Thought For The Day
An anonymous reader asked me to comment on a number of issues in the comments section of "Thought For The Day II" posted yesterday. At the risk of pissing off the only person who reads this stuff, I'll play along. I mean, I really have nothing better to do.
1) Gay Marriage From a legal perspective, I don't have a problem with gay marriage. More accurately, I find that the legally oriented (hah!) arguments against gay marriage are weak, poorly reasoned, ad hoc constructions. I don't buy the slippery slope argument that this will set a precedent in favour of legalizing polygamy, bestiality or incestuous marriages. On the other side of the coin, I don't support forcing religious organisations to perform religious rites that run contrary to traditionally held beliefs. (Not that anyone is seriously arguing that that would happen, at least not anyone credible that I know of. Please, feel free to enlighten me in the comments section below.) If a particular church or religious sect is willing to recognize gay marriage, it's entirely their business. Am I personally in favour or against gay marriage? This is the way I think about it: I am in favour of other people living their lives in whichever way they choose to, as long as their choices do not have an overtly negative impact on the way I choose to live my life. I don't feel that two men being married will have any effect on my own marriage, any more than The Raptors paying Vince Carter $10 million a year to put a ball through a hoop will have a negative effect on my finances. And I am not in favour of society making laws to curtail the liberty of others, based only on vague moralistic misgivings.
2)Stem Cell Research (Warning: This one gets unnecessarily nasty.) This is a needlessly contentious issue, in that stem cells exist in the tissues of adult humans as well as aborted fetuses. The research need not be carried out on the detritus of the abortion process, and for the time being it probably won't (at least not in Canada or the US). I guess you could argue that if you allowed research on stem cells regardless of the source then people who require the treatments derived from the research, who are morally opposed to abortion, might refuse the treatment altogether. Which is, in my humble opinion, their problem. (Same goes for Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse blood transfusions. Your needless early death is your problem, not mine.) I don't buy the argument that research conducted on the disgarded tissues of proto-toddlers will lead to a demand for abortions, any more than conducting scientific research using homicide victims will lead to a demand for homicide. I can't imagine a pregnant teenager feeling good about her decision to get a D&C under any circumstances, or feeling that she's somehow contributing to the greater good. So I say, damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.
3) The War In Iraq The "war" part of the war is pretty much over. The recent fighting in Fallujah may get the "Vietnam/quagmire" crowd moist, but that's as bad as it's going to get from here on in, and by the way, the Marines now own Fallujah so that's over too. 10 years from now, when the rest of the Middle East is drowning in a sea of revolutionary blood, people will look back on the American occupation of Iraq with teary-eyed fondness for the good old days. Best bet for a happy ending in Iraq: keep a large American military contingent on hand to protect the borders from aggressive neighbours, give the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites separate semi-sovereign regions and task the federal government with arbitrating their disputes and not doing much more than that. And then give them time to come together on their own terms.
Osama Bin Laden a) The "I Don't Care" reply: Quite frankly, I was more than a little surprised to see the most recent video extravanganza from OBL, in that up until that point I was comfortably certain than he was dead. I wouldn't be surprised if his sudden emergence from hiding is the real reason that Mark Steyn has gone AWOL, given that Steyn has a record of being insanely confident about his predictions. He also has a record of being right about those predictions, which makes this hard to take. If he had, oh, I don't know, say John Pilger's record of being right about his insights, than I'm sure it would just run off his back like water off a duck. Myself, I'm not really worried about Osama's whereabouts. Osama's apparently got deeper spider holes than Saddam had, but between climbing up and down ladders, finding ways to get to his secret dialysis treatements, and dodging the Marines at every turn for the rest of his life, I doubt he'll have time to make an effective go of running the jihad.
b) The "Conspiracy" reply: (Let me apologize in advance: I don't like conspiracy theories. I'm just throwing this out because it's an interesting take I've come across a few times on the web.) Who benefits from Bin Laden's capture? Not the hawks. Not the people who wish the war on terror to continue. Not the spooks at the CIA. The capture of OBL would provide ammunition to the anti-war folks, who would argue that the war on terrorism could be cut back because the biggest fish had been caught. I wouldn't be surprised if the A/V guys at the CIA are greenlighting everything purported to be Bin Laden as genuine just to keep the pressure up. The peace and prosperity of the Clinton years saw their budgets slashed. Having a big, scary and yet oddly untraceable enemy means job security. Ew. Now I feel dirty.
Thus endeth the lesson.
1) Gay Marriage From a legal perspective, I don't have a problem with gay marriage. More accurately, I find that the legally oriented (hah!) arguments against gay marriage are weak, poorly reasoned, ad hoc constructions. I don't buy the slippery slope argument that this will set a precedent in favour of legalizing polygamy, bestiality or incestuous marriages. On the other side of the coin, I don't support forcing religious organisations to perform religious rites that run contrary to traditionally held beliefs. (Not that anyone is seriously arguing that that would happen, at least not anyone credible that I know of. Please, feel free to enlighten me in the comments section below.) If a particular church or religious sect is willing to recognize gay marriage, it's entirely their business. Am I personally in favour or against gay marriage? This is the way I think about it: I am in favour of other people living their lives in whichever way they choose to, as long as their choices do not have an overtly negative impact on the way I choose to live my life. I don't feel that two men being married will have any effect on my own marriage, any more than The Raptors paying Vince Carter $10 million a year to put a ball through a hoop will have a negative effect on my finances. And I am not in favour of society making laws to curtail the liberty of others, based only on vague moralistic misgivings.
2)Stem Cell Research (Warning: This one gets unnecessarily nasty.) This is a needlessly contentious issue, in that stem cells exist in the tissues of adult humans as well as aborted fetuses. The research need not be carried out on the detritus of the abortion process, and for the time being it probably won't (at least not in Canada or the US). I guess you could argue that if you allowed research on stem cells regardless of the source then people who require the treatments derived from the research, who are morally opposed to abortion, might refuse the treatment altogether. Which is, in my humble opinion, their problem. (Same goes for Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse blood transfusions. Your needless early death is your problem, not mine.) I don't buy the argument that research conducted on the disgarded tissues of proto-toddlers will lead to a demand for abortions, any more than conducting scientific research using homicide victims will lead to a demand for homicide. I can't imagine a pregnant teenager feeling good about her decision to get a D&C under any circumstances, or feeling that she's somehow contributing to the greater good. So I say, damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.
3) The War In Iraq The "war" part of the war is pretty much over. The recent fighting in Fallujah may get the "Vietnam/quagmire" crowd moist, but that's as bad as it's going to get from here on in, and by the way, the Marines now own Fallujah so that's over too. 10 years from now, when the rest of the Middle East is drowning in a sea of revolutionary blood, people will look back on the American occupation of Iraq with teary-eyed fondness for the good old days. Best bet for a happy ending in Iraq: keep a large American military contingent on hand to protect the borders from aggressive neighbours, give the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites separate semi-sovereign regions and task the federal government with arbitrating their disputes and not doing much more than that. And then give them time to come together on their own terms.
Osama Bin Laden a) The "I Don't Care" reply: Quite frankly, I was more than a little surprised to see the most recent video extravanganza from OBL, in that up until that point I was comfortably certain than he was dead. I wouldn't be surprised if his sudden emergence from hiding is the real reason that Mark Steyn has gone AWOL, given that Steyn has a record of being insanely confident about his predictions. He also has a record of being right about those predictions, which makes this hard to take. If he had, oh, I don't know, say John Pilger's record of being right about his insights, than I'm sure it would just run off his back like water off a duck. Myself, I'm not really worried about Osama's whereabouts. Osama's apparently got deeper spider holes than Saddam had, but between climbing up and down ladders, finding ways to get to his secret dialysis treatements, and dodging the Marines at every turn for the rest of his life, I doubt he'll have time to make an effective go of running the jihad.
b) The "Conspiracy" reply: (Let me apologize in advance: I don't like conspiracy theories. I'm just throwing this out because it's an interesting take I've come across a few times on the web.) Who benefits from Bin Laden's capture? Not the hawks. Not the people who wish the war on terror to continue. Not the spooks at the CIA. The capture of OBL would provide ammunition to the anti-war folks, who would argue that the war on terrorism could be cut back because the biggest fish had been caught. I wouldn't be surprised if the A/V guys at the CIA are greenlighting everything purported to be Bin Laden as genuine just to keep the pressure up. The peace and prosperity of the Clinton years saw their budgets slashed. Having a big, scary and yet oddly untraceable enemy means job security. Ew. Now I feel dirty.
Thus endeth the lesson.
posted by Marty at 10:36 PM
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