LIPC: Phaser that Asshole, Spock
"one of the biggest differences between a real man and a child with pubic hair is intelligent restraint. cops typically have none. no subtlety, no long view -- just an itch to pull that trigger for real, and a long list of excuses to throw at a gullible, worshipful public." -- Charlie Hardman
From jomama:
"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it." -- H.L. Mencken
# Russmo.com - Exit Strategy - cartoon commentary telling President Bush, in a form even he should be able to understand, how to get the troops out of Iraq. [russmo]
# Sunni moved the Real ID Rebellion to it's own domain. I updated my left-column link. [sunni]
# Ionatron - What is LIPC? - Ionatran is working on the next step from the Taser. A Taser shoots two barbed wires, then passes a current through the wires. Ionatron's laser-induced plasma channel (LIPC) device dispenses with the wires and uses femto-second laser pulses to create a conductive plasma. Oh, joy. The JBTs will soon have phasers. Then again, so will we. Today's title, "Phaser that Asshole, Spock", comes from a home-movie Star Trek satire that I saw in college. [clairefiles]
# Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal - The Frivolity of Evil - how ever-expanding evil is the result of governments removing its consequences from those who commit it. Brilliant. [clairefiles]
A single case can be illuminating, especially when it is statistically banal--in other words, not at all exceptional. Yesterday, for example, a 21-year-old woman consulted me, claiming to be depressed. She had swallowed an overdose of her antidepressants and then called an ambulance.
There is something to be said here about the word "depression," which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.
A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is willfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. I have therefore come to see that one of the most important tasks of the doctor today is the disavowal of his own power and responsibility. The patient's notion that he is ill stands in the way of his understanding of the situation, without which moral change cannot take place. The doctor who pretends to treat is an obstacle to this change, blinding rather than enlightening.
...
But if the welfare state is a necessary condition for the spread of evil, it is not sufficient. After all, the British welfare state is neither the most extensive nor the most generous in the world, and yet our rates of social pathology--public drunkenness, drug-taking, teenage pregnancy, venereal disease, hooliganism, criminality--are the highest in the world. Something more was necessary to produce this result.
Here we enter the realm of culture and ideas. For it is necessary not only to believe that it is economically feasible to behave in the irresponsible and egotistical fashion that I have described, but also to believe that it is morally permissible to do so. And this idea has been peddled by the intellectual elite in Britain for many years, more assiduously than anywhere else, to the extent that it is now taken for granted. There has been a long march not only through the institutions but through the minds of the young. When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as "nonjudgmental." For them, the highest form of morality is amorality.
