What Will Be Born, And What Has Already Died

A few quick comments on Ross Douthat's latest piece.  First, the obligatory cheap shot, which I wouldn't make if if he didn't leave himself open to it as often as he does: this is not a man who should feel comfortable criticising others as "privileged have-mores with an obvious incentive to invent spurious theories to justify their own position".  This in an article arguing that liberals are going to bring back social Darwinism with all our Godless science, no less.

Secondly, consider the meat of Douthat's argument: some people who championed eugenics in the 1920s were liberals.  The idea became morally repulsive after WWII, and provably unhelpful a few decades later.  But that doesn't mean we've abandoned the idea!

Yes, Ross.  Yes, it does.  Dredging up the spectre of a past long since dead is pointless, a way of distracting readers from the fact that you're actual argument regarding the here and now is nothing more than "it's theoretically possible we'll find ourselves atop what might be a slippery slope, maybe".  At heart, it's no different from those recent painfully dumb articles about how Republicans are the real party of civil rights, because they were better on the subject until the 1960s, and should be taken no more seriously than all those the jokes about Germany's recent economic strong-arming being their closest alternative to invading France.

There's another of Douthat's most common themes in here, a tendency to think the worst of science.  He admits that the eugenics of 80 years ago didn't understand how intelligence is linked to genetics (or rather, they thought it was linked in ways it it isn't), but it doesn't occur to him to make the obvious link: it's through scientific advancement that we worked all that out.  Exploits like mapping the human genome are what has made the concept of social Darwinism medically counter-productive in addition to morally abhorrent. 

That means those who might champion the idea no longer need to merely switch off their basic humanity, they need to ignore the data as well.  Perhaps more than a handful of people still exist.  Perhaps, some are even liberals, though I can't for the life of me imagine the tangled thought processes that would take to justify.  But the same research that makes it increasingly unlikely that anyone would sensibly want to try such a thing would also make it theoretically (as oppose to economically) feasible to try it, and that's all Douthat can think about.

In some ways, this is a more disappointing article than usual from Douthat, because his final point - should we feel comfortable about aborting foetuses with serious life-long but not life-threatening genetic conditions - is worthy of discussion. Contra Douthat, that's not really a consideration which depends on one's feelings regarding the nature of a foetus; if you're pro-life, the answer is clear.  It's only a thorny issue for those of us who are pro-choice: does supporting a woman's right to say "I do not want to have this baby" extend to supporting them saying "I will only have this baby if..."

Like I said, it's a conversation worth having.  Douthat either can't or doesn't want to go there, though, so he's reduced to arguing that voluntarily deciding whether to have a baby given certain conditions is kind of like forcing people who are more likely to generate such a baby to undergo sterilisation.  Like those evil liberals once wanted to do.  Or something.

One last point.  It would be hard to pin Douthat down on this, because the man has an insufferable habit of pretending to be arguing from a secular perspective until actual secularists slap him down, when he suddenly claims to be writing for Christians after all, but there is one question I'd dearly like to ask him: what are the secular grounds for not allowing siblings to marry?

Right now, of course, incest is illegal. A lot of reasons are given for this, but as far as I can tell, they break down into social points and medical points, and almost invariably involve the resulting children.  The former are frequently persuasive as to why it's not a good idea (two parents who had the same upbringing don't have the necessary spread of experience, social ostracism, confusing family reunions), but many of the specific arguments can also be aimed at single parents and same sex (or even mixed race) marriages, which makes it hard to believe they're strong enough to justify a blanket ban.

The genetic argument seems to me to have far more force; there's an increased risk of all sorts of unpleasant conditions that a child borne of siblings can have.  But if Ross is against the idea of medical tests to determine the genetic structure of a baby, shouldn't he be in favour of allowing siblings - at least those separated at an early age and being reunited as adults - to get married? 

That's the problem with bright-line positions like the one Douthat is knocking around here.  Sooner or later you find something that's on the wrong side of it.  The problem with Douthat himself, of course, is that this sort of realisation always leads to another horribly tortuous spiel of sophistry in an attempt to paint the line somewhere slightly different, rather than facing up to the fact that the bright line never existed, and never can.

Someone Told Me It's All Happening...

OK, I admit it.  "Corstorphine Haze" wasn't entirely accurate.  Out in the real world, the rain in Edinburgh was inconstant enough for The Other Half and I to catch more than a few glimpses of the inhabitants of Reekie's mammal-ghetto, even if most of them involved the creatures in question huddling in their rooms.

Here's a selection of what was encountered:

A L'Hoest's monkey, who I've photographed mainly because I couldn't find any of the Jimmy Saville tamarins (note: may not be actual species name).

A selection of photos of the giant pandas, which were actually the main reason why we went to the zoo in the first place (having had a good look around last year).

Friday Talisman: Sneaky, Sneaky Bastards

After suffering seizures and mild hallucinations from painting the conjurer, I decided to head for the opposite end of the scale, and paint something as dingy as possible.  Enter: the assassin!

(This would be a perfect time to post one of my favourite James songs, "Assassin", but I can't find it on Youtube.  Curse you, intentionally commonly-named band!)

A Tale Of Cocktails #29

Dribena

Ingredients

2 oz cherry wine

1 oz vodka

6 oz lemonade
Dash lemon juice

Taste: 6

Look: 5

Cost: 9
Name: 7
Prep: 9
Alcohol: 2
Overall: 6.4

Preparation: Pour ingredients into a cordial glass.  Stir and serve.

General Comments: As the name implies (we had to make our own up, since this is a variant of the terminally boring "cherry wine cocktail", which cuts out the lemonade and is lethal), the combination of cherry wine and vodka somehow ends up tasting like Ribena and lemonade, only with something of a dryness to it.  Noting this curious result is somewhat more interesting than the drink itself, it has to be said. And you can't really even get drunk enough off of it to giggle at the silly name.

Damn cheap, though.

Corstorphine Haze

We came up here to get away from it all
And since I can't see shit, I guess that's Mission Accomplished
Two hundred miles north to a hilltop menagerie
Yet here's the animal I've seen most today: the fucking Queen
The small Scots girl promised nature in abundance
But all I'm getting is miserable sniffing and indignant grunts
Which might be emanating from the packs of schoolchildren
Who came to learn, but have discovered only
That these exotic creatures are smarter than them
Or us
Sleeping through the cloudburst we push through stiff-shouldered
Forced to settle for drawings of what allegedly surrounds us
A child's picture book in pouring rain.

Hate And War

I'm gonna stay in the city 
Even when the house fall down
 
War is Hell, I have been led to believe, and the Battle of the Blackwater isn't liable to change my mind on the subject.  But in amongst all the salt and stone and blood and fire, is there anything else we can dig out?

(Spoilers beyond the Mud Gate, men!)

At Least Put Some Effort In

There's plenty of people agape with contemptuous disbelief right now at Mitt Romney's suggestion of a Constitutional Amendment requiring the president have at least three years experience working in business.

I'm pretty outraged as well.  Not because it's a ridiculous idea, but because it's a ridiculous idea that's also really boring.  If you're going to start supporting arbitrary hoops for candidates to jump through, you should at least be inventive.  How about deciding no-one be allowed to take the Oval unless:

• They've punched a shark.  Like, really hard.  The shark has to be in tears afterwards.  No tears means vice presidency only;
• They've completed Halo 3 on Legendary difficulty, whilst wearing socks on their hands;
• They've strangled at least one Communist, using the American flag;
• They've challenged the Hulk to an arm-wrestle.  They don't have to win, but when Hulk says "Puny presidential candidate!", it has to sound at least a little ironic;
• They have laid their hands upon the sick, and, lo!, they have been healed (so long as they have health insurance, obviously);
• They've spilled Chuck Norris' pint, and refused to apologise;
• They've jumped out of an aeroplane into another one, all whilst singing the national anthem;
• They've set fire to a killer-bee hive with the power of their thoughts;
• They've perfected the moonwalk, on the actual moon;
• They've suggested the USA has no business policing the world.

Now that, my friends, would be a campaign season worth watching.