If you listen to the mp3 (linked near the bottom) beginning at 13:11 some of the hypermilers describe their interactions with other drivers on the road. They’re just trying to save some fuel, they explain, so everyone else should just put up with this rolling safety hazard. Protip: if people routinely honk at you on the road, you are doing it wrong.
I’ve just finished the process of taking someone who had never driven before and getting him to the point where he is now licensed. The night before I let him drive for the first time, I told him to keep in mind that every time you put a car in gear you are taking into your hands the lives of every single person you see, and many you do not see. Too often people are taught to drive by being cautioned that if they drive badly they’ll kill themselves. That’s a meaningless concept to pretty much everyone who is of an age where they are first learning to drive. Dropping the true moral implications of their actions – “Are you willing to risk those people’s lives to do x?” – is the better way. Putting your own life at risk is, ironically, an abstract notion (either you live, in which case the risk wasn’t that bad, or you die, in which case … well, you’re dead and can’t complain), but putting the lives of others at risk is a concrete idea that any non-sociopath can grasp.
I love driving; I drive fast and aggressive. But driving is a social interaction, and therefore brings moral choices. I strive to have fun while driving, but much more important than that is that I neither endanger nor inconvenience others. Yes, I put other people’s convenience above my own enjoyment. Because I’ve learned that when other drivers get inconvenienced, they drive erratically and unsafely. And because I understand that the enjoyment I derive from driving in my chosen manner is not superior to the contentment others derive from driving in their chosen manner.
Yet here we have a story about a bunch of goofs acting like a rolling traffic hazard across 2500 miles of interstate. And journalists go along with this, and participate in this, as though inconveniencing and endangering others is a normal part of saving money (second protip: to save gas, don’t gratuitously drive across the country just to show how little gas you use; real hypermilers stay home). The only time the journalist thinks about other drivers isn’t when he kills the engine while driving 45 on the interstate, it’s when he’s asking the members of the group how they respond to being honked at. Third and final protip: if you’re driving so slow that you have to plan out the evasive actions you’ll take when people come up on you too fast, you seriously need to speed the eff up. Because unsafe driving isn’t an amusing story, it’s wrong.
Apollo posted this at 12:07 AM HKT on Saturday, May 14th, 2011 as Philosophy
When the president called to tell him that Osama was dead, George Bush says he was eating souffle.
I suspect this news must make John Kerry very mad. “I was labeled an effete snob because I ordered provolone on my cheese steak, but he gets to publicly talk about eating soufflé? SOUFFLÉ!!??”
The Journal is devastating and accurate on Romneycare and its namesake. I’d vote for just about anyone running on the Republican ticket next year, but I’m not sure I could vote for Mitt Romney. It’s not that he passed a law that has been a failure; it’s not that his law provided significant rhetorical points in favor of Obamacare. It is that, as the Journal puts it, “Mr. Romney’s refusal to appreciate [why his law was doomed to fail from its inception], then and now, reveals a troubling failure of political understanding and principle.” He simply doesn’t get it.
Apollo posted this at 11:49 PM HKT on Thursday, May 12th, 2011 as Is It 2012 Yet?
I’m really glad some people, some place voted to put Rand Paul in the Senate:
He’s right, obviously. After watching this, Dorothy argued devil’s advocate: “But if you’re arrested, you have a right to counsel. Why isn’t that slavery?” Comparing the right to counsel to the “right” to medical care is instructive.
The right to counsel only arises because the state is prosecuting you. Neither prosecutions nor de fense attorneys occur in nature. The right to counsel is a right the state gives you because of something the state is doing against you. If there weren’t enough lawyers to represent all the criminal defendants, then the state could either slow down the trial system so that the remaining lawyers would be able to handle all the cases, or simply stop prosecuting people. If no one was prosecuted, no one’s right to counsel would ever be violated.
Health problems do occur in nature, but doctors do not. Cancer is a natural phenomenon, but to become an oncologist a human being has to willfully spend years of his life working very, very hard. If there weren’t enough oncologists, the state would have no way of vindicating a “right” to health care other than to force people to perform a job. The state can’t simply “drop” your cancer the way it can drop your prosecution.
In two paragraphs, this Reuters story is able to distill the stupidity and, ultimately, immorality of our Libyan excursion:
NATO-led forces are bombing Libya under a U.N. resolution authorizing them to protect civilians. The United States, Britain and France say they will not stop their air campaign until Gaddafi leaves power.
They have hit targets within Gaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziyah compound several times during the conflict, but deny they are targeting the leader himself.
Translation: We will continue to kill other people until you give up power.
I think this Robert Costa soft focus profile of Herman Cain is worth reading. He’s an admirable example of entrepreneurism and self-improvement, and his involvement in politics is longer and more serious than I had previously believed. I obviously think he’s unqualified – he’s never been an elected executive – but he seems to have an interesting skill set. I can’t say the notion of Vice President Cain much offends me.
Tangential to Cain, the story contains this howler:
Already, fellow 2012 contenders are getting a tad nervous about [Cain gaining popularity], which months ago seemed like a tea-party pipe dream. On the trail last week, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum took a shot at Cain’s electability. “He has never won an election,” Santorum said. “And it’s not that he hasn’t tried.”
In a thread regarding how spectacularly aggressive Obama was in his decision to raid Pakistan and murder bin Laden, FormerSwingVoter links to this NYT story. The lede:
President Obama insisted that the assault force hunting down Osama bin Laden last week be large enough to fight its way out of Pakistan if confronted by hostile local police officers and troops, senior administration and military officials said Monday.
Ay caramba! This struck a cord in my memory regarding how much Obama talked during the campaign about his willingness to launch raids into Pakistan. At the time, I didn’t take him seriously. Whether Pakistan is a friend or enemy, it is not terribly stable, has a large and powerful Islamist population that is sympathetic to our enemies, and, um, has nuclear weapons. It struck me that there could not possibly be a terrorist target in Pakistan important enough to risk upsetting or destabilizing such a country, and that no right-thinking person would take a risk with such enormous potential downsides.
How common was disbelief of Obama’s campaign rhetoric? It’s hard to say, but I found this in our archives. In one of the debates, McCain said that Obama’s threats of launching ”military strikes” in Pakistan were unwise. The Washington Post factcheckers called McCain’s characterization “misleading” and said that Obama had insisted he would only go into Pakistan with the approval of the Pakistani government. Here’s a Jake Tapper discussion from 2007 regarding what Obama actually promised, which features Obama plainly trying to walk back any from any hint that he would “invade” Pakistan.
Am I glad Osama’s dead? Hell yes. But I’m still concerned about the long-term effects of our actions on Pakistan. The Pakistanis appear to be starting to sort out some of this, regarding who knew what, when. There are forces in Pakistan beyond our control, and if this shakes out in such a way that the baddies in Pakistan gain power, history will not view his death as happily as we now do.
Here is an example of why it is impossible to take Ezra Klein seriously as a “moderate” liberal:
The Pay for War Act: War costs money. When we don’t pay for it, it costs even more money, because we have to pay interest on the debt we rack up and the absence of fiscal discipline keeps us from making hard choices.
That’s why Sen. Al Franken’s Pay for War Act should be such an easy sell. The resolution says nothing about the legitimacy or desirability of armed intervention. It just says that we, rather than our grandchildren, should bear the cost of the conflicts we start.
As Franken said in an eloquent speech on the floor of the Senate, “The idea that we should pay for our wars is not a Democratic idea, and it’s not a Republican idea. It’s not left or right. It’s not antiwar, it’s not pro-war. It’s just common sense.” Or, to put it slightly differently, it’s just a No-Brainer.
His blog post is ostensibly a list of bills that are non-partisan. Well, no Ezra, they aren’t. It may seem that way to a closeted coastal liberal like yourself, but its not quite that clear to us rubes in the rest of the country. How about this, oh purveyor of Journo-list, support a bill that requires us to pay for EVERYTHING. Like say a balanced budget amendment. Apparently paying for fuzzy liberal wealth redistribution programs on credit is fine and dandy, but freeing millions from oppression is not.
Masking rank partisanship as pragmatic bipartisanship is why most american’s are fed up with both liberals and conservatives, Republican’s and Democrats.
This is worth noting as a cultural phenomenon. I’ve some sympathy for the point, but it’s so overdone as to be stupid:
“It was taking the blame off the rapist and on the victim,” said Nicole Sullivan, 21, a student at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and an organizer of the SlutWalk planned Saturday in that city. “So we are using these efforts to reclaim the word ’slut.’”
If a rich man were to pin $100 bills to his shirt and walk down a dark alley at night, I think it would be fair to call him a fool. If there were a wave of men pinning $100 bills to their shirts and getting robbed, it would be fair for a police officer to say that men should not dress like fools if they don’t want to get robbed. . If people started pinning money to their shirts and marching to reclaim the word “fool,” I’d happily call them what they asked me to.
I’m not sure how that’s much different. It doesn’t take the blame off the criminal to point out that there are types of behavior that are more likely to attract criminals; such information merely empowers people to adjust their lives, if they choose, to avoid being victimized.
But feminists want to make their point. And guys know that, generally, leftist protest girls are easy, and these leftist protest girls seem to be asking you to talk dirty to them. So there will be marches.
Apollo posted this at 11:06 PM HKT on Friday, May 6th, 2011 as Kulturkampf
The following fact isbecomingapparent: Using information gained from waterboarded Gitmo prisoners, our president ordered Navy SEALS to to invade a foreign country, engage in a firefight at a private residence, and shoot an unarmed man.
Had I taken the most right-wing genes from Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Blackbeard, and Darth Vader, and created a child who I then forced to attend Hillsdale, I would have still been slightly surprised when Winston McThathereagan ordered this assassination. That an Alinskyite Marxist community organizer did it? Priceless.
It makes me giddy to think about the sinking feeling the “We-are-the-change-we’ve-been-waiting-for” crowd will feel in their guts as the reality of the situation sinks in. In 2007 and 2008, they poured their hearts and souls into getting Hopey McChange elected president. And after the attempts at socialized medicine, cap and trade, turning the Supreme Court into a bunch of living constitution types, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, this – THIS - will be without a doubt the single most popular thing he ever does.
This post, about priorities, is championship material:
The comments on lefty blogs are pretty much what you would expect. I get the feeling that grassroots conservatives feel better about President Obama’s authorization of this operation than grassroots liberals do.
Bin Laden was clearly an evil human being, but it is deeply disturbing to see photos of some of my fellow Americans literally celebrating and cheering like it’s a some kind of football game win.
Er… really? Which development really warrants the full-throated exultation? The United States finding and lethally punishing the world’s most wanted terrorist, with the blood of thousands of our countrymen on his hands, or that our team won the big game? . . .
No, really. This is the moment to cheer, to scream, to pump your fist, to break into that old bottle of your favorite beverage you’ve been saving for a special occasion. Because the world is different this morning. A key message has been beamed to every corner of the earth, sure to reach anyone who has ever committed terror against Americans, who seeks to do so again, or who is contemplating the act: No matter who you are, no matter how many followers you have, no matter how smart or careful you think you are, our guys can find you. . . .
Elsewhere, Salon groans that the war against Osama and his organization has cost $1.3 trillion. Think about what that says to aspiring terrorists. When we say, ‘we’ll pay any price to see them brought to justice or to bring justice to them,’ we mean it. That’s the kind of country we are.
Apollo posted this at 10:18 AM HKT on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 as Amer-I-Can!
This story seems to make a good point. Governments seem distressed that new electric cars won’t be paying the gas taxes that fund most of our road building and maintenence. So they’re trying to come up with ways to tax people who drive electric vehicles.
Yet we pour thousands of dollars in direct tax incentives into each electric car purchase, and probably even more money into subsidizing the research and production of these cars. Perhaps that’s good policy, perhaps its not (I think it probably is, but is probably overdone). But whatever mileage tax we would be assessing on these cars would bring in a pittance compared to the amount of money we’re paying people to buy them. If budget shortfalls are actually the issue, we should start by not paying out as much money, rather than coming up with an expensive means of monitoring the movements of citizens’ cars.
The paranoid among us might look at this situation and think that the government has, for a decade now, been engaged in a long-term policy to move us to a system where they get to track our every move in the name of taxation. I, on the other hand, look at this situation and see nothing but good faith bureaucratic idiocy.