perfidy

On a related tangent to my last post, I'd like to offer a few thoughts on discourse. The way I see it, there are two ways to argue. One is through fair debate. The other is through vicious ad hominem shouting matches. I've noticed lately that the ad hominem shouting matches are becoming many people's preferred method of disagreement. May I say, here in the little corner of the world where Mr. Two-Cents and Mr. Head have graciously allowed me some semi-public statement space, that ad hominem shouting doesn't get us anywhere.

I've been watching Bill Maher's HBO television program, Real Time, regularly lately. Maher, in his new HBO format, often has intelligent guests who present well-reasoned arguments, or at least thoughtful, usually with a cross section of left, right, and center. Some of his guests, however, quickly abandon the notion of discourse and go right to the ad hominem with a psychotic glean in their eye. Recently, he had a writer named Ann Coulter on his show. In my opinion, Ms. Coulter is a strong proponent of ad hominem shouting.

Here's my thing. Ms. Coulter has advocated the murder of 3,000+ Muslims to avenge the attacks of 11 September 2001. Few people in the United States, with the exception of looney tunes wackos (thus I'm going ad hominem over discourse) would argue that there was any thing positive about those attacks. People died. For no reason. It was horrible. There's another one of those events that toss moral relativism out the window. But how in the hell can the murder of thousands more innocents improve the situation?Isn't it better if no one else dies because of that shit? I'm sure few people have taken this seriously, but it's still not a good suggestion.

Ms. Coulter is also at work on a new book arguing that people who protested the war with Iraq are traitors. That is not the case. The Supreme Court long ago determined that treason was an act, not a statement. A person has to attempt to overthrow the government or give aid and comfort to enemies in time of war to be guilty of treason. I believed the war was unjustified, and I said so, publicly. A tiny little statement of protest. It doesn't mean I'm a traitor. If Hussein was sleeping on the futon in my living room and I harbored him, then it can go to court.

But back to my original point. On Maher's show, Coulter stated, to paraphrase, that liberals (current American sense) are a bunch of whiners. In one of her books, Coulter argued that liberals tell lies about conservatives and that liberals suck. Well, we all let our passions and beliefs get the better of us and we engage in this sort of ad hominem shouting match strategy. I've done it. Two paragraphs ago. But to offer a bit of unsolicited constructive criticism, Buckethead did it in writing that, "When Congress passed the welfare reform act back in 96, the left was having fits of apoplexy, crying and whining that we would have children starving to death because of the callousness and heartlessness of Republicans." He simultaneously pointed out that the left (though I will state that this is a very broad stroke, as I am okay with welfare reform since it is supposed to provide assistance and then get people back on their feet and working) was engaging in the same sort of ad hominem shouting. One more clarification, those members of the left who said what Buckethead correctly said they said, were some members of America's left-of-center aggregate. Not the whole goup. One more more clarification, to be fair, Buckethead was probably doing so for the sake of brevity.

But back to the main point, one of my professors at Duquesne, where I got my MA, argued that in a two party system, the parties are often defined by their opposition to each other. Shouting matches become the primary method of disagreement. That's where we are in America. We're just screaming at each other. "You're stupid!" one side says. "You're stupider!" insists the other side. "Oh yeah, well you're stupiderer!" responds the first. That needs to change. No good can come of it. Buckethead, you make good points about welfare reform and social security. Those programs need to be reconfigured to work better. Let me offer an apology for those times I engaged in the ad hominem shouting method. That was wrong.

Many thanks to my friend Tim Lacy, who with a very brief statement helped me fine tune this thought that's been running around my head.

Rick Santorum's comments viz-a-viz the Texas sodomy laws are at best misguided. But, as my blog-mates have indicated, it does open a question of the legislation of morality. I raised this during part of my lecture this evening, which covered reform movements in the U.S. in the 1820s and 1830s. Now, I think that broad issues of moral relativism went out with the Holocaust, despite postmodernist attempts to argue in favor of it. As I told my students, there are some issues of morality present in every culture. No matter who you talk to, killing someone in cold blood is immoral. 

The problem comes with moral issues upon which we cannot agree. For Santorum, and many others, homosexual relations are immoral practices. For others, it makes no nevermind. I believe that homosexual relations between two (or more) consenting adults pose no moral problems whatever. It's perfectly fine for two consenting adults to have whatever kind of sex they like. It's none of my business. Santorum, however, believes it's an erosion of what he calls family values. So the question is, does the government have a right to legislate morality on behalf of the people they represent?

The response is equally problematic. In some cases yes, in some cases no. As Buckethead argued well, the government legislates morality by prohibiting theft and murder. These things are bad. Case closed. But what about sexual behavior? Well, provided it is between the two or more aforementioned consenting adults and no one gets hurt, the government has no basis to step in. The government, as our elected representatives, can legislate to keep people from hurting one another. That's part of the social contract and leaving the state of nature, allowing the government to protect our lives, liberty, and property by sacrificing our ability to bash each other's skulls in for shits and giggles. But if two guys, or two women, want to get each other off, then what's the harm? This is where our republic does not need government intervention. 

Santorum doesn't see it that way. He believes that the government should promote his vision of morality, upon which everyone does not agree. The recourse against people like Santorum, as Buckethead would point out, is to vote against him or those who also try to legislate morality that doesn't fall under the we're all for it category. I could also write to him and tell him I disagree, but that's less effective than casting a vote for other representatives who think that the government does not need to uphold laws against homosexual intercourse. 

All that being said, I think we just need to keep talking, and permit the legislation of morality when it pertains to matters of don't kill, steal, or key someone's car just because they parked in front of your house. Other than that, we need to figure out what's a sheer judgement call and what isn't. That happens through discourse. I realize that I'm being uncharacteristically optimistic about all this. These things happen

There have been some articles floating around lately announcing that the French are in serious trouble. (Loyal reader #00008, Aziz Poonawalla has a list of them here.) Some of this may be wish fulfillment, seeing as how we all want the perfidious French to suffer for their weasely backstabbing. But there are some indications that the French do have some serious problems.

However, all of that segues into the other thing I wanted to write, about the upcoming EU constitution. So it will all wait for tomorrow, because I have to go to an Red Cross Infant First Aid and CPR class. Ciao til tomorra.

Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits---and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

Gotta love Omar.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

I've been thinking about this for a bit, as I wrestle with my partially completed novel. In my world, genre killing is when an author (usually science fiction) writes a book that destroys a sub genre for every subsequent author. If you think of the realm of possible science fiction novels as a vast, unexplored continent - some writers are like explorers, their novels open up new territories for development. Their ideas create places where others can settle and develop. Heinlein was probably the biggest explorer in this sense. He wrote important early novels or stories that opened up new terrain for others.

But other authors don't just explore, they discover and lay waste to huge tracts of land, and no one but the insane would ever be able to live in the wasteland they leave behind. David Brin is like this, his Uplift series makes it almost impossible to think of writing stories about genetically engineered smart animals. Charles Pellegrino and George Zebroski leveled the once rich region of alien invasion novels by writing Killing Star. This novel debunks nearly every possible motivation for invasion, and then caps it off by introducing relativistic bombing. The only way that you can write about a topic in the wake of a genre killer is to devote extraordinary effort to overcoming, outthinking, and resisting the influence of your predecessor. And even if you succeed, your work will bear the stamp of the genre killer.

The interesting thing is that this process is not merely about writing, it is also largely about the ideas that are at the center of science fiction. Dune, by Frank Herbert, largely killed the interstellar empire sub genre by interweaving it with ecology, politics and religion (wrapped in superb writing) and the only survivors are barely literate pulp sf war porn novels.

This is a small version of the effect that great writers have on all who follow them. Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon talks about this in great depth. Bloom focuses on how Shakespeare, at the very center of Western Literature, put the thumb on every writer who followed him, and will do so to every writer for as long as we have an English language. Shakespeare, more than anyone, killed the Sonnet by perfecting and transcending it. After the Bard, who could even attempt to best Sonnet 130, or Sonnet 123, or whatever your favorite is?

Since I am writing a novel about war, set in the near future, I must wrestle with Tom Clancy. Happily, he isn't a genre killer, which means that I am not wasting my time. But I must be aware of him, always in the back of my mind, so that I don't end up writing a dull Clancy pastiche of a novel. Hopefully, that will make me a better writer.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled kvetching

Some of the things that NASA has resisted in the past forty years: 

Orion and NERVA 

Nucklear propulsion technologies that had successfully reached scale model tests for Orion, and static testing of a prototype for NERVA before being cancelled by NASA. The prototype NERVA (Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications) prototype was twice as efficient as the most advanced chemical rocket ever built, the SSME, or Space Shuttle Main Engine. With a little practice, this could have been improved. (BTW, my dad in his role as Air and Space Museum curator helped save the prototype, nicknamed kiwi.) 
Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory  

A small (mobile home-sized) space station that could have been launched in the mid sixties, and would have had a crew of two.

DynaSoar  

Short for dynamic soaring, the X-20 was the result of a different evolutionary line than the Apollo moon rockets. It evolved from the German Sanger-Bredt Silverbird intercontinental skip-glide rocket bomber from WWII, and was the first space vehicle ever actually constructed - back in the fifties. NASA cancelled it eight months before drop tests from a B-52 and a manned flight in '64. This spaceplane, launched atop a Titan II or other disposable rocket, would have led to a series of more advanced follow on vehicles. 

Skylab  

The Skylab program was cancelled by the ingenious expedient of having the space station fall from orbit on 11 July 1979. Although there were several proposals that might have saved America's first space station, the freeze on non shuttle launches left NASA with no means of getting there. 

NASP  

The National Aerospace Plane, a space plane that would take off and land horizontally, was unceremoniously cancelled in the early nineties. Granted, there were doubts whether the vehicle was feasible, and some research continues. 

DCX 

I've talked about this one before, on this site, though that week doesn't seem to be in the archive. 

NASA has also consistently resisted additional alternative methods of propulsion like solar sails and tethers, any use of Shuttle External Tanks other than throwing them into the Indian Ocean, going back to the moon for any reason, and any means of going to Mars that doesn't take fifteen years and sending Pittsburgh into orbit to supply the mission.

In response to the comments on my NASA post of yesterday, here are some extended thoughts on the situation. I do not think that the formula for success in NASA lies in control of spending. NASA wastes money, and this is a concern. It is also a concern that NASA has no real means for even determining how much money it spends, and on what. But this is the least of their problems. Overspending was the third and last problem that I mentioned, and in the interest of brevity I didn't explain what I meant by that. The overspending that I had in mind is a NASA-specific kind of waste. NASA wastes billions of dollars on designing, planning, redesigning and yet more redesigning. The ISS was redesigned, what, five times in the twenty years before it was built? NASA seems to have a distinct aversion to actually building things.

But this is really only a small part of the total problem that is NASA. There is nothing really that can be done to fix it, because NASA is a government bureaucracy and therefore largely immune to change. Further, even if the Public, the President and Congress gave NASA an inspiring, all-consuming mission, and a butload of cash to achieve it; they still would have all the same problems. Lack of vision is inherent in bureaucracy. Lack of innovation and NIMBYism is par for the course. People go on and on about what a stupendous success Apollo was, usually so they can set up a stunning indictment of the current NASA. But the history of Apollo was one of political motives, awkward technical and mission compromises, and general rhetorical grandstanding. (It was also a stupendous achievement, but all of the seeds of NASA's current problems began in the sixties.)

In the early days of aviation, NACA (The National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics) was a government body that published basic and practical research on aeronautics, and on aviation. Private firms hoping to get funding from banks and venture capitalists could point to a NACA study and say, "See, the government says it can be done, it's practical." Then they'd get their cash, and build an airplane or whatever. NASA needs to do this for all the companies that would dearly love to get into space transportation, rather than jealously guarding its space monopoly with the connivance of the FAA and the DOD.

NASA could quite successfully send out robotic probes, do solar and deep space astronomy, and publish bleeding edge research on aerospace science and engineering. Especially if they weren't saddled with the economic, budgetary and political albatross of running the space shuttle program. The only way to get around the deeply ingrained institutional problems of NASA is to, well, go around them.

The preverts are going to drag civilization down.

The two major touchstones I have in thinking about the role of government in our lives are 1) Is it Constitutional? and, more fundamentally, 2) Leave me the hell alone. #1 is the first line of defense, because many bad things are unconstitutional. But even if it passes that muster, the government must show a really compelling need to interfere with lives of citizens before a law is "good." I can see that laws against theft, which interferes with my desire to take things that I want, is good for society. Similar thoughts give a pass to many laws we have. What consenting adults do in the privacy of their boudoir is, properly, there concern and theirs alone. Therefore, sodomy statures and similar laws are bad.

Where Santorum is wrong is in positing a slippery slope between sodomy laws and the other things that he mentioned. Slippery slope arguments are overrated and overused, and inapplicable here. Bigamy, gay marriage and adultery are different issues. Regardless of what you feel about these, they are societal concerns, and in a different category. They may be "antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family," but overturning a sodomy statute won't make them legal. 

It is a huge question whether the government has a role in implementing "the Good Society." Some weep and gnash their teeth at government legislating morality - but that is certainly what the government does with murder and theft laws. I weep and gnash my teeth at the liberal attempts to legislate a good society with "risky schemes" like welfare and so on. All of these things infringe on our rights to do just what we please, or at least leave us less cash to fund doing just what we please. We need to look at these things somewhat pragmatically, and somewhat strict constructionistally. 

We need first off to pay more attention to the Constitution, as it is written, because it is the rule by which we live. Many, many bad things come from ignoring this. There are no umbras and penumbras and eclipses and occultations in the constitution. If you don't like what it says, what it allows and permits, there is a mechanism for changing it. The rule of law is the most fundamental requirement for civilization, and we ignore it at our peril. The RICO statutes, and the RIAA and the Patriot II that Johno has been exercised over recently are all the result of a failure on the part of our legislators to ask the question, what part of the constitution gives us permission to pass this law. Deferring that judgement to the courts results in many other evils, as the courts end legislators who cannot be voted out of office. While we may be happy with one decision or another, the situation is bad for us all. 

On the pragmatic side, we need to look at individual cases, and ask, "Is this law doing what we want it to?" When Congress passed the welfare reform act back in 96, the left was having fits of apoplexy, crying and whining that we would have children starving to death because of the callousness and heartlessness of Republicans. This was an ideological reaction. The result was much happier. Welfare rolls are down by almost half, and there are no children starving to death. This was a situation where someone took a long look at a program that was supposed to end or at least ameliorate poverty, but ended up institutionalizing it. The law of unintended circumstances hits government programs harder than anything else - largely because government programs are so hard to change, much less kill. Social Security is clearly heading for disaster unless something is done to fix it - yet many oppose any kind of reform because it offends their leftist aesthetic sensibilities to kick this particular sacred cow. There are other situations where conservative sacred cows could use some kicking as well, most notably the drug war nightmare. Instead of reducing the amount of drugs in use, it has lowered prices, increased purity, given billions of dollars to very bad people, ruined Columbia and is ruining Peru and Venezuela, savaged civil liberties in this country and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent on an all expense paid vacation for 12 on Mars. 

On some issues, my instincts say, "that shouldn't be allowed." Or, "Those greenpeace fucks should be in camps." Others will have similar thoughts with different targets. But my other instincts say, we live in a rather nifty Republic, with constitutional safeguards, and we shouldn't screw it up. We best avoid screwing things up by avoiding action. The best government governs least. Anyone who feels differently is invited to look at the former Soviet Union, or even France for a counterexample.