Cybrpnk's Rantings

Just back from a fabulous week in New York. Doing the family thang and all that. Saw one mediocre play (Reckless) and one fabulous show (Cookin'). Too many great meals to list. Thanksgiving vegetarian creation for this year: Pumpkin Ravioli in Cinnamon Brown Butter. Very easy. Cook ravioli. Brown butter - just throw some butter in a sauce pan, heat over a medium-low flame, skim off foam as it develops, cook until nicely brown. Add some cinnamon to taste, toss in some dried cranberries. Serve with toasted walnuts and pepitas. Yum. Also got together with my college don (faculty advisor to you poor souls who attended neither Sarah Lawrence nor Oxford). Really great time all around.

One sour note: discussion of impending bear hunt in New Jersey. I understand the issues about managing wildlife on the human/nature interface, and it is quite complex.

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The title of this entry is a paraphrase of the title of David Foster Wallace's article 'Consider The Lobster' published in Gourmet Magazine. They don't seem to have the essay on their site, but there is an interesting article about it on The Boston Globe's website. In a similar spirit (but without footnotes) I would like to question the assumptions of those who wish to legislate against abortion. It strikes me that part of the problem with the whole abortion question is the lack of scientific answers to the core questions in the debate. To date we have not yet figured out what consciousness is, nor do we know how to determine whether or not a creature lacking language skill is or is not conscious. We have this strong intuition that there is some continuum from single-cell creatures up to higher primates, but can't assert with any certainty whether we really are more advanced than some number of our fellow creatures here on earth. In fact, it is unclear that attaining consciousness really does make us more advanced. Bruce Sterling has posited in some of his writing that hive minds could actually be more advanced than individual consciousness. So while we have some understanding about what makes one physically homo sapiens we have no clear definition for what makes one human.

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I've been mulling over the recent death of Jacques Derrida, and contemplating why it is that the conservatives I know are so hostile towards the ideas he developed during his lifetime. Some of it certainly is their discomfort with his dismissal of moral absolutism, which they are very open about. Some of it, one suspects, is just envy: Derrida makes them feel stupid. They just don't get what he's on about, and they are very bad at admitting that they don't know everything. And don't take that as an arrogant allusion to my own presumed brilliance. Everything I know about Derrida I have learned from others. I just happen to be fortunate enough to have an academic philosopher in my family. But I digress. I believe that at the real heart of why the American conservatives hate Derrida is that not only is he so on to them he makes them look like half-wits (which they most assuredly are not, except perhaps relative to him), but embracing his teachings provides people with a way out of the linguistic net they have been casting over our society in the course of the last thirty-plus years. In Derrida is the seed of the Conservatives' destruction. No wonder they were eager to bury him years before he died.

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Providence has decreed that my current consumption of literature is centered on Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, a work of historical fiction that takes place during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England and around Europe. One of the central themes running through both that period of history and Stephenson's novel is the horrific human cost exacted by the periods' many religious wars and plots. Protestants vs. Puritans. Catholics vs. Protestants. And, to borrow a line from Tom Lehrer, "everybody hates the jews." Remembering this as the backdrop against which our Founding Fathers enshrined the principle of separation of church and state helps to illustrate the grave disservice and threat to our country posed by the Republican strategy of fashioning George W. Bush's second administration as a religious institution.

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I don't know about the rest of you out there, but I am mad. No, not mad, furious. It's bad enough that so many people in America apparently want George W. Bush to remain president. But their reasoning makes it appalling, atrocious, scary, horrible. In particular I speak of the people who voted for him based solely on the belief that they were fulfilling their religious duty. They really piss me off. The message these people seem to be sending is that they are indifferent to the position of this country in the rest of the world, they don't care about their own material well-being, all they care about is having a president who shares their religious beliefs and will act to codify them in US law. And it isn't just legislation. These people are likely to have the opportunity to remake the US Supreme Court into a body that may well sanction this sanctification of America. Well, I have a message to all of you people out there in those Red States, you don't care about anything but your spiritual well-being in the next world, than stop taking money from those of us who you despise. Let's remake federal expenditures into some sort of nice tax parity: if your state pays N dollars into the federal budget, you get at most N dollars back. Some of that money has to pay down the debt, and I bet that a lot of us in those big blue states are sick of carrying your deadweight. You don't like the way we live, see how you do without us.

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