Last Post on Blogger!

I'll leave this site up (at least for a while), but I'm moving to WordPress because it's more versatile. The address is thesoggyliberal.wordpress.com.

I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians.

Cool... er, Hot

One of the featured blogs on Blogger's "Blogs of Note" was a site dedicated entirely to global warming news!

A Few Things Ill Considered

I would especially recommend their FAQ on How To Talk To a Skeptic.

I Love My State!

My Senator, Gordon Smith (R-OR), said on Friday (on the floor of the Senate):

"Our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day, it's absurd. It may even be criminal."

Even though he's Republican, you gotta admire his honesty/cojones.

Halfway!

I just finished my Latin essay. That was pulling teeth. I got it in just under deadline, and just over minimum length. Probably not my best paper, but not my worst, either.

Anyway, I want to give a plug to one of the professors at Willamette: John Doan. I was at his Christmas concert last night, and I was blown away. I knew he could play the harp guitar, but not the tremeloa (a really bizarre Hawaiian instrument)! Anyway, I would really suggest his Christmas album, which is on iTunes.

This post has nothing to do with the fact that I'm taking guitar from him next semester.

Net Neutrality

It looks like Senator Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens' telecommunications bill is dead. Well, at least the new congress looks a bit less likely to pass the idiotic thing.

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, Stevens wanted to give AT&T and their ilk the right to charge big sites (like Google or Amazon) to give them priority over little sites that haven't paid (like yours truly) and better download times. Sort of like taxing mom & pop stores to give WalMart a tax break. Or cutting back on social services to give Halliburton a massive no-bid contract. You know, stuff our government would never do.

Anyway, I still have to write a letter to Gordon Smith to try and get him to change his mind. Hopefully I can get my republican grandpa to do the same.

I Hate...

Insomnia. Combine insomnia with an essay in Latin, and it becomes loathing. I've had a major case of writers block with my term paper in Latin, and finally came up with a topic: the dichotomy portrayed in Catiline. If it sounds boring, that's because it is. It might even get me to sleep.

Ancient Rome, Final Exams, and the Death Penalty

I just finished my first final exam—Latin Prose—and now I only have to write two term papers and study for a chemistry exam. Anyway, for my exam we had to translate a good chunk of Sallust's Bellum Catilinae (The Catilinarian Conspiracy) and write a "linguistic and historical analysis" of another chunk. Not entirely painless, but not pulling teeth, either.

What brings me to write about this is a speech by Julius Caesar that Sallust quotes. After Catiline, a traitor against Rome, has been discovered, there is a debate in the Senate over whether to execute him (which was illegal, since he was a Roman citizen). After a rather obscure senator named Decimus Silanus (I'm still waiting for Biggus Dickus) makes a speech urging for the death penalty, Julius Caesar—the future emperor of Rome and one of the best prosecutors of the day—makes a speech against the death penalty.

So Caesar was more civilized—2000 years ago—than we are today.

I think anti-death penalty advocates could learn a thing or two from Caesar. He doesn't dispute that Catiline and his co-conspirators are a threat, or that they deserve death. Instead he says, essentially, "yes, we have the power to revoke the Porcian Law (which protected Roman citizens from execution) but we shouldn't because it is not worthy of us and will set a dangerous precedent." I think that we need to refocus the debate on these two arguments. We are honestly getting nowhere with the arguments that capital punishment is unconstitutional (and will get nowhere for some time), or that it doesn't prevent murder, or that we're executing innocent people. We need to say that we are a compassionate people, and a nation of just laws. We are not a people that indulges in mob violence, and we are not a nation of retribution. We must say that the death penalty is perfectly legal, but that we ought to rise above petty retribution.

I Just Like Chains!

Don't You Want Your Country to Win?

Bill O'Reilly has been asking liberals whether they want the US to win in Iraq recently. Ignoring the question of whether or not it's possible for us to win, my answer is a definite no. I don't want to win in Iraq, because winning would be bad for both Iraqis and the United States.

First of all, in order for us to "win," there has to be a government in place that is friendly to us. In other words, a dictatorship. Think about it. Every one of our Arab allies in the Middle East is a brutal dictatorship: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Uzbekistan, among others. The only three Arab governments that approach democracy are Palestine, currently controlled by Hamas; Lebanon, where Hezbollah has a majority in parliament; and Iran, which Bush apparently wants to nuke.

Winning would be bad for us, as well. The fact is that we are no longer the empire we once were. When the USSR fell, and no one needed us to "protect" them anymore, we lost a lot of international power. Now, we can't to pump out manufactured goods as quickly as China, and soon we won't be able to compete with India in technological industries. We are losing what was left of our international power quickly.

This is very similar to what happened to France and Great Britain after the Second World War. Their empires started to crumble. England decided to slowly let go of power, and the Brits essentially resigned themselves to not being a world power anymore. France, on the other hand, clung desperately to their colonies, and got walloped in Vietnam, Algeria, and their other colonies. Yet France still has an attitude that would be more appropriate for Napoleon's era.

Now that we are losing our empire, we have two choices: accept our fall gracefully, like Britain, or fight it every inch of the way, like France. If we bow out gracefully, we can keep some of our stature and influence. If we don't, we will be like France—annoying and ignored. If we lose in Iraq, maybe people will wake up to the fact that we're not an empire anymore and will stop acting like we are.

Evolutionary Psychology 101

Over at Feministing, where I comment frequently, there have been more than a few, er, discussions about evolutionary psychology. (Full disclosure: I started one of them.) In general, the feminists (whom I usually agree with) think it's a bunch of bunk, and the "trolls," who are the loud obnoxious frat-boys of the blogosphere (at least, that's the impression I get), use evolutionary psychology to "put women in their place"—pregnant and at home.

The problem is, evolutionary psychology isn't really anti-feminist. (Is "masculinism" the opposite of feminism? Just a thought.) Most of the readers at Feministing also have a somewhat distorted view of evolutionary psychology: "evolutionary biology [sic] means that I shouldn't be good at math or abstract thinking." Well, actually, it doesn't. The first thing that you must remember about evolutionary psychology is that no one, not even Steven Pinker, thinks that biology is the only thing that controls personality or ability. There is room for a "use it or lose it" theory, and significant outside influences. Even if someone is born with an aptitude for math, if they are discouraged from taking math, they are likely to lose some of that ability. Conversely, if someone is encouraged to take math, and likes it enough to continue with it, they can become very good at it regardless of innate talent.

Second, evolutionary psychology deals only with averages. It cannot deal with individual cases. So, if most humans are better at arithmetic than calculus (which I blogged about previously), evolutionary psychology can help explain. It cannot explain why Einstein could discover E=MC² but couldn't do his taxes. It can explain why most men don't like it when their wives/girlfriends cheat on them, but not those men who don't really care. It might be able to explain the difference in the ratio of men to women in sciences and in arts, but not why certain people prefer science, art, language, or any other discipline. It can explain why we like sex, but not why some like BDSM, and some don't

Finally, and most importantly, evolutionary psychology is descriptive, not normative. It makes claims about how the world is, not how it ought to be. So, even if Lawrence Summers was right when made those stupid remarks about whether or not the lack of women in sciences could be due to innate differences, it should not influence him to avoid hiring qualified female science professors (as he apparently did).

Here We Go...

I was hoping I could ignore the brouhaha over Keith Ellison taking his oath of office on the Quran rather than the bible, but Dennis Prager has written a column that is at once very scary and strangely amusing. A couple excerpts:

What Ellison and his Muslim and leftist supporters are saying is that it is of no consequence what America holds as its holiest book; all that matters is what any individual holds to be his holiest book.

Damn straight. There's this little thing called the First Amendment, Dennis. You might have heard of it. No? I suspected as much.

Ellison's doing so will embolden Islamic extremists and make new ones, as Islamists, rightly or wrongly, see the first sign of the realization of their greatest goal -- the Islamicization of America.

Yes, what the Islamic extremists want most of all is to see a moderate Muslim serving the United States after having vowed to fight terrorism. Sheesh.

[S]ecular officials did not demand to take their oaths of office on, say, the collected works of Voltaire or on a volume of New York Times editorials, writings far more significant to some liberal members of Congress than the Bible. Nor has one Mormon official demanded to put his hand on the Book of Mormon.

Let's see:
1) I can't think of a single atheist (why he insists on calling atheists "secular" is beyond me) who has been elected to a major position yet.
2) Mormons believe the Old and New Testaments to be holy as well.
3) The whole point of swearing on a Bible is to be sure that you don't break your oath. This is why ancient Greeks made sacrifices to the gods while making important oaths, and Romans grasped their testicles. (I swear I'm not making this up. Testes is the root for "testify.") If you want a Muslim, who doesn't believe in the authenticity of the Christian Bible, to keep his oath, why in God's name would you have him swear on a Bible?