The Crooked Heart

Thursday, May 01, 2003

 
Movin' on Up

After long and careful consideration, I have decided to move my blogging operations over to the new Crescat Sententia (formerly Baude's blog). This was a difficult decision for me, since as a rule I prefer to do things my own way, rather than as part of a team. However, I feel that given our largely shared readership it makes sense for me to join my fellow U of C bloggers in consolidating our operations at a single blog. Hopefully, our combined volume of posts will also attract new readers, and allow us to make our mark on the blogosphere.

The Crooked Heart is therefore going dormant for the forseeable future. Everything I've posted so far will remain here, but all my new posting will be at Crescat Sententia. Feel free to let me know what you thing of the change--you can be sure that if you take the trouble to email me, I will definitely take your opinion into consideration.
Amy 4:37 PM

Monday, April 28, 2003

 
The Crooked Heart Hits 1000

That's 1000 visitors since March 21st, when I started counting. Not bad for something that started out as a way to procrastinate writing an irritating paper. Special thanks to everyone who has responded to my posts--either in their own blogs or by email. I appreciate being shown the error of my ways, and appreciate even more having their correctness confirmed.
Amy 9:29 PM

 
Jacob Levy has a nifty post on the "secret sin" theory of politics. I like it generally, but I think the mechanism he proposes isn't quite right. It's not so much that we want the law to stop us from acting on our deepest, darkest desires, (after all, if someone has gotten to the point of wanting a law to stop them from acting a certain way, they must also recognize that there is something wrong with that action, and so are already being deterred). Rather, because we have only our own experience for evidence, we assume that other people are like us in the degree to which they harbor our secret sin, and want the law to stop them (since they may not also realize that the sin is wrong) from pursuing it.
Amy 1:00 AM

 
For Whom Does Santorum Speak

I was going to remain silent on the whole Santorum debate, but this and this irritate me. In point of fact, the group for which Santorum speaks is the citizens of the State of Pennsylvania--not Christians, not Conservative Christians, not Catholics. If the citizens of Pennsylvania are dissatisfied with their chosen representative (as I hope they are) they will have a chance in 2006 to express their displeasure with their chosen spokesman and select another (as I hope they will).
Amy 12:45 AM

 
More on Conservatism:

After being somewhat merciless in my last anti-conservatism blog post, I feel an extra obligation to defend him and other abortion foes who call abortion murder. (Defend them, that is, against the charge that this is a bad way to win supporters. Whether nor not abortion actually is murder is a question I'll reserve for a future post.) Will writes:

First off, let me just remind my friends on the other side of the abortion conflict (with which I really do sometimes sympathize) that making snide comments about murder really doesn't win new supporters, though maybe it sort of titillates the old ones.

While I think Will is spot on when he points out that the crux of the debate should be whether or not a fetus is a human being, I think he's a bit optimistic about the rationality of the participants of the debate. I suspect that most people who are neither virulently pro or virulently anti abortion actually regard fetuses as sort of human. A fetus isn't exactly the same thing as a five year old child, but neither is it the same thing as a cow or a chicken. Since our legal system sees living things as either human or not human, any attempt to articulate this position soon runs into problems, but nevertheless it makes a certain amount of emotional sense. Call abortion murder (or on the other side, refer to fetuses as its, or clumps of tissue) enough, though, and you might succeed in nudging people's views of just how human a fetus is a bit more in your direction. It's called propoganda, and evidence has it that it works.

UPDATE: William James did a much better job of making my point when he said, "There is nothing so absurd but if you repeat it often enough people
will believe it."
Amy 12:28 AM