With all due apologies to the people with whom I am in Seriously Serious discussions (lots of those to be had lately :( ), I had one particularly successful Unserious discussion yesterday, in which I posited a theory of lightsabers that it really quite elegant and I'm really quite proud of it : ). This was in response to the common objection that beam weapons can't by any physical logic just *end* at a set distance from the source.
C'mon, you know this has always bugged you ;).
So here it is:
I think light sabers don't end. I think only a portion of their infinite (and constantly existing) powerline is manifesting in our ("our" she says? ;) ) three-dimensional space at any time. This would also explain the amazing amount of burn-through capability the saber is capable of, and the capacity of the energy blade to absorb or reflect large (but relative to infinity quite minor) energy blasts.
Possibly the special temple-cave crystals cause this precisely limited dimensional interference by being themselves somehow structured into some other dimensional space, and perhaps this interface is activated/deactivated by the Force, somehow raising the molecular (or other) activity levels enough to trigger the crystal's special properties.
This segment-of-an-infinite-energy-beam theory makes me pretty happy :).
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Friday, July 4, 2014
on the Hobby Lobby decision: two alternative lenses and two additional thoughts
Granted that the decision itself is apparently preposterously non-specific, and from what I have read I am totally willing to believe it opens the courts and the law to all of the "religious exemptions" that are now being asserted (jokingly and seriously). I have (so far) two basic alternative angles (not fully explicated, just *directions* of perception) from which to consider this decision. (I am partially in favor of and partially against it myself, probably in a non-resolvable way, and so have been working on sorting out what it is I'm thinking/reacting to.)
1) It's an interesting question whether the right to physical autonomy or the right to autonomy of the mind (decision making and immediately derivable action or refusal to act) is in fact a more definitive human right ... perhaps particularly because there is clearly, when one gets down to brass tacks, no such thing as physical autonomy (probably there is no such thing as true autonomy of the mind either, but it is somewhat easier to ignore or theorize away psychological/emotional interdependence).
I think a lot of the same people who are screaming foul right now would usually argue (and have historically argued) for the right of mind as *the primary* human right -- certainly until recently most of the moral choices now being espoused were not considered any kind of legally or even intellectually defensible in the first place: "opening minds" to conceptualizing a different moral basis and to making real concrete choices based on those changed intellectual constructions was a primary goal. Certainly the nation's founders were pretty hot to trot about freedom of thought (including religious beliefs or lack thereof). It's my impression that just about all revolutions-toward-liberty, worldwide, start with the right to have and express non-establishment *thought* ... and physical expression is a derivation of that right, once acquired (so, it is secondary).
From this point of view, the decision of the court might be leaning toward protecting the more fundamental human right as established in American legal (and social) thought, however fundamental a right to bodily autonomy is (and the latter is definitely not a universally agreed upon "truth," whether among women regarding childbearing or among men regarding other sacrifices of body/life for others, even just in America ... if we open to other cultures, indigenous or invasive, the possible variations increase).
I do note that such a prioritization of rights, even if historically and/or philosophically justified, does not imply that the specifics of the decision are necessarily reasonable, even if they are logically derived (I am under the impression they are at least logically derived -- but one can logically derive many things from any social assertion; Naziism is one logical social descendant of Romanticism). But the fundamental *direction* of the majority is, I think, less screamingly indefensible than many people are currently busy asserting.
2) Second major alternative lens: There is some sort of fundamental difference I haven't gotten quite formalized yet between "my religion objects to non-human blood transfusions because I sincerely believe makes a human into something unable to attain heaven" and "my religion objects to abortion because I sincerely believe it actively kills in real earth-time an individual, living human" ... this doesn't necessarily make Monday's Hobby Lobby decision legally sensible, but it's not reasonable to compare debt forgiveness, or pig blood derivatives, to "I refuse to participate in active murder or even potentially active murder, particularly of an innocent and dependent human." That's really a very different level of moral concern than "I think you are hurting yourself" or "I think you should be less meanspirited" or "I don't like how you think children should be raised." The only "joke" I've seen so far that might approach the seriousness of the concern is about Christian Scientists denying medical treatment to their children (another area where there is *no* correct legal answer, although I recognize that people who have not experienced medical miracles would perceive it as a clean-cut legal decision to make).
Anyhow, our nation has a very spotty record of being actually logical about human rights, even on the occasions where we've at least manged good-sounding rhetoric; I doubt we will suddenly start being perfectly logical today (if it's even possible), and I doubt that there is an answer that will work for both sides in this division because we think and work from quite different moral priorities (individual "freedom" is a verrrry sketchy "absolute," and many cultures don't value it highly -- America is an extreme case sociologically, as has recently, and fascinatingly, become the in-thing to scientifically and statistically assess).
I do believe abortion murders a human being (and the most innocent, most defenseless type of human being), and it is a real and concrete problem for me that anyone can be coerced into being party to financing it (yes, including "contraceptive" methods that probably aren't but might be abortifacient). I'm also pretty damn horrified that we can't solve hunger and environmental destruction, not even in our own country(!), that we watch foreigners die as if they aren't extensions of (and measures of) our own humanity, and that people watch demeaning (to both sexes) pornography. I am human-centric enough to consider human life a particular kind of sacred, and all of these forms of dehumanization are, to me, different facets of disrespect of the sanctity of human life. I can't be surprised that a nation that is largely OK with migrant workers taking their chances with weather, farm equipment, and pesticides in order to justify cheap food prices for the convenience of citizens is not interested in considering a zygote as a human individual that deserves protections of any sort (and, yes, I am extremely offended that many who scream about the rights of a zygote are somehow OK with non-citizens being abused, poisoned, and starved ... talk about "arbitrary"!).
There are no yes/no, "simple" answers to any of these, and there are many partially right, partially messed-up answers.
I can't be against a decision that allows people like me to not support abortions in any preventable way. I celebrate the concept that there would be a large, even an extreme, degree of freedom-of-conscience around this issue (as I also celebrate conscientious objection to military service and some other related things). But I'm not at all sure I'm "for" Monday's decision either. I wish that the justices had been clearer about why this line was somehow legally pertinent, and what they then assert the lower boundary should be on the now-allowed exemptions. My sense is that the life/death issue'ness of it affected the outcome of the deliberations ... and I haven't heard that they captured any such thing in the ruling. I wonder if they know themselves why it came down this way -- or if maybe they do in fact realize and consider it the Right Thing to blow open the doors of religious exemption just as much as most commentators think they have done.
So, yeah. I don't have a lot of conclusions there, but two lenses that might cast a different color on the paths to the decision.
* * * * *
As a side note, I don't think most pro-choice people are conscious that, at 40+ years, most people who are for one reason or another against abortion have spent the vast majority (or all) of our lives on the losing side of this question (and many years on the minority side, although I know the first 10 or 15 years were transitional and the last few years have been hotly argued by different statisticians). The victim(/oppressed minority) storyline was fundamental to energizing the "right to abortion" fighters, ironically similarly to the odd psychological construct many Bible Christians live within, that conservative Christianity is a heroic minority viewpoint in America (self-fulfilling prophecy?) ... so it's not like most pro-lifers/anti-abortion activists haven't confronted the questions of the defensibility of, or the potentially incorrect nature of, our belief(s). It's not like many of us haven't dealt with the baby-or-abortion decision ourselves (I have) or with friends (that too).
While there are definitely admit-no-doubt pro-lifers, I don't think they are anywhere near the majority, and I don't think any of the Supreme Court Justices are among them, especially nowadays when one has to be both extremely politically savvy and very, very legally literate to even get nominated to the SCOTUS. If your reaction to Monday's decision was any version of "they weren't thinking well," you probably need to examine your reactive psychological assumptions for interpretive reasonableness.
* * * * *
Eden Organics has apparently filed for an exemption.
I am interested in whether this will bring more conservative Christians into the organic-food fold, to try to support Eden Organics by counteracting the boycott which was pretty much instantly called.
.
1) It's an interesting question whether the right to physical autonomy or the right to autonomy of the mind (decision making and immediately derivable action or refusal to act) is in fact a more definitive human right ... perhaps particularly because there is clearly, when one gets down to brass tacks, no such thing as physical autonomy (probably there is no such thing as true autonomy of the mind either, but it is somewhat easier to ignore or theorize away psychological/emotional interdependence).
I think a lot of the same people who are screaming foul right now would usually argue (and have historically argued) for the right of mind as *the primary* human right -- certainly until recently most of the moral choices now being espoused were not considered any kind of legally or even intellectually defensible in the first place: "opening minds" to conceptualizing a different moral basis and to making real concrete choices based on those changed intellectual constructions was a primary goal. Certainly the nation's founders were pretty hot to trot about freedom of thought (including religious beliefs or lack thereof). It's my impression that just about all revolutions-toward-liberty, worldwide, start with the right to have and express non-establishment *thought* ... and physical expression is a derivation of that right, once acquired (so, it is secondary).
From this point of view, the decision of the court might be leaning toward protecting the more fundamental human right as established in American legal (and social) thought, however fundamental a right to bodily autonomy is (and the latter is definitely not a universally agreed upon "truth," whether among women regarding childbearing or among men regarding other sacrifices of body/life for others, even just in America ... if we open to other cultures, indigenous or invasive, the possible variations increase).
I do note that such a prioritization of rights, even if historically and/or philosophically justified, does not imply that the specifics of the decision are necessarily reasonable, even if they are logically derived (I am under the impression they are at least logically derived -- but one can logically derive many things from any social assertion; Naziism is one logical social descendant of Romanticism). But the fundamental *direction* of the majority is, I think, less screamingly indefensible than many people are currently busy asserting.
2) Second major alternative lens: There is some sort of fundamental difference I haven't gotten quite formalized yet between "my religion objects to non-human blood transfusions because I sincerely believe makes a human into something unable to attain heaven" and "my religion objects to abortion because I sincerely believe it actively kills in real earth-time an individual, living human" ... this doesn't necessarily make Monday's Hobby Lobby decision legally sensible, but it's not reasonable to compare debt forgiveness, or pig blood derivatives, to "I refuse to participate in active murder or even potentially active murder, particularly of an innocent and dependent human." That's really a very different level of moral concern than "I think you are hurting yourself" or "I think you should be less meanspirited" or "I don't like how you think children should be raised." The only "joke" I've seen so far that might approach the seriousness of the concern is about Christian Scientists denying medical treatment to their children (another area where there is *no* correct legal answer, although I recognize that people who have not experienced medical miracles would perceive it as a clean-cut legal decision to make).
Anyhow, our nation has a very spotty record of being actually logical about human rights, even on the occasions where we've at least manged good-sounding rhetoric; I doubt we will suddenly start being perfectly logical today (if it's even possible), and I doubt that there is an answer that will work for both sides in this division because we think and work from quite different moral priorities (individual "freedom" is a verrrry sketchy "absolute," and many cultures don't value it highly -- America is an extreme case sociologically, as has recently, and fascinatingly, become the in-thing to scientifically and statistically assess).
I do believe abortion murders a human being (and the most innocent, most defenseless type of human being), and it is a real and concrete problem for me that anyone can be coerced into being party to financing it (yes, including "contraceptive" methods that probably aren't but might be abortifacient). I'm also pretty damn horrified that we can't solve hunger and environmental destruction, not even in our own country(!), that we watch foreigners die as if they aren't extensions of (and measures of) our own humanity, and that people watch demeaning (to both sexes) pornography. I am human-centric enough to consider human life a particular kind of sacred, and all of these forms of dehumanization are, to me, different facets of disrespect of the sanctity of human life. I can't be surprised that a nation that is largely OK with migrant workers taking their chances with weather, farm equipment, and pesticides in order to justify cheap food prices for the convenience of citizens is not interested in considering a zygote as a human individual that deserves protections of any sort (and, yes, I am extremely offended that many who scream about the rights of a zygote are somehow OK with non-citizens being abused, poisoned, and starved ... talk about "arbitrary"!).
There are no yes/no, "simple" answers to any of these, and there are many partially right, partially messed-up answers.
I can't be against a decision that allows people like me to not support abortions in any preventable way. I celebrate the concept that there would be a large, even an extreme, degree of freedom-of-conscience around this issue (as I also celebrate conscientious objection to military service and some other related things). But I'm not at all sure I'm "for" Monday's decision either. I wish that the justices had been clearer about why this line was somehow legally pertinent, and what they then assert the lower boundary should be on the now-allowed exemptions. My sense is that the life/death issue'ness of it affected the outcome of the deliberations ... and I haven't heard that they captured any such thing in the ruling. I wonder if they know themselves why it came down this way -- or if maybe they do in fact realize and consider it the Right Thing to blow open the doors of religious exemption just as much as most commentators think they have done.
So, yeah. I don't have a lot of conclusions there, but two lenses that might cast a different color on the paths to the decision.
* * * * *
As a side note, I don't think most pro-choice people are conscious that, at 40+ years, most people who are for one reason or another against abortion have spent the vast majority (or all) of our lives on the losing side of this question (and many years on the minority side, although I know the first 10 or 15 years were transitional and the last few years have been hotly argued by different statisticians). The victim(/oppressed minority) storyline was fundamental to energizing the "right to abortion" fighters, ironically similarly to the odd psychological construct many Bible Christians live within, that conservative Christianity is a heroic minority viewpoint in America (self-fulfilling prophecy?) ... so it's not like most pro-lifers/anti-abortion activists haven't confronted the questions of the defensibility of, or the potentially incorrect nature of, our belief(s). It's not like many of us haven't dealt with the baby-or-abortion decision ourselves (I have) or with friends (that too).
While there are definitely admit-no-doubt pro-lifers, I don't think they are anywhere near the majority, and I don't think any of the Supreme Court Justices are among them, especially nowadays when one has to be both extremely politically savvy and very, very legally literate to even get nominated to the SCOTUS. If your reaction to Monday's decision was any version of "they weren't thinking well," you probably need to examine your reactive psychological assumptions for interpretive reasonableness.
* * * * *
Eden Organics has apparently filed for an exemption.
I am interested in whether this will bring more conservative Christians into the organic-food fold, to try to support Eden Organics by counteracting the boycott which was pretty much instantly called.
.
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