The RSS excerpt on this incoherent New York Times editorial caught my attention:
Then the F.D.A. should move as quickly as possible to determine the effects of menthol and what should be done to regulate or ban it.
You know, this whole research and factfinding thing is kind of tiresome. We’re pretty sure it might be a problem – therefore let’s regulate or ban it. Because you can never have enough regulation, and you can never ban enough things to make people truly safe and healthy.
I’m becoming a Libertarian, I swear…the more I read this drivel, the more tempting a subscription to Reason looks.
*…I’ll leave the provenance of the quote to the crowd. No fair using Google.
It was the same kind of thing — but with regulating social issues rather than economic issues — that drove me from my brief mooring to the Republican party. But may I suggest that you skip the Libertarian phase (because you won’t be able to stand them for long; they tend towards doctrinaire self-righteousness) and start with the small ‘l’ instead?
Is that from Catch -22?
* – Being a dork, I can’t help but associate it with Star Trek somehow. It’s either a ST:TNG quote from Q, or from ST:TOS from that flamboyant guy in the ruffles that played the piano and got his powers from the mirror.
Judge Roy Bean.
But yes, Trelaine (The Squire of Gothos) or Q might have said it, equally well.
AL, be advised that the comments link on your “Sorry” entry also (/still?) 404s to Baghdad Bob.
But thanks for all the free ice cream…
Here’s a suggestion: Stop reading the New York Times.
Maybe you’ll be happier and live a longer healthy life.
Vista, here’s a suggestion: Contribute substantive comments (we have seen you do it before). Maybe you’ll be happier and spend a long time as a contributor here.
Dear Armed Liberal,
You, and so many others, suffer angst when you figure out that your “ism” sometimes doesn’t reflect the world as you see it.
Bob Dylan, in Desolation Row:
“All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name”
That’s what happened. I’ve followed politics since 1950. What happened? It started when the radical left hijacked the label “Liberal”. They’ve ruined that brand so now they’re calling themselves “Progressive”.
The same thing happened, somewhat later, when the radical right hijacked the term “Conservative”. They’re in the process of destroying that brand, too.
These extremes have taken what were essentially ways of thinking and turned them into dogma. “He’s not a TRUE conservative!”. RINO! DINO!
I find my grounding in the writings of Russell Kirk. He has managed to brilliantly sum them up in his Ten Principles. Take a look. Five minutes.
“link”:http://www.kirkcenter.org/kirk/ten-principles.html
Shakespeare nailed it:
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Regards,
Roy
[Bare URLs are frowned on here; guidelins for formatting are presented above the comment entry fields. Corrected for you,this time. –NM]
Roy, that Shakespeare quote is an old saw that can cut in more than one direction. Feels good to say it, though, don’t it?
I don’t know what to make of Russell Kirk; interested readers might also follow some of the links presented at “Volokh Conspiracy”:http://volokh.com/posts/1165701072.shtml (Scroll down to “Related Links”), though most of these are notions that Mr Kirk would have been revolted by.
You were a little hard on Vista, weren’t you? I thought his suggestion was extremely practical and to the point.
Texan99:
Thank you for your feedback. Vista doesn’t use a working email when posting, so I -had no recourse but- chose to make my comment here [I’d have preferred to communicate it off list, but could not]. May I say, as politely as I know how, that if you want to give me the sort of feedback you just gave, you might note that there’s an email link for me over in the right hand margin that you’re welcome to use? Or is that me being hard on you?
The aim is for substance, not metadiscussion. Seems that, when I let things wander or when I try to “weed”, I can’t win for losing. Vista has had three posts here under that nick; Vista seems to value being hard to reach. The trend away from substance on such brief acquaintance was noteworthy, so I noted it.
[Edited]
Agree with Vista. I believe a point is being made about whether traditional print media outlets are worth consulting. The simple solution to the problem is to stop reading them, thereby sending a signal that market forces may (or may not) amplify.
The post itself opens up this “meta-discussion” as one angle in the issue.
I believed that Vista might, equally well, have been simply twitting {AL} with deniability on short acquaintance — in a word, trolling; perhaps I was too oblique or off in my choice of the “meta” tag. I agree that I presumed, rather than giving Vista the benefit of the doubt. If I erred, I regret the error.
Vista’s point plays well with the “hijack” thesis posited by Roy Lofquist. Practitioners of old-paradigm journalism have become (as a rule) so dogmatic and monochromatic with regard to the political spectrum (or at best dichromatic, if we accept popular talk radio and Fox News as belonging to the old paradigm) that it has become hard to reconcile self-identifying as “Liberal” with what’s being called by the gatekeepers “modern liberalism”.
Of course, if one self-identifies as Libertarian, one should expect to be treated with all the respect generally given to The National Enquirer by those on a friendly basis with the Chattering Classes.
Truth has become subservient to Narrative for the folks trying to control the channels of communication. I keep harping on this point, but the practical effect of the Enlightenment was to overturn the “narrative trumps evidence” paradigm that was and is the hallmark of theocracy and despotism. Which makes old-paradigm media folks enablers of the worst tendencies of the human spirit.
Sorry, we’ve been there, done that, smelled the burning witches. Or, in this case, smokers of menthol cigarettes. (Yes, it does make a difference which end is burning.)
NM –
I gather now you were suspicious of Vista because he doesn’t use a real address, and his comment was generically applicable to any posting that quotes the NYT. Fair enough. I, too, am guilty of a knee-jerk reaction to the NYT, though I think it’s a sensible one well-rooted in experience. I took Vista’s comment to be a mild joke exploiting the tone of the NYT article, which assumed that it’s the government’s job to nudge us all into behavior that will lead to longer, happier, healthier life.
I didn’t occur to me to comment privately, because it seemed to be a public issue. Although you know better than I whether Vista is a troll, his trollitude wasn’t visible to me from his posting — thus my surprise at the vehemence of your reaction. I’m not usually surprised when you slap someone down. I actually appreciate your function very much. This site is remarkably free of nonsense even when the discussions grow quite heated, as they have done lately.
Some followup:
1) I have read the editorial and think it is actually quite reasonable and well argued. I would of course be interested to hear Armed Liberal explain to all of us what precisely are his points of contention with the editorial’s substance. From the tone of his post, it is possible that he doesn’t have any such disagreements (although the term “incoherent” does suggest such), but rather is entirely concerned about the possibility that the government might regulate menthol, and that in general this type of regulation is a bad thing.
2) As far as regulations in general, I believe quite strongly that one key function of the government is to protect citizens (in this case consumers) from unwitting exposure to dangerous compounds in their environment. This function is necessary to offset the natural tendency of business interests to conceal information about potential dangers in their products. I should think this is something that everyone can agree on. There are so many examples of this that any quick internet search can reveal; perhaps Alar would be a good place to start.
3) As far as my point to discontinue reading the New York Times, I think #13 above makes a good stab at an explanation for this, and would largely agree that he/she is largely correct.
4) As far as the “troll” issue, this term has little meaning anymore. I see absolutely no reason why brief comments made in passing should be given so much negative attention. Not everyone has the inclination or time to spend to immerse themselves in a thread that was initiated in such a whimsical manner. If you’d like to initiate serious discussions, why not try posting on serious issues?
5) As far as posting anonymously and without an email address, I’m sorry if this is against your websites policies but it against my personal policy to give such information out. I should think that anyone whose real world internet presence can easily be gleaned might have a similar approach. After all, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I doubt very much that “Nortius Maximus” is the real name of the site’s enforcer?
I don’t wish to carry on an extended discussion with either Texan99 or Vista about this — thus my request that it go to email, which Texan99 chose to ignore in her reply. Replying in line is trivial, emailing Marshals is less so. It’s a design and expectation problem, and I don’t expect people to go against their inclinations.
Texan99: Vehemence? I beg your pardon, Texan99, but I don’t see my response as vehement. Curt, perhaps. Snarky, certainly. Mocking? A little. I consider your feedback 100% received.
Vista: Act well, be welcome. On the matter of identity:
Some time back I tried to write “about some of the surrounding issues of reputation and comity”:http://tinyurl.com/5an8qe . Those matter much more to me than being able to identify real-world participants.
You might not know my real-world name, but I’ve been reachable via e-mail during my entire tenure as an “enforcer” (hey, next time, got for “thug” or “goon”, why don’t you? [ 🙂 ]). You, au contraire, are not reachable at an email address like “a@a.com”, are you?
Some say that they get sp*mmed after leaving their real emails at blogs. I don’t know how to evaluate that claim. I think Gmail’s anti-sp*m tech seems pretty robust, but it’s not to everyone’s taste and I dislike monocultures.
The matter of proxy indirection and anonymizers is separate, and unfortunately sets some administrators with a practical bent against their better natures. If you were posting from Burma or some other such unfortunate place, I’d laud the technology that kept you from the knock in the night. If you were just playing ha-ha wack-a-mole after appearing here as three other annoying dorks, my reaction would be less sanguine.
“Just don’t read the NYT!” as one of your first posts didn’t seem to be anything other than something one of the old trolls might use as an opening shot.
It’s a tough problem. So as I say: Act well, be welcome. And as I said, if I erred, I regret the error.
[Edited to add smiley.]
I wrote:
bq. I don’t wish to carry on an extended discussion with either Texan99 or Vista about this
Actually, I do want to, just not in this thread. There are concomitant problems I can forecast, but what the hell, kids, maybe I’m taking this all too seriously.
Vista –
I’ll reinforce Nort’s comments by saying that we welcome pseudonymity and don’t welcome anonymity here. I don’t care who you are in meatspace, but I’d like you to have a consistent identity here. To that end, an email address – even one as hard to figure out as “armed-at-armedliberal-.-com” is a good token of sincerity.
But let’s go to substance.
I completely agree that a key role for government is protecting – to some extent – the health and welfare of the population, which includes the regulation of dangerous chemicals.
My core problem with the editorial was – as my title suggested – that it shortcut an important step in the process, which is proving danger.
If they had said “we’re worried about these chemicals in tobacco, and there are some studies that suggest that they are inherently dangerous and make cigarettes more dangerous – and so we’d like some real studies to be done, and if they show evidence of harm, we’d like to see regulation up to and including banning.” I’d have had no objection (possibly a minor philosophical one).
But that’s exactly the opposite of what the editorial said. It said “we should study them and then regulate or ban them” which is missing the critical step of proving harm.
I do have a philosophical problem in that this kind of issue skirts close to the edge of what I think the appropriate level of government protections are – at some point, if we are to be free, we have to have the freedom to do stupid things. There’s a limit…and I’m not sure which side of that limit this issue is on. That’s a longer and deeper discussion, and let’s stipulate for a moment that we had solid studies that proved harm beyond a reasonable doubt – at that point I might well be in support of such regulation or bans; a lot would depend on the substance of the study.
As to the troll issue, the point of this site is interesting dialog. Part of the price you are expected to pay for participating here is that you need to add to interesting dialog – if your participation detracts from it, you may be unwelcome. That doesn’t remotely mean you have to agree with me (ask Andrew Lazarus or hypocracyrules), but it does mean that you’ve got to participate in a discussion, and sniping isn’t really such participation.
Your later post was, and is appreciated.
A.L.