The Art of Worldly Wisdom

A Study in Scarlet

2009-01-27T22:00:00.000-08:00

So, Conservapedia has posted a list of Senate Democrats in states with Republican guvs as a handy guide for prospective assassins.

I'm not really outraged so much as bemused-- regicide is committed for many reasons, but a Senate majority seems a tad dry, you know? Thought it is always comforting to see political discourse in this country reduced to so-and-so must die. Really the discourse has degenerated to the point where open calls for assassination/revolution/civil war don't seem all that outlandish. Perhaps the discontent of being a college educated retail manager is finally what will get someone to snap and start blowing up Wal-Marts.

"A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise."

2009-01-23T10:42:00.000-08:00

All of these orders are improvements over Bush's policies, but they include unnecessary equivocations. The order closing Guantanamo, for example, expresses Obama's preference that detainees be tried in civilian courts or in courts-martial conducted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But it reserves the option of using the current, and flawed, military commission system (though perhaps with new procedures).

The order governing interrogation is similarly compromised. It rightly requires CIA interrogators to abide by the Army Field Manual, which prohibits physical force, waterboarding, extended solitary confinement, placing hoods on prisoners' heads or using dogs to intimidate them. The order, however, seems to allow the administration to change its mind. It creates a task force to review the manual's guidelines "to determine whether different or additional guidance is necessary for the CIA." It isn't.

[...]

Obama deserves credit for ending the worst of the Bush administration's excesses in the "war on terror." As he does, he should not introduce shades of gray into issues that call for black-and-white clarity.

The LA Times has thoughts on Gitmo's going-out-of-business sale.

Anyone who believed that an incoming American President would unequivocally repudiate powers of his office, particularly powers relating to defense was either gullible or mad. Obama's orders are not, as we may have been led to believe, the triumph of the better angels of our nature over fear. Instead, it is the inevitable victory of propriety over open hostility. Gitmo is not being closed because it was evil (though it was, and is) but because it's closing soothes the nagging vestigal threads of conscience the American public still possess. Gitmo was an international embarrassment, not because of what was done, but because of the honesty with which it was being done. We don't torture, because we say we don't torture and because we got rid of that place where the all the torture happened. It's a symbol-- and such a transparent one that even American journalists can quite clearly see it's duplicity.

Red Harvest

2009-01-23T10:19:00.000-08:00

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/01/23/pakistan.missile/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

And so America's campaign to reclaim it's international standing begins with a bang. Unilateral American military action which ignores the wishes of the sovereign nation in which the action is occurring seems like an odd first move for a man who has spent so much time harping on the need for America to rejoin "the international community" unless one considers that perhaps the point of said reconciliation is in order to perform such military action with less visibility and transparency than was possible under Bush.

What's frightening is the breadth of military power and influence America possesses, a nation which finds itself on our Naughty list has no recourse but to accept punishment. Pakistan which has endured every sort of libel from American politicos who don't understand a whit of it's situation, can only politely ask that we refrain from firing missiles into it's airspace without consulting them. To the great unwashed masses here in America, Pakistan is just little brown people running about; sometimes murdering the leaders we've appointed to rob them blind. It's a dirty town...

We've traded the cowboy for The Continental Op--and he's going to clean up Poisonville whether Poisonville wants to be clean or not.

"First then, wilt thou suffer me a few questions...to test the state of thy mind?"

2009-01-22T23:02:00.000-08:00

Though royal purple soothes his pride,
And snowy pearls, his neck adorn,
Nero in all his riot lives
The mark of universal scorn
Yet he on reverened heads conferred
Th' inglorious honours of the state.
Shall we, then, deem them truly blessed
Whom such preferment hath made great?

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius is one of those lost treasures of the dreary old Western canon. It is beautiful, lyrical, and that most dangerous of things for Academia-- passionate. Written by a Roman civil servant while awaiting a terrifying execution for false charges of sedition, The Consolation deals, as one might expect from that background, primarily with the problem of evil. As Boethius laments his loss of station and fortune, he is doctored back to spiritual health by Philosophy incarnate. In the course of their dialogue on the futility of worldly honors, the preceding verse is deployed to underscore a key claim: That honors received by a savage tyrant (and thus, by a savage state), are not honors at all. That recognition and acceptance from evil is something to cause shame-- not elation.

And now, Obama receives his laurel wreath; his authority over a government, and thus a people, whose viciousness is only matched by their self-satisfaction. He does not so much offer hope as he implores that we be hopeful, or more directly-- that we (and the international community) offer his administration a kind of divorce from the ethical history of his predecessors. But I never owned slaves, why should I be punished for all that oppression? Cynicism in regards to the ethical bent of the new administration is wrong despite having full knowledge of all the monstrosities concocted by everyone who's held that office since I woke up in history class because he's never been President before. As though the 85 year old man who has hated scrambled eggs since he was a child only does so because he hasn't tasted mine yet.

We kill, we torture, we starve. We've always done it, and we've always ignored anyone who tried to tell us about it. Obama is clearly an intellect of this first rank, a man who supped at all the finest tables American academia. He knows all of this, there is no way he cannot-- and yet he still asks. He is no fool and so he must be a liar.

As a wise man once said when asked: What is to be done?
Buy a gun. Practice.