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Yesterday, in response to the postponement of a football game, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell said:

“I think we’ve become wussies. … We’ve become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.”

Hmm. It’s pretty obvious he’s trying to score some political points here, although it’s hard to imagine why, seeing as how the elections were last month. Also: “you people suck, you should be more like ____” anything is bound to be a vote-loser.

Meanwhile, pundit Tucker Carlson says:

“I believe fervently in second chances… But Michael Vick killed dogs, and he did in a heartless and cruel way. And I think, personally, he should’ve been executed for that. He wasn’t, but the idea that the President of the United States would be getting behind someone who murdered dogs? Kind of beyond the pale.”

The first thought which sprang to my mind on hearing these stories was that I’d like to see Carlson and Rendell have a debate about the Chinese human and animal rights records. That could be interesting.

More seriously, though; it’s interesting to me that these two are actually trying to argue for semi-reasonable points: that they ought to have played the game on Sunday, and that people are too forgiving of Vick. And yet, they make these points in such an obnoxious and hyperbolic fashion that there’s really nothing to do but ridicule them for it.

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National Review praises Sarah Palin:

“During an episode of her reality show, the once (and future?) candidate cooked up a mess of hot s’mores and a side of even hotter politics, declaring: ‘This is in honor of Michelle Obama, who said the other day we should not have dessert.’

Palin was being over-generous in her paraphrase. What Mrs. Obama in fact said was considerably more worrisome: ‘We can’t just leave it up the parents’…. If her vision leaves any room for limitation on government interference in family affairs, it is impossible to detect it. Palin… later expanded on her views: ‘Instead of a government thinking that they need to take over and make decisions for us, according to some politician’s — or politician’s wife’s — priorities, just leave us alone, get off our back, and allow us, as individuals, to exercise our own God-given rights to make our own decisions.'”

National Review and Palin appear to have not realized that if your kids are in school, then they will be fed by the school. You can maybe send a lunch in with them, but some children–not that I suppose NR really cares about this–come from families who are too poor to do so. (Besides which, if the lunch is paid for by taxes, most people will probably wish to take advantage of it.) Therefore, unless you are actually opposed to the concept of school lunches, you must ask: do you want the school to feed them healthy food or unhealthy food?

If they were Libertarians, they might make the argument that we ought to abolish school lunches–and, for that matter, government schools–altogether. But they won’t make this argument here, because to do so makes them look, frankly, like unfeeling jerks to many people. So, they take the easy way out: griping about the system without actually putting forward an alternative system which might address the alleged problems.

(I should mention: although I am not a Libertarian, I was one in the past. And, perhaps out of a sentimental sympathy for some of their beliefs, I feel a need to make it clear that the Republicans of today are not really Libertarians; they just act like it sometimes to get what they want. This is not to say the Libertarians are right–which I obviously don’t believe–but rather in the interest of clarity in discourse.)

But I digress.

Now, if a parent wants to have this degree of control over their children, then they should not send the children to school. But, since many parents cannot (or in some cases, will not) actually educate, feed and care for their own children all day every day, they do send them off to school. And that carries with it certain costs and benefits. But essentially, what the National Review crowd wants is all the benefits of parental control with none of the costs.

But then, as they ought to know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

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Rather unsurprising news:

“While 80 percent of Americans think that America “has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world,” more than a third say President Obama does not share that belief, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Dec. 10-12.”

It’s interesting to me that “American Exceptionalism” has lately become a Conservative catchphrase. As I’ve said many times on this blog, the reason for this is that American Exceptionalism is, in my opinion, a fancier word for Nationalism.

There are, admittedly, some attempts at non-Nationalistic definitions of American exceptionalism; such as this from Heritage Foundation:

“To really understand what sets America apart, we need to go beyond numbers to examine the heart and soul of the nation: the ideas of the Declaration of Independence. Unlike other nations that derive their meaning and purpose from some unifying quality—an ethnic character, a common religion, a shared history, an ancestral land—America is a country dedicated to to the universal ideas of equality and liberty. The truths we hold to be self-evident apply to all men—not just all Americans.” 

There seems to me to be something paradoxical about the idea that one country (and its citizens) are “special” precisely because they believe that all people, regardless of nationality, are to endowed with equal opportunity and liberty. All non-Nationalist interpretations of Exceptionalism suffer from similar flaws.

Now, it is probably true that when Alexis de Tocqueville first expressed this idea, it was more accurate and more pronounced. I think that America was probably more different from Europe in 1800s than it is today. America and Europe have since grown more alike and, despite what Conservatives will tell you, the change has not only been in the direction of us becoming more like them. They also became more like us, in some ways.

Ironically, because of America’s standing in the world, it is inevitable that other countries would seek to emulate it, thus eroding our “exceptionalism”. And because America’s good qualities are indeed “the ideas of the Declaration of Independence” and not “an ethnic character, a common religion, a shared history, an ancestral land”, it is relatively easy to emulate them. If you learn English and can find a copy of the Declaration Independence, you are all set to begin copying America’s unique qualities.

But this argument would be unlikely to persuade those who speak most loudly of American Exceptionalism, because they do not really think it is only these ideas which make us exceptional. For them, while it may not be “an ethnic character”, it really is a “common religion”–see the so-called “War on Christmas”, a “shared history”–ask the Texas school board–and “an ancestral land”–which is why Republicans are always celebrating hunters and farmers and “small town values.”

I’m not accusing the Conservatives of lying, exactly. They want to think that their policies and philosophies are grounded in the simple logic of the Founding Documents, instead of resorting to quasi-mystical beliefs in “ancestral land” and so forth. But the trouble is, because such beliefs are what really motivate them, and since they cannot say it outright–and probably are not even consciously aware of it–they must resort to other, flawed arguments.

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Well, I confess I’m not really in a position to know for sure, since I only played three of the games released this year: BioWare‘s Mass Effect 2, Obsidian Entertainment’s Alpha Protocol and Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas.

So, it may be that there are other games out there that are better. Given BioWare and Obsidian’s excellent track records however, I doubt it. 

If forced to choose, I would say F:NV is the best, followed by ME 2 and then AP. I pick New Vegas over ME 2 largely because of a few serious problems with ME’s plot towards the end of it. (Detailed by Shamus Young here.) F:NV‘s story is pretty out-there as well, but it was fairly consistent in the level of what it asked the player to believe from beginning to end.

As for Protocol, while I still maintain that it is a fine game that was treated most unjustly by the critics, there’s no denying it had some bugs, some poorly executed concepts, and even a few instances of sloppy or cliched writing. (By Obsidian standards, I mean. It’s still much better written than the vast majority of games.) I suspect that it suffered somewhat from Obsidian focusing heavily on making New Vegas all it could be.

I should probably mention that my evaluations of all these games were perhaps slightly tainted by the fact that this past summer, I finally got round to playing Black Isle‘s legendary RPG Planescape: Torment. It is, as I had heard, one of the greatest games of all time–surpassed only by what must be considered its spiritual sequel, Obsidian’s Knights of the Old Republic II–and I suppose that my judgment of these more recent games was clouded by it.

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Well, speaking of “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Man” and historical aerial combat, I guess this seemed appropriate to reference:

You know, there really was a Christmas Truce in World War I.

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Posting will probably be somewhat infrequent over the next few days. If I think of something I really want to say, I’ll post it, but otherwise things will be probably quieter than usual around here until after Christmas.

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It’s funny how much we use common expressions without really thinking about them. For example, is it: “toe the line” or “tow the line”? (Answer here.)

I was reminded of this by something I was writing today. I was going to use the expression  “the whole nine yards”. But I wondered where the expression came from, so I looked it up on Wikipedia:

“The origin of the phrase is not definitively known, although a vast number of explanations with varying degrees of plausibility have been suggested. Perhaps the most frequently quoted is from World War II, where to “go the full nine yards” was to fire the entire aircraft’s machine-gun ammunition belt at the enemy, which is nine yards long.”

So, having seen this, I opted not to use the expression in what I was writing at the time, which was:

“Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Man–the whole nine yards.” 

 I think it might have undercut my point in that instance.

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It’s a pretty rare event. It may mark a moment of spiritual significance to some. Or it may summon Cthulhu. Or, most likely, it may be kind of neat to look at.

Therefore, to be safe, I plan to be asleep and to find pictures of it tomorrow. How ’bout you all?

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Reports the BBC: “Scientists have shown they can change people’s moral judgements by disrupting a specific area of the brain with magnetic pulses.”

Read the article. It’s pretty interesting; however, I’m not sure if they’re modifying people’s morality so much as how they judge actions in general. And frankly, people frequently fall into the trap of judging a decision–whether morality is involved or not–based on the outcome, not the information available at the time the decision is made.

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According to a new study: “Exposure to violent video games or television shows is not a strong predictor of aggression or violence among youth.”

I’ve never really thought games could make people violent. However, I will say that it might not be merely a question of violence; rather, it depends on how the violence is handled.

I wonder if anyone ever did a study comparing, say, people who play Metal Gear or Fallout to people who play Duke Nukem or Manhunt. All of those games are rated “M”, and contain violent and disturbing scenes, but the former handle them in a mature, intelligent fashion. The latter, not so much.