Archives for March 2005

Well, let me put it this way: Some people have been tossing these traffic camera "tickets" straight into the trash for quite a while now…just like some people have been tossing their jury summonses straight into the round file for as long as they can remember. Some people don’t want to be willing accomplices to their own robbery or enslavement. And some people certainly don’t want to help the state be more efficient in its stealing.

Let the state undertake to deliver their traffic tickets and jury summonses by personal service. Can you guess what’d happen if a lot more people did that?

Update: It’s probably a waste of time to point this out to the first commenter, Theodore Craig. Generally, when I hear "if just one ____ is saved…," it’s just time to pack up shop, because you’re not dealing with anyone who’s yet learned the finer points of thinking.

"The statement that the plaintiff is a ‘Dumb Ass,’ even first among ‘Dumb Asses,’ communicates no factual proposition susceptible of proof or refutation."

That may be true, but I’d still say that trial judge Harry Tobias, who refused to toss this case and left that duty to the appellate court, is a Dumb Ass.

There’s a new post up at Greg Swann’s place on the heels of our discussion of the Schiavo case (see here, which leads to all previous post on both sides). I think it’s probably no accident that Greg posted this now, though he doesn’t explicitly implicate Schiavo, et al. It’s an interesting argument, the barest gist of which, is:

The purpose of civilization is to prevent rape, to make the world safe for women and children. To make a world where women are not raped and killed and where children are not stolen and sold and raped and killed. Civilization is the means by which men make the world safe from their worst impulses, and it is remarkably successful.

I encourage you to go read the entire exchange and see the argument in full.

As for myself, count me agnostic. I tend to think that civilization is just as purposeless as human evolution—as is, indeed, existence itself. I believe that purpose applies only to individuals and that such purpose is inherently selfish. To the extent that individuals cooperate on a million different levels with one-another (from romantic love between a man and woman to mega-corporations, and everything in-between), it ultimately goes to a selfish and individual purpose.

So then, why do we have civilization? Well, because we’re smart and rational. We figured things out—like agriculture. Prior to that, you couldn’t have large groups of people inhabiting one spot. They’d all starve to death because all native animal and plant sources would be quickly expended. Agriculture, a human technology, is the very heart of civilization. In short, humans found they could stay in one spot and eat rather than hunt for food and be always on the move. It was selfish individual purpose. It was then possible to invest time and resources in acquiring and improving property and shelter, and all the tools necessary to build and maintain them. Selfish individual purpose. Larger families could be raised and fed. Civility followed for the selfish individual purpose of protecting it all—not just the women and children—but all of it.

If you read Greg’s argument in its entirety, I buy most or all of it—not as an aspect of human civilization, per se—but as an aspect of pre-civilized human evolution. If anything, civilization is in part what allows us to move beyond the confines of our biology and mysticisms that are designed to get us to behave in pre-ordained ways without a lot of explanation.

No, I think that civilization has no intrinsic purpose—but that the state and religious institutions, that grew up around civilization, do. The purpose of both institutions, of course, is to control people. At first, both controlled through violence and threat of violence. Now, it’s just the state (universally) that operates through violence and threat of violence, while most religious institutions (excluding Islam in most places) operate not through direct violence, but through a veiled form of threatened violence aided by limited (curable) mental retardation, brainwashing, lies, deceits, and guilt. Of course, the threat of violence is what God is going to do to you if you don’t subordinate your will to that of the church’s authority.

It’s been a long time since I consulted the figures, and I don’t recall who’s ahead of whom, but in all history of human civilization, there’s hundreds of millions dead over nation-state wars fought over territory, and hundreds of millions dead over religious ideology. Civilization, while being a protector, appears also to be a huge and efficient killer. But, it can afford to kill because it’s so efficient at producing offspring above replacement levels.

So, how does all this relate back to Schiavo? Well, if I get Greg’s idea, civilization is about protecting and preserving life, both at the beginning and at the end, to every extent possible. I agree, but there needs to be limits, definitions, distinctions. First, begin with what life really is. What are its limits? Why is it crucially important to distinguish a fetus from a conscious, thinking being exercising its human volition? Proceed from there.

There is something deeply ironic about the Schiavo case, however. Can you guess? It is religious doctrine that gives both sides of the conflict their necessary premise. The real argument here is nothing more than about who plays God. And this is why religionists will ultimately loose. They have granted the premise that a higher authority can decide when to take a life, for whatever mysterious purpose—you know, like how God murdered those 300,000 people in Southeast Asia on his Son’s birthday—and it need not even make any sense. So if God can see fit to wipe out millions every year in preventable accidents, disease, state tyranny, crime, then can’t a well-meaning family decide when it’s time for a loved-one to go?

But humans are coming to know the fact that they are God, and rather than a slippery slope (because, then , they’ll go and play God, and we can’t have that!), it’s really the dawning of real, universal civilization. Guess why? Because, at his best, God has always been far, far more evil than our worst human beings. Think about it. We’ve always been real-God, and we’ve always been far better than imagined-God, as evidenced by the simple fact of all the human suffering “he’s” caused or allowed to happen in human history. Suffering that dwarfs the evil of men.

We’re so much better. We always have been.

We can be trusted with decisions like Terri Schiavo—or at least those she entrusted with such decisions.

Oh, I know, your store front is always bright and shiny and fast. But become a pay-per-click advertiser and actually log in, and one is suddenly on the absolute most consistently slow, buggy, and intermittently inoperable major commercial website ever. E V E R !

It was like that a year ago, when I first began, and several hundred thousand ad-dollars later, it’s just as bad. And, yes, I’m on a frame relay data circuit.

Too bad Google’s AdWords doesn’t deliver anywhere near the consumer-based traffic at cost that you seem to be able to do, ’cause their web interface is somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 times better than yours, I estimate.

C’mon, for the kind of money we’re paying you (and the service is effective), you ought to be able to put together a decent website that runs a lot faster.

Greg Swann kindly takes time out to reply to my last:

…but my view is that Richard’s take falls apart because consent can only be expressed–or revoked–in real-time, not in advance.

If I understand and am restating it accurately, Greg argues that you cannot rightly hold someone to something they have consented to in advance—if—either they revoke such consent later—or—are in a state where they are unable to affirm or revoke consent later.

Assuming I’ve treated his argument fairly, then I’d have to say that I just don’t agree, in general. The whole point of this exercise is about being in a predicament where one cannot affirm or revoke consent (otherwise moot). What Greg seems to be arguing is that you should not have the moral authority over your own disposition to lay out in explicit terms, that: "If I ever end up incapacitated, cannot communicate, and the mediacal prognosis is for no material improvement, then kill me, no matter what, by any means you choose." I understand Greg’s argument to be that if I were to do that for myself, and were then to end up in such predicament, then it would be morally wrong for someone to carry out my explicit wishes of this sort that had been given in advance.

Greg’s position, to me, implies a restriction on my freedom that I find intolerable. So, regardless of what my firm and steadfast wishes are presently and for as long as I am able to express cogent thought (that I do not ever want to live as a drooling idiot who can’t feed himself, needs his messy diapers changed twice a day, and has no reasonable expectation of recovery); I should have no moral authority to insist upon my disposition now, and that no one else should have the moral authority to carry out such disposition later. If ever I am incapacitated, my sentence is to exist and breath as a drooling idiot without a shred of dignity, regardless of my past accomplishments or heights of splendor attained. My goodness, what an inspiration to me now! No wonder some people find it important to be humbled by the notion of God. This sort of potential future requires one helluva lot of humility, in my book.

…What matters is that, outside of an immediate emergency, it cannot be righteous for one person to kill another without the victim’s consciously expressed consent at the time the killing is to take place. Whatever that person said or wrote down in the past, it is not possible to know what his wishes are now unless they are expressed now.

But this is the whole reason for all of this. If wishes could be expressed, now, then all of this is moot. Moreover, this argument presumes that there are wishes in the present. I don’t believe there are; and I do believe that’s an important distinction.

Here is a very simple metaphor for understanding the entire issue:

"It wasn’t rape, your honor! She consented to sex before she passed out!"

But, this doesn’t work. If she consented to sex, in general, that would be one thing. The presumption is that she meant that she’d be an active participant (i.e., conscious), because that’s what people usually mean. However, what if she explicitly consented (let’s say in writing, and it was notarized), and in fact specified sex from her lover while in a state of unconsciousness…because, uh, I dunno…perhaps one or both get off on it…? Then, next day she catches him with her lesbian lover (because, they all are, after all, a bit kinky), and, well…, hell hath no fury, you know, and, …uh, it was rape!

The fact is, if you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. I fear that Terry Shiavo will lay at the bottom of a vast mound of corpses. And that doesn’t even take into account the millions slaughtered in abortuaries. Mercy, it turns out, is a virtue of insatiable ferocity…

Well, I don’t share Greg’s fear of a slippery slope for practices such as concerns Terri Schiavo, any more than I share it with respect to abortion. I see no evidence whatsoever that any of this is in any way unified. Young women, by and large, get abortions because they are rational and understand their situation. Families turn off life support, and in some cases, kill by withholding nutrients, because they are rational (never moreso, in fact), serious, and they know what’s best for themselves and their loved ones.

In such cases, human beings approach Godhood, because, after all, human beings are God.