On the heels of Obama's commencement speech at Notre Dame I thought we'd lighten things up a bit and talk about . . . abortion! More specifically, I'd like to echo our President's call for a more civil tone in the abortion debate. That might seem like an oxymoron, and it probably is, but for over 35 years now we've tried screaming at each other and it hasn't worked, so how about trying something else?
In the abortion debate, I am an anomaly. I am the only person I know of (though I'm quite sure there are many others) who has actually changed their mind on this issue (from pro-life to pro-choice). Apart from being raised Catholic, when I became a Republican in the mid-90s one of the main reasons I was pro-life is that I saw abortion as another example of a growing trend where people have a "victim" mentality and don't believe that they are responsible for their own actions. Judas Priest "made" my son kill himself. Marilyn Manson "made" those kids shoot up Columbine. Grand Theft Auto "made" these teenagers steal cars. I didn't like the detachment from personal responsibility that seemed to be growing in our culture. In many ways I still feel that way. At that time it was simply a matter of "you knew when you had sex that a baby was a possibility and now you've got to deal with the consequences of your actions." At that time I should add that I was still in favor of abortion in the cases of rape, incest, or endangerment to the mother.
As weird as it sounds, the thing that actually made me change my mind about abortion was reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. For those that have not read it, no, abortion is not mentioned anywhere in the story. But what is present is Rand's philosophy of objectivism, which (to express it extremely simplisticly) emphasizes total respect for the rights of individuals and, as an extension of that, laissez-faire capitalism. It is very critical of people (and particularly government) intervening in the name of the "greater good." So I started thinking about some of the implications of this. Rand would say that most social programs are bad, because they perpetuate this victim mentality among those whom they purport to help. It's along the lines of "give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime." Rand would say that it's far better to allow the entrepreneurs of the world to thrive and create opportunities for the lower economic classes to seize, but only if they are willing to work for it. So, how does this relate to abortion? Well, I realized that if I was going to be in favor of eliminating a lot of social programs and telling the lower class that they wouldn't receive anymore handouts, it would be inconsistent to say "oh, and we're going to force you to have that baby even though we won't help you support it." It seemed to me that the only way I could justify being "cold" towards welfare is if I could truly say "well, it was your choice to have that baby."
Writing and rereading that paragraph feels very strange to me now. That's not really the reason I am pro-choice now but that really is the rationale that first led me to change my mind. Since that time I've become a little more pragmatic in believing that women who want abortions will still find ways to get them. I've also been swayed by things such as Freakonomics, which makes a fairly convincing case that Roe v Wade was the single biggest influence in the sudden drop in the crime rates in major urban cities in the early 90s.
So I bring all that up as background as a way of saying that I really do see both sides of this issue; at one time in my life I have passionately argued both sides of this. Even though I have a definite opinion on this issue, I by no means think that I'm unequivocally right. Hence, the only people whose opinion I don't respect on this issue are those who can't see how it's a very, very murky issue.
The question basically comes down to this: at what point does human life start? And one of the main troubles is that science can't answer that question for us. Most people agree that in the moment after you have a fertilized egg you don't have a human life yet and most people would also agree that the moment right before birth you do. So then you start counting forward and backwards. How about a minute after fertilization? A day? A month? How about a day, week, month before birth?
So, of course, with science unable to provide a definitive answer religion is all too happy to step in. That in and of itself is not a bad thing. Religion is there precisely to provide the answers that science cannot (yet) give us. It's just quite unfortunate that a religion (Christianity) that is above all about love, peace, and forgiveness is often presented with a face akin to that of a rabid dog on this issue.
If you are a Christian, you probably should be against abortion. If you believe that only the hand of God has the ability to create a human life, then it makes sense that you believe that life begins at conception. But you should also understand that your belief is just that: a belief. It's not a fact. And you should also be able to see that those who aren't Christians don't have that clear-cut answer, and for them it's a far murkier issue. A good Christian needs to be able to reconcle the fact that it is possible to be both a good moral person and be pro-choice.
I'm not suggesting that will change their mind on the abortion issue. I am hopeful though, that it will help change the tone.
(cringes as he hits "publish post", knowing that the last time abortion was brought up on this blog we got a crazy reverend advocating the bombing of abortion clinics in the comments)
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
Deja Vu All Over Again
Almost exactly a year ago I asked the question "Has Hollywood finally run out of ideas?" Today I ask the same question about Broadway. Christy and I had the pleasure and torture (respectively) of seeing Legally Blonde: The Musical on Friday night. Back in December we bought tickets to a series of 4 plays and this one was the first. The other three are Fiddler on the Roof, The Addams Family, and a new play called Spring Awakening. So that's one out of 4 original theatre productions. Then last week I get a form in the mail soliciting a renewal for the next series. Those plays: Young Frankenstein, Dreamgirls, 101 Dalmations, and the token one new play In the Heights. So one out of 4 again. Then, as I was scanning through the playbill (which, by the way, was the highlight of the performance) I noticed an ad for Mary Poppins and a "coming soon" poster for Shrek: The Musical. Oh, and by the way, the theatre where we're seeing all these (The Oriental) just got done housing Wicked for the last 3 and a half years. Technically, Wicked is an original (but only in the strictest sense) but it's still a prequel (and doesn't everybody just love prequels!) and certainly only "works" if the audience is familiar with The Wizard of Oz.
Has Broadway now basically become the new action figures for movies? Something that just automatically accompanies a hit film/franchise? If we wait long enough are we going to see musical versions of The Dark Knight and Saw (actually, that I would like to see)? It's not so much that the plays aren't new. Apart from the plays that have been turned into movies (e.g. Chicago, Phantom of the Opera, Rent) there really is not a DVD equivalent for theatre, so I don't really have a problem with Cats or Fiddler on the Roof coming around every couple years. I just don't like the ultra-formulaic exercise of taking an existing movie, transplanting all scenes and plot points wholesale into a stage script, and slapping together super-cheesy, bubble-gum pop ballads and inserting them every 5 minutes and calling it something "All New!" It just shows a tremendous lack of creativity. It seems like Broadway is following the lead of Hollywood in that they are so terrified of making an expensive flop that unless Andrew Lloyd Weber is willing to attach his name to it you'd better already have a built-in audience or it's not getting made.
Look, I am not a complete artistic purist by any stretch of the imagination. Hollywood and Broadway only exist to make money. I always thought that the job of a producer and director was to look at something and see promise and/or to say, at various points in the process, "ok, it's good but we need to do X here, " or "it's dragging in this spot, we need to rewrite this so we don't lose the audience." To me, this seems like 1) producers have lost all cajones and are afraid to take any risk; or 2) they have absolutely no idea how to spot good ideas/scripts anymore and they know it.
It used to be that movies were seen as "for the masses" and theatre was viewed as being (for lack of a better term) more cultured. To use an analogy, if the average movie is a Miller Lite, than theatre was a Heineken. Not for everyone, but for those that like it there's no comparison on the quality. So now it seems like Broadway has decided that there isn't enough money in Heineken so they better start serving Miller Lite too. That's all well and good, but if I'm now gonna get the same product at 4-5 times the price, remind me why I'm going again?
Has Broadway now basically become the new action figures for movies? Something that just automatically accompanies a hit film/franchise? If we wait long enough are we going to see musical versions of The Dark Knight and Saw (actually, that I would like to see)? It's not so much that the plays aren't new. Apart from the plays that have been turned into movies (e.g. Chicago, Phantom of the Opera, Rent) there really is not a DVD equivalent for theatre, so I don't really have a problem with Cats or Fiddler on the Roof coming around every couple years. I just don't like the ultra-formulaic exercise of taking an existing movie, transplanting all scenes and plot points wholesale into a stage script, and slapping together super-cheesy, bubble-gum pop ballads and inserting them every 5 minutes and calling it something "All New!" It just shows a tremendous lack of creativity. It seems like Broadway is following the lead of Hollywood in that they are so terrified of making an expensive flop that unless Andrew Lloyd Weber is willing to attach his name to it you'd better already have a built-in audience or it's not getting made.
Look, I am not a complete artistic purist by any stretch of the imagination. Hollywood and Broadway only exist to make money. I always thought that the job of a producer and director was to look at something and see promise and/or to say, at various points in the process, "ok, it's good but we need to do X here, " or "it's dragging in this spot, we need to rewrite this so we don't lose the audience." To me, this seems like 1) producers have lost all cajones and are afraid to take any risk; or 2) they have absolutely no idea how to spot good ideas/scripts anymore and they know it.
It used to be that movies were seen as "for the masses" and theatre was viewed as being (for lack of a better term) more cultured. To use an analogy, if the average movie is a Miller Lite, than theatre was a Heineken. Not for everyone, but for those that like it there's no comparison on the quality. So now it seems like Broadway has decided that there isn't enough money in Heineken so they better start serving Miller Lite too. That's all well and good, but if I'm now gonna get the same product at 4-5 times the price, remind me why I'm going again?
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Food for Thought
First off, although very minor this is probably the funniest story of the year. It's good to see that there appear to be others besides me with a Taco Bell obsession.
Next, from an article in the New York Times, a new report shows Medicare and Social Security now going broke even earlier than expected. Social Security is now set to go bust in 2037 (4 years earlier than previously estimated), while Medicare will be broke by 2017 (2 years earlier than thought). While estimates are notoriously inaccurate, like the weather they tend to get more and more accurate the shorter the projection, and 2017 isn't that far away anymore. The culprit is, of course, the recession, so initially when I read this my first thought was "yeah, but once the economy improves it'll push those dates back out again, right?" Wrong. The current estimates already assume that the economy will return to growth later this year. Which means that if that doesn't happen the reality will be even worse, perhaps significantly so.
I'm not bringing this up for gloom and doom sake. Of the things that I worry about, the solvency of Social Security and Medicare don't even make the top 20. Of course, that might be because I already assume that those programs won't be around by the time I qualify for them. But I digress. From the article: "Spending on Social Security and Medicare totaled more than $1 trillion last year, accounting for more than one-third of the federal budget." So we're already at 1/3 the budget yearly and the baby-boomers have only just started to retire. It's important to keep things in perspective and in that respect all of this debate over stimulus plans and increased government spending programs, while still important, is really just something of a sideshow. The truth is that no matter what else happens, you will never have a sustainable balanced budget if you don't figure out how to manage these two programs. And to manage them, one of two things needs to occur: 1) raise taxes or 2) cut benefits. Some combination of the two is probably the most likely outcome. Anyone who tells you we can have the same benefits without raising taxes is mathematically challenged at best and a deceitful windbag at worst.
I think this would also be a good time to point out how disastrous the Republican plan for the privatization of social security accounts looks right now. Obviously we can't say for sure, because it looked pretty good for the 10 years before last October, but if the Social Security endowment had been in the stock market it would have easily shed 25% of its value and probably shaved about 10 years off of the projected insolvency date. And before anyone jumps down my throat for more Republican-bashing, I was fully in favor of this plan too so I am admitting that I was wrong as well. Maybe it will recover and still look like a good long-term plan again in the future, but I've already seen enough to think that a separation of retiree income from the ups and downs of the stock market is a good thing.
Next, from an article in the New York Times, a new report shows Medicare and Social Security now going broke even earlier than expected. Social Security is now set to go bust in 2037 (4 years earlier than previously estimated), while Medicare will be broke by 2017 (2 years earlier than thought). While estimates are notoriously inaccurate, like the weather they tend to get more and more accurate the shorter the projection, and 2017 isn't that far away anymore. The culprit is, of course, the recession, so initially when I read this my first thought was "yeah, but once the economy improves it'll push those dates back out again, right?" Wrong. The current estimates already assume that the economy will return to growth later this year. Which means that if that doesn't happen the reality will be even worse, perhaps significantly so.
I'm not bringing this up for gloom and doom sake. Of the things that I worry about, the solvency of Social Security and Medicare don't even make the top 20. Of course, that might be because I already assume that those programs won't be around by the time I qualify for them. But I digress. From the article: "Spending on Social Security and Medicare totaled more than $1 trillion last year, accounting for more than one-third of the federal budget." So we're already at 1/3 the budget yearly and the baby-boomers have only just started to retire. It's important to keep things in perspective and in that respect all of this debate over stimulus plans and increased government spending programs, while still important, is really just something of a sideshow. The truth is that no matter what else happens, you will never have a sustainable balanced budget if you don't figure out how to manage these two programs. And to manage them, one of two things needs to occur: 1) raise taxes or 2) cut benefits. Some combination of the two is probably the most likely outcome. Anyone who tells you we can have the same benefits without raising taxes is mathematically challenged at best and a deceitful windbag at worst.
I think this would also be a good time to point out how disastrous the Republican plan for the privatization of social security accounts looks right now. Obviously we can't say for sure, because it looked pretty good for the 10 years before last October, but if the Social Security endowment had been in the stock market it would have easily shed 25% of its value and probably shaved about 10 years off of the projected insolvency date. And before anyone jumps down my throat for more Republican-bashing, I was fully in favor of this plan too so I am admitting that I was wrong as well. Maybe it will recover and still look like a good long-term plan again in the future, but I've already seen enough to think that a separation of retiree income from the ups and downs of the stock market is a good thing.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Just Asking
Can someone explain to me why the movie Catwoman is on AMC? AMC, by the way, stands for American Movie Classics. Or at least it used to. Apparently, although they have not officially changed their name they've taken a page from KFC and just want to now be known ambiguously by their initials. All I know is that the only thing "classic" about that film is that it is a classic example of how to lose all the prestige of winning a Best Actress Oscar as quickly as possible.
Can we get a little consistency in the headlines please? I open up this article and I feel pretty good and then I open this one and I feel like I should run around screaming with my hands waving frantically over my head Godzilla-movie style. So, let me see if I've got this straight: either the swine flu epidemic is almost over or it's on its way to infecting one third of the world's population. That is (ahem) a bit of a large range. Maybe I should do this thing Price Is Right style and bid 2 billion and 1 people infected. Can I get my own article then? My favorite part though is the WHO chief who was quoted as saying "This is a benchmark from the past. Please do not interpret this as a prediction for the future." Judging by the title of the article, it doesn't look like they listened to him. Here's a good investment tip: put money in the pharmaceutical companies that make flu shots.
And finally, what the f*ck is wrong with people? OK, let's make it multiple choice:
When you are getting into a fight over beer pong, are you:
Can we get a little consistency in the headlines please? I open up this article and I feel pretty good and then I open this one and I feel like I should run around screaming with my hands waving frantically over my head Godzilla-movie style. So, let me see if I've got this straight: either the swine flu epidemic is almost over or it's on its way to infecting one third of the world's population. That is (ahem) a bit of a large range. Maybe I should do this thing Price Is Right style and bid 2 billion and 1 people infected. Can I get my own article then? My favorite part though is the WHO chief who was quoted as saying "This is a benchmark from the past. Please do not interpret this as a prediction for the future." Judging by the title of the article, it doesn't look like they listened to him. Here's a good investment tip: put money in the pharmaceutical companies that make flu shots.
And finally, what the f*ck is wrong with people? OK, let's make it multiple choice:
When you are getting into a fight over beer pong, are you:
A) Psychotically competitive
B) In desperate need of anger management counseling
C) An irredeemable douchebag
D) All of the above
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