Day 8: A teaser for one of the station's "You paid for it" segments. This time, high pay for bus drivers. I'm guessing this will reflect seniority and overtime, and will not compare to the pay given to police. The think that annoyed me was the statement that it doesn't matter whether you ever ride the bus, you still are paying. I'll wait to see the report, but that sounded to me like an argument more than a fact: why should you have to pay all this money when you don't ride the bus? This is a contentious, politically slanted, and quite stupid argument. I'm never going to use Walter Reed because I'm not in the service. I'll use the bus, but I may never use the 41 line. Even if I do, I'm not going to use the 8:25 stop at X street. I could save a lot of money by vetoing every tax that I don;t personally make use of, and pay only for what directly benefits me. So what? Maybe I want our soldiers to get medical care just because I favor sick people being treated. Maybe I think it's good for people to have access to mass transit so they can get to hospitals, jobs, day care. It benefits me because it benefits the general public. Public transit at least gives our veterans a place to go when it gets cold at night.
Day 7: I didn't see it. Howeverm there was a teaser for a "Speedbusters" segment, and this time a twist: they bring the cops along. I don't get why they think it's their job to participate in this kind of law enforcement. Plus, if they simply reverse rolls: instead of watching and reporting on the police catching people, the news is going to catch people and bring the police along to watch. How is that a benefit to anyone? It's an interesting question to what extent the nightly news should participate in law enforcement. There are disasters out there that happen when the police get more interested in fame and exposure than they should, and let the media crew take the lead. When a defendant gets met at the door by a SWAT team and a television crew for a sex offense charge before having a day in court, that's a problem. The news shouldn't play cops for the entertainment value. In principle, they could be doing a lot of law enforcement if they did it right, but so much of it is one-sided, misleading, with heavy-handed judgments and epithets directed at the supposed bad people. I would like to see a code of ethics and a code of standards for the local news acting as an arm of law enforcement.
Day 6: Three things: (1) A report of four dollar gas. I thought: BS. It's either $3.99 and 9/10 cents, or more than 4. I suppose it could be exactly four, but given that that seems unlikely, and that $4 gas may mean exactly or may mean at least, I find the report ambiguous and unreliable. (2) Sportscast reported that Eva Longoria Parker was in the stands to watch her hubby, and remarks that "that's always worth a peek." Eva worth looking at? I agree, but to hear it reported that way seems sexist, objectifying, lookist, and just vulgar. (3) This is the one that really got my goat: Milwaukee's Archbishop Timothy Dolan was interviewed to give his reaction to a story about a pastor who kept a dead relative at home for two months, cashing her social security checks and claiming that she still might be resurrected by a miracle. (This is similar to what the couple who let their daughter die of untreated diabetes was told: pray hard, and she still might recover.) I would not automatically run to a Roman Catholic heirarch to comment on the beliefs of an obscure non-Catholic religious minority. So what did he say? Well, it was just a perversion of evertything religion is about, and these people are crackpots. Personally, I have no trouble with the notion that this is crackpotism. Keep your dead relative on the toilet for weeks on end? Yikes! But I have some forced respect for religious crackpots; I have to because most religion is at least a little bit crazy. I think some of the Archbishop's beliefs are a little goofy: miracles? People rising from the dead? Jesus? Lazarus? All of us living forever through the "blood of Christ": crazy stuff, for sure. Certifiable for anyone looking at the belief system from outside. So I was yelling at my TV set: who is this fat rich ugly hypocrite to stand there and mock and judge these people for believing in resurrection. Sure, they may be crazy. There are some decisions I would not let them make, and posing a public health hazard by failing to report a corpse is one of them. But what does it mean for this fat rich jerk, representing his fat rich church, with its centuries of crimes and its unravelling factories of child rape, to say that someone else's faith is crazy, perverse, disgusting and intolerable? How is that anything other than sectarian hate speech against a fellow faith tradition? And why is it being aired uncritically?
Day (??): Forget exactly when it aired, but t's in my recent notes: On the same day, two stories: (1) People are upset that the new release of Grand Theft Auto is being advertised on city buses, and this has led public officials to engage in a lot of vituperation and try to cancel contracts; (2) The Republic of Iran has formally denounced and banned Barbie dolls as a negative cultural influence. The first report appears more incritical than the second, but in neither case is there any meaningful analysis.
Now to some other items that are not part of my diary:
1) It's an old issue that has been addressed already, but I was thinking about Bush's low approval ratings and the Republican talking point that Congress has a worse rating. The obvious and well known answer is that people like their own reps, whom they voted for, but just don't like the group made up of 535 people, 533 of whom they did not vote for. In contrast, even most of the people who voted for Bush would like to see him fall out of Marine One and be lost at sea. Then I had another thought, for my brothers and sisters in DC. They had the chance to vote for president but have no votes in Congress. So the difference is, they dislike Bush because they voted against him. They dislike Congress because they never got to vote on Congress at all. Zero for 535. Does that help explain it?2) Some coverage of the new Gitmo trials has mentioned that one of the charges that the US is trying to prove is that of giving material aid to terrorists. This struck me as so bizarre that at first I thought it was a screwup, but even the more detailed reports from legal blogs have included this fact. The problem is, material aid to terrorists has become familiar since 9/11 as a domestic crime. It is controversial because it is so broad: giving money or services for hospitals or schools operated by foreign groups the United States government doesn't like and has labeled as terrorists will get you in trouble. But foreign citizens, those of, say, Yemen, swept up in Afghanistan and associated with al Qaida, are not subject to substantive US domestic law. Giving material support to terrorists is not generally, to my knowledge, a crime in international law. Terrorism, depending on how broadly it is defined, is probably but not necessarily a war crime or crime against humanity, but merely giving aid to such people (perhaps giving them legal representation, or being their driver or bodyguard or physician) is not by itself unlawful. Yes, if you're so involved as to be a party to the actual root crime of terrorism, that might count. But until Nuremberg, conspiracy was not even recognized as a crime much outside the US. So this whole matter still has me questioning.
3) Did I ever mention my idea about Hillary and Barack and the vice presidency? Don't offer her the VP slot, but ask her to lead the search committee. That way, the pick that isn't her will still have her imprimatur.
4) I am a fundamentalist. A fundamentalist believes that while there may be some mysteries about things, some areas of doubt, there is some core that you believe ane what you believe is what you believe and it's absolute and you serve God according to that belief without limitation or exception. It's odd because, even though I am a member of the clergy, I'm not very religious, and I'm not good at practicing what I preach. In fact, I'm against many uses of religion. But I think that what you believe, you believe. So when Mike Huckabee says something pastorish that offends a lot of people, I cut him a little slack: are you explaining that his view is idiotic and evil, or accusing him of being insensitive and mean-spirited, or are you attacking him because he has beliefs that he thinks come from God, and he won't shut up about those beliefs simply to avoid offending somebody? I remember making a defense of Huckabee like that not long ago, and I'll make the same defense for Jeremiah Wright. Disagree with what you want to disagree with, but he was called to preach. He believes some stuff. He thinks it's fundamental to somebody's salvation that he come out and say what he believes. He's been called to witness. So don't expect him to be quiet. There was a piece in the local paper by one of our community columnists, and it attacked Wright very subtly. I had to read it a couple of times before I could break it down and what the argument boiled down to is, whether you agree or disagree with him, the way he presents his case is too black. I wonder how prevalent that is.
5) One thing I don't like about McCain is that he jokes about torture. Now because he's a torture victim, I respect his right to joke about torture privately. But I think it is very disturbing that he does it before masses of people that are not torture victims. What that does is it seems to give permission to other people to maks such jokes. This is no different than if Obama were to start using the word "nigger" on the campaign trail, except that torture victims are a minority that no one much thinks about.
5A) More on torture comments. One of the defenses used to belittle acts of torture as somehow not so serious is to decribe them without the elements of extremity or forced exposure. Hence sleep deprivation, heat or cold, hunger, loud music, maybe getting a little water down your nose. You know, these are things that lots of people have to deal with once in a while. But they are much more like torture when they are being done to you deliberately and prolongedly or repeatedly or harshly and against your will. So much of torture is psychological, about control. For that reason, getting waterboarded by choice in a controlled environment is a lot less devastating than having it done to you against your will. Another thing that could be put on the list is sex, which is also forced on people as a form of torture. The only difference is that we have a words for being violently exposed to unwanted sex: rape, sexual assault, or in more diluted form simply sexual harassment or humiliation. One cannot casually refer to rape simply as sex, the same way one can casually refer to other forms of torture as "sleep deprivation" or "loud music." We need to change the way language is used here. The weak language used to describe torture methods makes them easy to mock, which is grossll misleading and dangerous.
6) Hillary won't quit. She keeps on attacking. She's got so much invested in her war that of course she does not want it all to have been in vain. The problem is, she can't win, that's just the reality. But she doesn't care if this goes on for 100 years, she just has no exit strategy. Good to know Iraq would somehow be different for her.
7) Reality-forcing is a really nifty concept that is too often overlooked. It comes to mid because I read that just a year before Obama's candidacy, some staggeringly high number of folks polled said they could not conceive of themselves voting for a black president. Yet here he is, the likely president. Just being there changed something. Likewise, advocates for Bush's impeachment say what every trial lawyer understands: it does not matter that most people think your case is a loser. You put it together, present it, and when people see it in action they take notice. Once Bush was impeached and the evidence started coming out, it would show how justified the impeachment was. There are numerous and wider examples of this. Airbags were an example of a forced innovation brought about by technology-forcing innovation. If you demand that all cars must have something by year X, chances are it will get invented.
8) Intelligent design. I think maybe here too we should change the language. I don't have a problem with an evolution-compatable "weak ID" theory. You could postulate that there is something analogical to intellligence or design in the way evolution works out by trial-and-error, interated variation and selection, nifty solutions to environmental challenges. The real rub is the notion that the "design" is not taking place over time, organically, but that it was somehow worked out in advance. I recently read on the "Expelled Exposed" website that ID advocates tend to exploit an equivocal use of the word "design." The issue is not design, but predesign. Evidence for evolution is evidence for continuous design as against predesign.
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