Meta and Meta

The Real Me

I wish people would like me for who I am.  You know, deep down--not just my smile, or my hair style, or my skin color, or my voice, or my sense of humor, or my intellect, or my memories, or my interpersonal dispositions, or my phenotype or genotype, or the information they contingently encode and express. I mean the real me.

UPDATE: The New Yorker totally one-upped me on this one, with a cartoon (6.25.2007 issue, p. 69) that depicts a woman facing her ostensible boyfriend, declaring, "I don't want to be defined by who I am."

"It's Hard Work"

President Bush has invoked this observation more than a few times as a shield against charges of incompetence.

Professor John Yoo appears to be adopting approximately the same device.

Heckuva job.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of Year

Fafblog! on "Secularmas":

"Secularists do not believe in jollity," says Giblets. "They believe in a series of random chemical processes which over millions of years have created the appearance of jollity."

"Secularists don't decorate Christmas trees," says me. "They decorate Secularmas trees, which are big holes dug in the ground to demonstrate the absence of trees."

"On Secularmas, they do not exchange presents," says Giblets. "They exchange identical cardboard boxes filled with rocks and mold and broken childhood dreams and nothing!"

(Via Brad DeLong.)

What Humor Is All About

Humor is all about ambiguity. Well, in one sense, anyway.

Naturalism and Supererogation

Naturalism doesn't annul morality. If anything, naturalism entails the most demanding morality of all.

(For a discussion of this sort of view, you might look at the Center for Naturalism webpage.)

Proof of God's Existence of the Day

ARGUMENT FROM NEGATIVE THEOLOGY, from  Over Three Hundred Proofs of God's Existence (via Brian Leiter):

(1) We live in a world of pain and suffering.
(2) It seems that God is completely and utterly absent from our world.
(3) This complete and utter absence constitutes an infinite void.
(4) Only an infinite being could create [an] infinite void....
(5) Therefore God exists.

 

Krauthammer Condensed

Impeachment Nonsense (couldn'ta titled it better myself):

If you elide the opinions of respected, reality-based legal scholars like Orin Kerr and Cass Sunstein, you can make it sound like even they don't think it's plausible President Bush violated the law or the Constitution. See?

Posner Condensed

Our Domestic Intelligence Crisis:

The executive branch is not subject to the rule of law when the law is too restrictive.

ECHELON and Bush-Snoop: Apples and Orangutans

Apparently Bush's recently uncovered intelligence hijinx is so obviously inexcusable that Republicans have been reduced to (among other diversions) a rather pathetic tu quoque. Shorter version: "This is just like project Echelon." 

Well, no, it's not. ECHELON was a program started in 1971. It was not initiated by the Clinton administration. It was (to my knowledge) never established that the NSA intercepted domestic communications. A fortiori, it was never established (again, to my knowledge) that Clinton sought to abuse the ECHELON program by approving (and reapproving) domestic communication interceptions.

Here, as I noted in a comment at Chequer-Board (before John Fund's deployment of the spin-point on Lou Dobbs Tonight made me realize it had achieved mainstream penetration), the  Bush administration has formulated the underlying policy, serially and explicitly approved its implementation, and later (only after having been found out) publicly advocated the program.

In sum, Bush-Snoop appears to be a whole 'nother enchilada.

Do Men Overcompensate When Their Masculinity is Threatened?

Some homo at Cornell says the answer is yes. What a homo.

(Via Accidental Blogger, via Brian Leiter.)