Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Definition of the day: misottawy: 1. The antipathy that Canadians, especially those furthest to the east and west, feel toward their federal government. Also called “Western/Eastern/Northern alienation.” 2. (By extension) Distrust of a government, particularly a government at a great geographical distance from its subjects. [Langmaker Neologisms]

Last week, the Florida State Supreme Court struck down Terri’s Law, the Bush-backed (no, not that Bush—the other one) bill to keep a brain-damaged woman alive despite her husband’s continuing legal efforts to starve her to death.

Although Terri left no living will, I think she’s a good example of why a living will is meaningless. Terri has left the building, and this is now a fight between what her parents want (the new, brain-damaged but not quite vegetative version of Terri) and what her husband wants (his wife dead). We can assume that the new Terri is incapable of a desire to die, since suicide is a pretty high-order concept. I don’t see any reason to treat her the way the former inhabitant of her body would have liked. We don’t generally kill people because other people want them dead, whether the other people are relatives or former residents. Suicide is illegal for the competent; why allow it to the incompetent?

From the Candian Press service (CP) by way of Med Broadcast: the Ontario Health Minister is determined to keep a US company from administering diagnostic tests in Canada. George Smitherman has vowed to squelch all private health care in Ontario:

“If anybody finds out about this stuff, you call that in. We have a quick response capacity, and we will stamp these out. We will protect public medicare in the province of Ontario.”

Unlike private monopolies, a state monopoly can outlaw the competition. Unlike private businesses, the state will persecute the competition even when there’s no financial gain in doing so—how can Canadians paying private companies for procedures that they’ve already paid for endanger medicare? It may embarass medicare that people are running off to private providers, but where is the threat? Even if medicare funds are apportioned according to use, that’s just bureaucratic number-shuffling, not a genuine financial loss.

Here in America, an HMO would be laughing all the way to the bank if they got their protection money out of the rubes, and then the rubes went and paid again for outside services—but at least it would be legal. If I want to see Dr. Hot Stuff every year instead of every two years, all I have to do is pay him to see me. No black market transactions would be involved.

I won’t be running for the border anytime soon.

The linkdumper script is already hard at work. Here’s a collection of funny links that have been gathering dust in a folder all summer. (”Summer” is an astronomical term which has no bearing on the weather of the past 3 months.)

Bunny humor:

• Angry Alien Productions - 30 Second Bunnies Production
• Morbid Tendencies - Bunny Of The Month Club

Geek humor:

• Editing slashdot IE security headlines [rec.humor.funny]
• Redundancy [image]

Fan humor:

• If “The Lord of the Rings” had been written by someone else ….
• Jay Solo - Green Eggs and Lembas
• MTV Movie Award Spoof of “Battlefield Earth”
• The Lord’s Prayer in Klingon
• The Onion - Woman At Farscape Convention Has Dangerously Inflated Self-Image

Political and sociological humor:

• SteynOnline - The John Kerry Songbook
• Get Out of Hell Free — Sin All You Want- We’ll Print More
• Why Are We Still There? [rec.humor.funny]
• SteynOnScreen - Wicker Park - this one’s more of a semi-serious essay. To paraphrase: It’s the 21st century, stupid!

I’ve blogged before of the brain-drain theory of what’s wrong with American schools, but here’s a different analysis by John Gatto in his Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech from 1990: kids have no time to be themselves.

I was surprised that the Metro was still reporting about Bush’s National Guard service yesterday without mentioning that the recent memos were patent forgeries. Here are all the gory details from the typesetting perspective, and here’s a fun interview with Dan Rather’s ego on the matter. (Thanks to Classical Values for the title and the second Ra^thergate link.)

There’s a convention in London today to celebrate 9/11: “The Choice is in Your Hands: Either You’re with the Muslims or with the Infidels.” Thanks to Classical Values for the link.

A while back someone was telling me how she just couldn’t understand how people believe in God. Ok, you may be thinking, she was an atheist. The proper statement of atheism, though, is, “I don’t believe in God,” not, “I don’t get why you believe in God.” The former is a belief; the latter is a failure of imagination.

When people speak as if their failures of imagination have independent significance, we call that the argument from ignorance, argumentum ad ignorantium. The argumentum ad ignorantium is the assertion that a statement is false because it has not been proven true. A related fallacy is the argument from lack of imagination—I’d call it the argument from dullness—the assertion that a statement is false because the speaker cannot imagine it being true.

Often the argument is implied, and only the ignorance is professed. Willful ignorance is a common rhetorical tool. For example, abjorn professes ignorance when it comes to Republican popularity:

I just don’t get it. I don’t. … I don’t get how Newt Gingrich can think that little “Purple Heart bandages” are funny. I don’t understand how Ted Poe can continue the disgusting Republican tradition of slandering the French without anyone considering this to be a completely dishonorable act that is unbefitting a public figure.

It’s not restricted to politics by any means; Naomi Chana doesn’t understand why other people aren’t as interested as she is in the history of the Hebrew liturgy:

There is also a lamentable lack of historical curiosity on the part of the average Jewish liturgical participant… I find very few synagogue-goers (and remember, this is already an interested subset of the Jewish population) who want to know which parts of the service are rabbinic and which medieval, or which parts of the Aleinu got edited out when… I have trouble understanding this level of apathy; I can only put it down to really, really lousy Jewish education.

These aren’t the best examples, just the most recent ones I spotted in my RSS reading. I find it fascinating that people will profess ignorance (or misunderstanding) of something as common as Republican beliefs or layman disinterest in deconstructing the liturgy. People are interested in what interests them; there’s no accounting for taste. Other people’s beliefs are never a mystery to me; I may not agree, but if I’m confused people will explain. There’s not much opportunity for misunderstanding politics when people are ranting about it 24/7 on both sides.

I assume the professors of ignorance are just misusing the word “understand” to mean something deeper—say, “empathize.”

Jeff Percifield has a couple of good entries on the religion of peace: the religion of evil and the religion of child-killing. I commented in Lori’s blog on how the existence of religions (or sects thereof) that encourage the slaughter of innocent schoolchildren disproves the belief that all religions teach the same moral or spiritual values. If you’ll pardon a Chesterton quote:

Is one religion as good as another? Is one horse in the Derby as good as another?

A couple of random kitty links:

• Mustang Sally writes LJ fic about Spike and her cats
• Mark Pilgrim uses googlefight for a kitten fight.

I tried the latter at home.

For a regular googlefight:

Number of results on Google for the keywords J/C and C/7:
J/C (1 930 000 results) versus C/7 (2 720 000 results)
The winner is:    C/7

A kittenfight yields:

Number of results on Google for the keywords J/C kills kittens and C/7 kills kittens:
J/C kills kittens (21 results) versus C/7 kills kittens (32 results)
The winner is:    C/7 kills kittens

Font link of the day: Olympukes, for Seema

Once upon a time in America, you could walk into a church and get married. It wasn’t quite kidnapping a bride, but it was a reasonably unregulated process. Today in America, you need a blood test and a license to get married. Obviously the Pilgrims weren’t doing blood tests, so where did they come in?

I used to think that it was a simple public health measure to prevent the spread of syphilis (and nowadays AIDS) to the innocent spouse, but that’s not it. The truth is we’ve inherited our heavy regulations from the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. (If you had no idea, here’s a site about eugenics and the law in Vermont.) Eugenics supporters lobbied legislatures for pre-marriage health certification to keep the unfit from marrying, and therefore (to some extent) from reproducing.

So when you take that blood test, remember what it’s really for. Are you fit or unfit?