Hsieh WHAT?!
NoodleFood has been a bastion of sanity in the blogosphere, but of late, I really think the Hsiehs are losing it. First there was the whole big thread of assent and support to Leonard Peikoff's notion that Objectivists should vote Democrat because theocracy is a bigger threat than socialism. Sorry, don't see it, at all. It can certainly be argued that the GOP has sold out its libertarian wing to the Religious Right..and Nov. 7 showed what that got them. Americans, even screaming-in-tongues, snakehandling nutjobs, are not at core theocratic. OTOH, socialism is as omnipresent in modern American thought as air is in the sky, to the point that the highest ranking elected Republican espouses socialist policies. Even ceding the tactical advantages of blocking the theocrats first, one is left with the recommendation to compromise with evil. What would Rand do?
In any case, rational voting as a concept is pretty much a non-starter. The Duopoly appeals solely to emotion. That's why they try to kick minor parties out of debates: because the outsiders beat them. Information is filtered, and presented in little emotion-stirring snippets. I'm not sure fear of Hell is any worse a reason to vote than fear of Social Security cuts. It's hard to get enough information to make a rational decision. that doesn't mean one shouldn't try. But to expect the electorate to revamp their decision-making process is hopeless. Ain't gonna happen in our lifetimes, even if St. Ayn comes flapping down from the clouds with little Athena-wings.
Then there's Paul, trying to find a new term to cover waterboarding, because evidently instinctive panic at perceived threat of death is not the same as excruciating pain and is therefore not torture. I suppose that, since he doesn't believe in angels, he can't argue about hom many can dance on the head of a pin, so he has to make this argument instead. I don't see him lining up to experience this non-torture, so somewhere his mind knows that a spade is a spade. It's fairly benign and non-destructive as tortures go, and sometimes torture might be a lesser evil. But there's nothing to be gained by avoiding reality.
It's kind of ironic, given the whole anti-religion thing, that the dictonary definition of "torture" that Paul cites uses the word "excruciating". I guess that if you didn't actually nail Jesus to the cross, and took him down whenever he became too weak to raise himself up to breathe, that wouldn't be torture either.
Comments
Posted by: jeffrey smith
Posted on: November 14, 2006 11:56 PM
You do realize that a sentence like:
"even if St. Ayn comes flapping down from the clouds with little Athena-wings"
takes cognitive dissonance to new heights?
Presumably if she did come flapping down from the clouds, with or without wings, she'd be going "Whoa! Did I have to revalidate my concepts!"