Unfinished Acts of Blogging

I’ve got a whole bunch of half-written posts sitting around, and right now I don’t see how I’m going to finish them. What follows is generally coherent but incomplete; it seemed better, though, not to fire off a string of seven or eight separate posts in exceedingly rapid succession:

1. “PATHOLOGICALLY HOMOPHOBIC”: It strikes me as entirely appropriate for Andrew Sullivan to be outraged over the plans to exhume John Henry Newman’s body and separate it from that of the man with whom it was his explicit request to be buried. I am sure that there are some tricky issues of canon law here (though cf.), but it seems that respecting the wishes of the dead should be a priority. Moreover, the fact that Newman’s relationship with Ambrose St. John was – or at least strived to be – a chaste one gives all the more reason to honor its holiness, and use it as a model for Christian sanctity. Alan Bray’s fascinating 2001 article in The Tablet on the forgotten Christian practice of blessing same-sex friendships is important background reading here.

2. MEGAN MCARDLE TILTS AT WINDFALLS: Megan McArdle has a terrific post explaining what is so wrong with Barack Obama’s stupid proposal for a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies. But what’s strange to me about it is that the bulk of her case against the windfall tax can be transferred straightaway to a carbon tax more generally: but when last I checked, she’s still in favor of the latter of these policies. And so I am puzzled. If both a windfall tax and a straightforward tax on carbon will have disproportionate effects on the poor, and if in each case the outcome of trying to offset this regressiveness will end up undoing much of the good of the original task, then why is one of them acceptable while the other is not? Is the fact – if it is a fact – that a windfall task does more to dampen speculation than a straight-up carbon tax really that definitive? Should it be? Like I said, I’m puzzled.

3. THE GREAT DIVORCE (II): James deserves a standing ovation for calmly taking on Byron York over the issue of war crimes trials for Bush Administration goons:

The explanation is simple: this administration has made a habit of doing as secretly as possible whatever it takes to do whatever it deems appropriate at the time, and has taken that approach during a period of extreme fear, confusion, and opacity. The ‘post-9/11 world’ does require a series of emendations and tweaks to our law. But these need to be conducted with as much transparency and due process as possible, and the contention that the Bush administration met the bar of possibility in that regard is simply fanciful.

Yeah. As I have said (and then ably demonstrated), I simply don’t know how to talk to people who can’t see the light on this issue, which makes me doubleplus glad to have clear-headed folks like James around. But as York went on and on about how “they” (i.e., “the left”) are “serious” about the idea of war crimes trials, I couldn’t help thinking that if there were any possibility that a President Obama would actually listen to the likes of Dahlia Lithwick and take real steps to hold these goons accountable, I might give him my vote. Ain’t gonna happen, though …

4. FOR THE LOVE OF YARDS: I know I’ve written before in defense of the family-friendliness of urban spaces, but it seems to me that Ryan Avent is massively understating the difficulty of raising kids without a yard. It’s not just that I’d like a dog and a garden and maybe a few ducks at some point, but also the hours I’ve spent chasing my son down the sidewalk in front of our house, or trying to find a space for him in a public playground that’s been overtaken by a Montessori class, or … well just take my word for it: it certainly doesn’t have to be huge, but even a postage stamp of a backyard provides benefits that no public park can ever offer.

5. THE LUDDITE CARD: Just before his disappearance, Ezra Klein turned once again to what is clearly the stupidest reason to worry about a potential McCain Presidency:

… though the 71-year-old Arizonan isn’t senile, he’s definitely out of touch. In the year 2008, when information technology is deeply integrated into most every sector and drives a substantial portion of our economy, the president should know how to use e-mail, and accessing the internet all by himself should be part of his everyday life, not a campaign promise. But if you try and argue that the bright-eyed, cogent politician on the TV every night is secretly in the throes of early dementia, not only will that attack fail, but related, fair criticisms will probably be discredited also.

This is so incredibly silly that I simply don’t know what to say. The POTUS is surrounded, approximately 24/7, by scores of advisers keeping him informed on the issues with an informational depth and detail that publicly available information simply cannot begin to equal, and we are worried that he can’t use Google? What do you want him to do, check his Twitter stream before meeting with the SecDef? (I’ll happily admit that I have no clear conception what a Twitter stream actually is.) Anyway: McCain’s age is indeed an issue, but his technological incapacities decidedly are not.

6. IT’S THE METHODS, STUPID: Note to Sonny Bunch: that one of the effects of putting prisoners in vertical coffins is to “[s]egregate [them] from the rest of the prison population” does not mean that imprisonment in a 3 foot by 3 foot by 6 foot box is anything but torture, any more than the fact that we were asking questions of the man who was shackled naked to a bed with underwear on his head made it a mere “interrogation”. There are plenty of ways to affect solitary confinement that do not come right out of the Gestapo playbook, and resorting to dehumanizing and unnecessary cruelty with an eye to accomplishing further ends is in most cases exactly what torture is.

7. THE CREEPING PRIVATIZATION: Coming soon, apparently, to a highway near you. I would really like to know what liberal pro-transit types think of this trend, since at least as I understand them, road privatization measures usually meant to be a way to make the cost of upkeep fall directly on the shoulders of the drivers. How can this not be a good thing?

8. OH. MY. GOODNESS.: Like Nathan, I found this somewhere between inexpressibly awesome and unfathomably incredible:

And with that, consider yourself blogged.

Filed under: miscellany