cheese it, the cops!

personhood

i'm glad the mississippi personhood thingummy failed. probably, what is and what is not a person is not a matter best left to voters. on the other hand i'm not sure it's best left to philosophers or scientists either: it's a wickedly difficult or impossible question in various cases. to tell or remind you of my views on abortion: i am pro-choice. but i am queasy. i think it has been central to the progress of women in some ways, and specifically i definitely agree that every woman ought to control her own sexuality and reproduction. on the other hand, how much a fetus in vitro counts morally is a serious, and perhaps an impossible question. not nothing, and the question of whether abortion is an exercise of the autonomy of the person on whom its performed or the worst sort of violation of another person is just a really hard question. i was pretty clear when i was 16 and my 14-year-old girlfriend had an abortion. i got queasier, i must say, after seeing a number of births, and having some children. so if ron paul is pro-life obstetrician, i can respect that and understand it.

really it is a relief not to be a lobbyist, an activist, or a politician. in other words, if the head of naral were queasy, she couldn't say so. and she probably couldn't get queasy. her commitment is immune to revision or experience. obviously, so is a fundamentalist pro-life position. in a way, the extreme and absolute nature of the positions reflects the deep obscurity and difficulty and ambiguity of the question: you need subjective certainty - an absolute rigid faith one way or the other - precisely because the questions of objective truth are impossible to answer. it has to be an absolutely clear answer, precisely because ther is no answer. well, i have the luxury of living with that, because it does not matter what i think.

now if it faces me again with one of my daughters, or god forbid a hypothetical pre-menopausal lover of my own, then i will leave the ultimate decision to her, of course. and i do think that's where it belongs. but i also won't feel exactly right about it.

d

oh dang. so long heavy d.

total destruction

herman cain's total denial approach is going to make the ultimate reckoning totally destructive. he'll have to move to djibouti. and this idea of his and his lawyer's that these accusation "strain credulity" etc is just ridiculous. on the contrary, they're completely plausible. stuff like that happens all the time.

on spin

cain is the paradigmatic casualty of the "news cycle": an absolute non-stop bludgeoning on cable news. i'd be very surprised if he survives as a candidate even for the next few days; one just whiffs further devastation.

fublic punding

the idea of public funding for presidential and congressional candidates is appealing, because otherwise the whole system rests on corruption, i believe. but then: the structure of public funds will even-more-firmly freeze the two-party nightmare into place (the one thing that d and r admins can agree on: don't fund the rise of any other force), and is itself subject to all sorts of abuses. rather a dilemma, isn't it?

tree of life

years late, but i'm going to do  a little review of the film of that title. it's an auteur flick: extremely stylized. like: let's just drop in a twenty-minute cgi vignette of the history of the universe. then we finally get to it: on the surface, a wholesome, typical american family. underneath, a million freudian tics. as that might indicate, the symbolism as a whole, which comes in a non-stop barrage, is as heavy-handed as could well be imagined: dead child? cut to an empty chair. cut to a dead butterfly. cut to a popping bubble. it would be surrealist poetry if it wasn't hackneyed dream-interpretation, or the smack of a two-bit psychic. it's the worst sort of pseudo-profound almost-meaningful claptrap, hammered home by the dismal, cliche-ridden soundtrack. also it is itself as a whole dismal: slow, bleak in an unearned kind of way. what are these people suffering from? distressingly, people whisper their depressive, fragmentary internal monologue to themselves.

there's no real occasion for acting, and so they mostly waste their cast: in any given scene, you get tiny wisps of dialogue, strange metaphoric images, and extreme close-ups: still lifes of brad pitt's face or whatever. the thing is far more visually sophisticated than religiously, philosophically, psychologically...all the elements it purports to put vaguely into play. ultimately, the message is nothing if not woolly. really, it's a barrage of stunning imagery. an interminable barrage.

greek debt vote

it really is quite amazing and right, i think, that papandreou is calling for a plebescite on the bailout/austerity package. i can't imagine the pressure he's under from bankers and governments not to do that; supposedly he courts the meltdown of the world financial system. and yet it is certainly a fundamental question about the shape of greece's society, and one where he himself probably does not know which decision is right, or where he hates every possibility. it's precisely the sort of thing that the country should vote on.

one-state solution

whatever they say, it is obvious that the u.s. government is opposed to palestinian statehood