The Hairball Conspiracy

There’s just something about the ways things have been going around here lately that makes it next to impossible to sit down and bang out a decent post of any kind.

First of all, there’s the simple fact that my time management skills are not in the least bit what they should be. Of course - and not to make excuses, but - it would be one heck of a lot easier if I had a reasonable and consistent schedule. Unfortunately, instead of finding that tidy little Aristotelian mean, I swing between the vicious extremes of either not having enough time, or having entirely too much.

Second, I’ve been trying to cram as much time with my fiancée (hereinafter and forever to be known as “La Principessa”) as possible. I am pretty much without remorse on this point because in a week and a half she will be graduated and a continent away for a fair chunk of the next year and a half. I’m going to assume that I don’t need to explain myself any further on that point.

Oh, and a close third, I got home late last night with every intention of writing a post magnificent…until I realized that Octavian (my cat) had in essence tried to use my desk as a massive climbing toy, pulling down all sorts of miscellany in my absence. I was too tired to be really angry at him, so I just cleaned up and went to sleep. It’s not really his fault, either; I’ve been out a lot and the apartment isn’t exactly designed to entertain a 10-month-old kitten. I’ve just made a note of the fact that I really need to get him a piece of real furniture - read: climbing tower - to exercise on. Hopefully that will keep the destruction to a minimum.

The cat antics didn’t stop there, though. I managed to clean up the desk, but then I started hearing a sloshing noise coming from a location roughly synonymous with the inside of the cat. This I knew could not bode well (I’ve seen it before when he inexplicably drinks so much water that he pukes). As is his wont, he started in the living room, leaving me a lovely gift of brownish, chunky liquid. He then proceeded into the hallway. I followed, more to make sure he didn’t try to do anything to my shoes than to prevent nature taking its course - which it did, in the form of a green (yes, like pea-soup green) sausage of hair and what I can only assume were digestive fluids. He then proceeded to do the same thing in the dining room.

All three messes were a relatively easy cleanup. However, I find myself wondering whether this is exactly how hairballs are supposed to make themselves known. Being the first time I’ve ever seen him bring one up - if one it indeed was - I have no idea what to expect. Part of me is tempted to just call up the vet to ask. I really don’t need him exploding (or puking on anything in my absence).

So that would be why there was no customary middle-of-the-week post. In the way of a consolation, I give you what follows, courtesy of The Shrine of the Holy Whapping:

And…Voila

Well, finals are now over.

Iron Man is a giant shiny piece of awesome, and apparently I’m not alone in thinking that because it grossed $100 million this weekend, beating all but Spider Man in the most-obnoxious-amount-of-money-on-an-opening-weekend category. Well deserved.

Now, if you will excuse me, I’m going to return my brain to the charging cradle for a few days.

Not to Sound Like a Marxist…

I’ve pretty much gotten used to the idea that I live in a budding corporate police state. I’m not necessarily okay with that, but all things being equal, there’s also not much I can do about it. From ISPs to email services to usage tracking to satellites and wiretaps - and now the story, corroborated elsewhere, that Microsoft has effectively deputized itself into a law-enforcement role - I feel like it’s easier to just assume that privacy is primarily an illusion unless I totally unplug and don’t leave the house.

But apparently that’s not going to be good enough for long. At least, not unless the military wises up and starts listening to James Cameron. Or does nobody remember SkyNet? To recap:

Cameras, ‘bots, and prying eyes I can avoid with only a little bit of inconvenience. Terminators are another story entirely.

Late-Night Pre-Final “Wow”

From G. D. Davidson over at The Sci Fi Catholic:

I would pay money to see this. …Or, you know, the feature-length version.

Case in Point

Just as an example of what I meant in the end of the last post…

While I am very sad that Simcha’s blog is on an indefinite hiatus, I’m not going to try to do anything to force her to post further. It just wouldn’t be right.

Democracy, Liberty, and the Modern Species of Man

Final exams looming near in law school land - nay, they are already here! - invariably leads me to wax contemplative upon the themes of man, justice, and the πόλις. And since the examination most lately dispatched was one for a class on the history of American jurisprudence, there’s actually some pragmatic value for me in these musings. Of course, the speculative side of my nature will, through force of habit, charge off in a direction that totally negates whatever slivers of practicality might have existed at the start. Nevertheless, I persist - it entertains me to do so. And it gives me things to write about, so everybody wins.

Something that bothered me back in my first year of law school was tort law. In spite of the best efforts of my professor and the textbook to establish some boundaries and reasonability to the matter, it seems to me that the evolution of tort law has been a process of gradually inverting the common-sense notions of personal responsibility.

First let me explain what is getting inverted. Say that I own a parcel of land, upon which I build an expensive house. Say further that I fill this house with expensive and luxurious amenities. Would I not be justified in wanting to protect this mass of material wealth? So say I build a fence, hidden amongst hedges so that it isn’t aesthetically unpleasant; and say that I post regularly and often on the perimeter of my property that trespassing is not allowed, and that I keep guard dogs to discourage such trespass. Dogs? Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention the half-dozen large Dobermans that roam the grounds.

Okay, so my stuff is now secure, right?

Well, as it turns out, some moron decides to ignore the signs, jump the fence, and try to make it to my house. Predictably, my canine security force corrals him - albeit roughly - and the police take him away to be charged with attempted robbery. Just another dumb criminal who underestimated the seriousness of my security precautions, right?

Oh, yeah, and he’s suing me.

What, you ask? He broke onto my property…what on earth is he entitled to sue about? The fact of the matter is that I’m not actually allowed to use deadly or potentially deadly force to protect my personal assets by default. Realistically, I’m not allowed to use deadly force unless I or another person are at risk.

Why is this, exactly? Because living in a society requires as a matter of course a certain amount of limitations on free will. I may want to eviscerate anyone who tries to break into my home, but society prevents me from doing this because uncontrolled killing is not perceived to be a general good. I can hardly fault the judgment, either.

But there are other sacrifices that autonomy must make in order for the individual to participate in society - and these are regulated far more subtly. Specifically, you as an autonomous individual must respect me as an autonomous individual when I make choices that you disagree with. There are limits to this rule created by overarching moral considerations, but for the general, day-to-day decisions of one’s life, it holds. For example, if you are friends with someone whom I find grating and unequivocally unpleasant, then you may be friends with him and I will choose not to be. You have absolutely no right to try to force me to be friends with him. You might tell me that you think I’m unreasonable, you might tell your friend you think I’m unreasonable, but that’s it. You can’t try to undermine me. It just won’t work - and even if it did, by placing your will over mine you are committing a moral infraction.

Like I said before, this rule has its limits. But that would require a whole new post…and it will come eventually.

Working

In the throes of finals, things move slowly. My actually-substantive posting, for example. Well, I’m going to risk disappointing you yet again, but you’ll have to wait to Wednesday.

Sorry…forgive? Believe me, I’m at least as annoyed as you are.

Lethargy

Well, I did intend to post something today. It’s not like I don’t have the idea. I’m just suffering from a combination of writer’s block and springtime…

I’ll work on it over the weekend, never fear.

As Usual, My Thoughts Through Mediation

As always happens when I have difficulty expressing my thoughts on a particular subject (for example, my dubious feelings regarding Twitter) I have found somebody else who explains exactly what the problem is. Do read the associated text entry, also, since some people think better textually than visually. It may work better for you. Also, “Tycho” is prose gold as it stands, so you’re doing yourself a favor either way.

To return to the subject at hand, let me phrase it now in my own words. Twitter is the Borg with closed captioning. Collective consciousness for the hearing-impaired. A facially mind-blowing mass of continuous, streaming thought. It’s scary.

I understand that there are ways to actually filter the unrelenting flood of “tweets” so that you only obtain the thoughts of the people who you want to follow. Be that as it may, the whole concept of Twitter implicitly embraces a degree of connectivity that I do not want. Now, I’m all for connectivity. I get twitchy if my cell phone is AWOL. I would like to say that I don’t need to check my email every day, but that would be a filthy dirty lie. Still, I have my limits. I like my privacy. I like being unplugged every once in a while. The day I want to hear everything going on with everyone everywhere is the day that I have an interplexing beacon in my head and nanoprobes in my bloodstream:

At least then you get personal force fields.

As a Fence-Hopper I Say “Bugger Off!”

Courtesy of Fumare:

I think that this clip speaks for itself, quite honestly. My initial sentiment was to drive directly to the Capitol building and cause Tom Tancredo to choke to death by (brace for irony) a burrito, but then I thought it was better to let him live and continue to do inadvertent violence to his cause through his asinine xenophobia. I’ve been on both sides of the fence around this issue, I will confess, but the plain fact of the matter is that the Holy Father was making an observation on human nature and fundamental moral rights. I think the underlying point is that since prosperity is a gift from God and not (as the Puritans, Pharisees, and William Kristol would argue) a right stemming from some sort of virtuous industry, then it is something that is properly shared as much as possible. To that end, I would say that the deepest the Holy Father would wade into the nitty-gritty of the immigration debate is to say that our border shouldn’t aspire to the security of Fort Knox.

I don’t mean that Benedict isn’t saying that there’s something wrong with the way we do business now, but he, like all good Pontiffs, isn’t going to presume to give us a 12-step plan for immigration reform. He just gives us the moral imperative. What we do with it (or not) is our business, and that of our eternal souls. Or in Tancredo’s case, his racist, fascist little raisin of an animating principle.

In other news, it was brought to my attention that last Friday’s post was at least potentially obscure - specifically, it was alleged that my treatment of mores created the impression that I was merely swapping a simplistic determinism for a complex determinism. This bothered me, so I went back and reread the thing and came to this conclusion: I am assuming a knowledge of Tocqueville that may be a bit greater than standard, so let me briefly revisit the subject before going forward.

Mores are not deterministic in the way that Marx claims economics is. Mores are, roughly speaking, “habits of the heart” that form a communal morality and generalized code of conduct across the entire polity. It is not adhered to with total consistency throughout (especially in a polity as large as America’s) but it is present in the minds.

Perhaps an example will help. Take the democratic idea of equality, which I mentioned in Friday’s post. This principle advances the idea that all men are basically equal, deserving of parity in treatment. This is not an equality of condition - such an idea would ignore natural inequalities that we can do nothing about and would be, therefore, absurd - but rather of dignity. I have no exalted dignity over and against any other human being, for example. At the most basic level, we are equally created and loved by God. This rule remains the same regardless of who you plug into the equation. I and my brother are of equal in dignity. I and Pope Benedict XVI are of equal dignity. I and Hitler are of equal dignity. Barack Obama and George Bush are of equal dignity. Clear?

This is the principle. The mores that follow from this principle (at least in Tocqueville’s estimation) are social judgments on acceptable conduct. The idea that nobody is particularly entitled to have more weight accorded to their opinion than to another’s, for example, is a democratic more. It’s a faulty judgment, to be sure - since it is a priori true that my opinions are automatically at least twice as weighty as anyone else’s, except for the Pope’s - but it colors the American mind subconsciously.

Again, this is not deterministic because it’s a social moral, not an instinct. The former arises after birth and is seldom compelled, doing its work purely by implication and suggestion; whereas the latter are hard-wired into the brain and are inexorable - it is only with great force of will that they are overcome.

A preview of Friday’s episode: I talk about freedom and its limitations in a society. Stay tuned!