Saturday, May 25, 2002 Bushisms and Self-Sacrifice By Diana Hsieh @ 3:01 PM Eugene defends the president's latest Bushism as nothing to get all excited about. Eugene cites Bush's speech: They found out we think differently here in America. We think differently because this is a nation that loves our freedom, loves our country. And this is a nation that has got citizens who are willing to sacrifice for a cause greater than themselves. Forget the silliness of "this is a nation that ... loves our country." How about the philosophical absurdity of the United States being a nation of "citizens who are willing to sacrifice for a cause greater than themselves." There is a reason that the worship of death and destruction found in Islamic militants is accompanied by a worship of self-sacrifice for a greater cause. The former is the natural consequence of the latter. Americans, however much they might prattle incoherently on about the virtues of selflessness, are lovers of life and happiness. That's why we think differently from our enemies. That's why America is so great. Particularly aggravating is the idea that the passengers on Flight 93 willingly sacrificed themselves for the good of the rest of us. Surely, their actions benefited us greatly. Surely, they did not want to stand by and be complicit in the horrible evil that the terrorists were attempting to perpetrate. But, in reality, attacking the hijackers was their best and only chance of survival. They knew, from talking to the relatives on their cellphones about the attacks on the WTC, that they were all dead if they did nothing. Their only chance for life, as slim as it might has been, was to attempt to retake the plane. So they did. Those of Flight 93 are not heroes because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to save others. They are heroes because they saw the reality of their situation and acted courageously to fight for their lives. They are heroes because they were unwilling to play the role of sacrificial victims to the hijacker's evil. Will Thomas articulated this point better than I have in a commentary entitled American Heroism. He writes: A myth has circulated in the press: that the passengers of Flight 93 sacrificed themselves to save the nation's capital. In fact, at the time they attacked the hijackers, there is every reason to think they had a reasonable hope of survival. This myth is driven by the altruistic conception of heroism which permeates the cultural subconscious, steeped as it is in the life-boat stories so prevalent in college courses on moral problems. Let it be said that were this myth true, there would still be much to admire in the integrity and benevolence of a person who would not abandon his values in the world even in the face of his own certain death. To live as a human is to live by reason and to live by principle. So it is admirable and moving to see a person face his own death with the same virtues that he lived his life. But there is no evidence that martyrdom was the goal of Glick, Burnett, and their companions. There is every reason to think it was possible for the passengers, perhaps with the help of a surviving pilot, to find a way to safely land the plane if they could only get control of it. Burnett's wife told the AP her husband "thought he was going to be home. He was going to solve this problem." It is a tragedy that he and his compatriots did not make it home. It is heroic that they acted while they still could, as best they could. It takes a rare love of life to throw oneself into a one-sided battle, against the odds, risking injury and death for a chance to make it through. That is the hope of the lover of life: that even the direst problems can be solved. It is a characteristically American hope, and striving to bring it about under the direst and most unforeseen of circumstances takes greatness in many dimensions. It takes American heroism. Indeed. Link / Noodles / Trackback Interview with Wendy By Diana Hsieh @ 11:35 AM John Hawkins (of Right Wing News) has a good interview with Wendy McElroy (of iFeminists) covering the basics of her views. One of the ideas that Wendy espouses in the interview is that "a prospective father who asks the woman to abort ... should not be held responsible for child support payments if she refuses." I've long advocated this view, as I do not think that men ought to be slaves to the accidents of pregnancy any more than women should. There are complications with this view. In particular, should the man be obligated to support the child if he knew in advance that the woman would definitely not have an abortion or give the child up for adoption? What if the woman merely expressed reservations about abortion or adoption? Or interest in keeping any conceived child? What if the man made vague promises about taking care of the woman if anything happened? What if the couple agreed previously that they would not abort the child, but then the woman decided to anyway? There seems to be a great deal of gray area here that would be worth examining in detail. Link / Noodles / Trackback Oh Ah! By Diana Hsieh @ 11:06 AM If you need to do some arithmetic, why not use the Orgasmic Calculator? Using it at work or around children would seem to be a particularly good idea! Link / Noodles / Trackback A Bit of Fun By Diana Hsieh @ 10:56 AM I'm not sure if this is true, but it's damn funny. Number of physicians in the US: 700,000. Accidental deaths caused by physicians per year: 120,000. Accidental deaths per physician: 0.171 (U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services) Number of gun owners in the US: 80,000,000. Number of accidental gun deaths per year (all age groups): 700. (1999) Accidental deaths per gun owner: 0.0000094 Statistically, doctors are approximately 18,000 times more dangerous than gun owners. "FACT: Not everyone has a gun, but everyone has at least one Doctor." Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban doctors before this gets out of hand. Link / Noodles / Trackback Tuesday, May 21, 2002 Ed on Clones By Diana Hsieh @ 9:15 AM Ed Hudgins has a piece entitled "Star Wars and Falling Republics" on the moral and political lessons from Attack of the Clones. Personally, I have never been a fan of Star Wars. The universe is silly and uninspiring. George Lucas is a completely incompetent philosophical wannabe. But I'll see the movie anyway -- but not until I've seen Spiderman. Link / Noodles / Trackback Monday, May 20, 2002 How to Be a Good Christian Woman By Diana Hsieh @ 2:11 PM Thanks to Andrew Sullivan, I found these delightful Biblical Instructions for Women using Legos as illustrations. The last few in this sequence are hysterical, in substantial part because the Biblical ideas are so absurd. Do people actually believe this stuff? Jesus! Uh, or something... The whole Brick Testament is definitely worth checking out, including the Instructions on Marriage and Instructions for Slaves. Link / Noodles / Trackback More Dependent Creatures By Diana Hsieh @ 10:49 AM So just a few minutes ago, I went upstairs to find our cat Fanny following a baby bunny around one of the bedrooms. Oh thrill, another dependent creature comes into my care! Augh! Oddly enough, Fanny wasn't really attacking or even seriously playing with the bunny. She didn't harm him in the process of catching him or bringing him inside. But he was terrified. So I put him in a box with a blanket and locked the cats outside while I tried to decide what to do with him. He's old enough to have some bunny life-skills, so I decided to put him out by the woodpile, where I know other bunnies live. (Unfortunately, I don't know where Fanny caught him.) So I brought him out to the woodpile, left him on the blanket near a opening to the protected interior, and then went to the barn to feed the horses. When I returned to the woodpile a few minutes later, he was missing. I presume that he hopped into the interior. Well, I do hope that he survives. But if not, such is life in the natural world. Link / Noodles / Trackback More Excitement Than I Need By Diana Hsieh @ 9:51 AM On Wednesday, my dog Kate had the first of two hip replacement surgeries. (She has terrible hip dysplasia, thanks to the eugenics of the AKC and the irresponsibility of whoever bred her parents. We adopted her from a shelter when she was about 4 years old, so we bear all the cost, but none of the responsibility.) She was one of the first dogs to get a new kind of cementless hip replacement, thanks to an inventor in Switzerland and the amazing surgical skill of Dr. Robert Taylor of the world-famous Alameda East Veterinary Hospital. (Alameda East is featured on Animal Planet's show Emergency Vets.) The surgery went fine, and Kate stayed two extra days while I was in Leadville speaking to the Colorado Libertarian Party Convention. So yesterday, after driving home two hours from Leadville, Paul and I relaxed for a bit before taking the 50 minute drive to pick up Kate from Alameda East. She was very glad to be going home, and the few extra days at the vet had really helped out, as she was much more sturdy and stable than she had been when I visited her on Thursday. So we got her home, petted her a great deal, let her visit with the overjoyed Abby, put her in her newly-purchased, larger-than-a-crate octagonal pen, and went upstairs to relax a bit with some of our TiVO-recorded television. (Kate has to stay on carpet and avoid stairs for the next month, which means living exclusively downstairs.) When I came downstairs an hour later (7:30 pm), I immediately saw that Kate had ripped out all the staples holding her 10-inch surgery scar together. I was so shocked and horrified that I couldn't even tell Paul what was wrong. I just was yelling incoherently until he came downstairs and saw for himself. We were home just two hours and the damn dog ripped herself open! Augh! So I made a frantic call to Alameda East while Paul covered her wound with some gauze so that it wouldn't get dirty in the car. (We had to use duct tape to secure it, as the medical tape was small and flimsy. But even the duct tape didn't work so well, but well enough.) And so Kate and I took the 50 minute drive back to Alameda East. Unfortunately, between the time when I called and when I arrived, a number of traumas rolled in, so Kate's repair took about an hour for one of the vets to get to. (Unfortunately, I didn't have either my laptop or the keyboard for my Clie, so I couldn't even really get any work done.) As it turns out, Kate didn't just pull out her staples, she also ripped some of the internal stitches. So the wound had to be recut, resown internally, and then resown externally. (They used sutures rather than staples this time for greater stability.) The only not-so-bad part of the evening was that Kate was able to tolerate all this repair work just local anesthetic. She is a very calm and stoical dog. So Kate and I arrived back home four hours later, this time with a head collar. Jennifer, Dr. Taylor's assistant, called me this morning to find out how Kate was doing after all the excitement last night. Strangely enough, she said that she didn't give me a head collar when Kate went home because Kate didn't fuss with her wound one bit while she was an in-patient. I suspect that depression over being at the vet was the crucial difference. ("Oh, I'm so happy that I'm home. Now I have the energy to rip out those damn staples. Oh shit, we're going back to the vet!") The problem with the collar, of course, is that it makes walking and navigating much more difficult for an already unstable dog. And during this recovery, a fall could be very dangerous for Kate. So I asked Jennifer if I could fashion a pair of bike shorts to prevent Kate from fussing with her wound, which she said would be fine. So I'll be cutting and sewing Kate a pair of pants this morning. That's not quite what I had planned for my morning, but c'est la vie! Will I ever get any rest? At the rate I'm going, probably not for a while. Link / Noodles / Trackback

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