Round and About

With nothing too important to say, let's cast an eye across the world...

Sport! That is, Red Sox! that is - what a peaceful, sweet sensation it is to experience once more their patented Late Season Collapse. It's been so long! Now - there are many opinions about what led to this disaster, but I think the cause is clear enough: they're running out of players. I said back in June that Jon Lester was going to save the season - by that logic, I'd say now, losing Tim Wakefield doomed their season. Having 4 decent starters, they were doing fine - down to three, and one of them a rookie and another with an ERA over 5, plus a bullpen full of rookies and incompetents (and Mike Timlin's 40 years) - you could guess where things were headed. Now, of course, the hitters are dropping like flies... so.... Myself, I don't think this indicates anything sinister for the future - underachievers like Coco Crisp and Josh Beckett seem more likely to be better next year than not; all those rookie pitchers will be a year older, smarter and tougher next year; heck, they'll even have Matt Clement back (or turn him into something useful) - bad as he's been in Boston, he's still useful, especially if he's closer tot he end of the rotation. So I can stand it. I'd stand it better if they could get a young starting pitcher somewhere, but hey...

Meanwhile, 'round the blogs - Lawyers, Guns and Money offers up abuse of the Electoral College, along with abuse of Mickey Kaus and lamentations regarding the Bosox. I'm with them on this one - the EC is a ridiculous, anti-democratic anachronism. Get rid of it! For all the reasons cited there, and because it gets in the way of the elegance of the divided government. What should happen - the House Representatives should consist of people elected directly by local districts; the Senate should consist of people elected directly by whole states; and the president, the Federal government, after all, should be elected directly by the entire country. But no! While on the subject of voting - Making Light cites interesting research into Senate voting patterns: they're almost all driven by economic interests, runs the conclusion. Dems vote for the interests of more people who control less money - republicans vote for the interests of fewer people who control more money.

Finally, on Whiskey Fire, Thersites stares into the bad writing abyss: Ann Althouse, banally blogging about the Emmys - or the completely unreadable Maximos - writing about - something. Liberals, I think. It really is a thing of - uh - what's the word? I have to provide a sample:

Liberalism, then, has, upon its own presuppositions, no rational, consistent basis for opposing that which even the darkest minds realize is despicable and base. That most liberals do oppose it is a credit them as persons, and a shame to their professed dogmas. Liberalism’s consent problem, then, is this: an absence of a rational basis for a moral prejudice all sane persons recognize as being of the essence of civilized norms of behaviour, combined with a tacit invocation of the very values with which its entire theory is at war: authority and the necessary expression of authority, responsibility. One of the many necessarly expressions of the authority and responsibility of adults towards children just is to refrain from sexualizing them, either as objects of desire or as objects of “enlightened” educational policies intended to mold them into specimens of liberated humanity. Liberalism wishes to retain the form of the obligation while evacuating its substance; in order to preserve itself from the obvious consequences of its dubious theories, it must make an unprincipled exception: traditional authority and decorum are pernicious, except when we say they are not.

This, in case any should wonder why I have troubled to express thoughts upon so loathsome a subject, will be the ultimate reason - coupled, of course, with its affirmation of homosexuality, which includes a manifest cult of youth, and finds its probable origins in the traumas of youth - for the inability of liberalism to resist the furthest, most debauched consequences of the sexual revolution which now labours to overthrow the institution of marriage. Liberalism lacks a principled basis for stopping at the final frontier of depravity, and eventually, determined passion will overcome the absence of reason. It always does.

That - I mean, golly! What's going on there? it's like one of those magic eye pictures (autostereograms!), where you're supposed to star until your eyes go out of focus and you see the picture. Except you can't see anything! Oh, it's there, you're sure of it - your friends keep pointing at it and it and telling you, "look! there it is! it's a mountain lion! look! and an eagle, on a crag!" but you can't see it. I mean - well, I can sort of see a straw-liberal in there, but even that, I can't keep in focus... I can't even figure out what set him off, though I'm guessing it has something to do with this California law. The usual nitwits are up in arms. Whatever, man.