As the deficit blooms to the largest in history and Bush signs into law new mortgage relief measures (which aren’t counted in that deficit figure), and congress contemplates yet another economic stimulus package, I wonder…
At what point does the benefit to our economy of stimulus packages and mortgage packages get outweighed by the harm to our economy of going into such ridiculous debt?
The MPAA rating system is broken. I guess I’ve known this for a long time, but it was driven home with brutal force yesterday.
I went to see The Dark Knight yesterday. It’s a great movie, in my opinion, and it deserves all the accolades it has received. My problem is with the movie’s rating: PG-13. On the one hand, this may seem reasonable. After all, there is no sex, very little bad language of any kind, and all of the violence is bloodless.
Their are also multiple scenes where extremely violent acts of torture and brutality happen right as the camera flashes away–although with enough lead up as to make it perfectly clear what is about to happen and to make the audience squirm at the thought.
Dark Knight is a great movie–for adults. Kids have no business seeing that movie without their parents permission. The MPAA has become so preoccupied with sex, nudity, and gore, that they’ve forgotten that the most scary and disturbing things in life are the ones we ourselves imagine. No monster is as scary as a simple growl coming from a dark corner. And certainly no image of a female breast is as scarring to a young mind as the Joker slamming a pencil into a man’s brain–whether the camera angle shows the entry wound or not.
Drug legalization (and I will include the addictive mood altering chemicals tobacco and alcohol here as well) is a hard question. On the one hand, it’s not really government’s job to protect people from themselves. On the other hand, issues like addiction, second-hand smoke, “roid rage”, public financing of emergency rooms, drunk driving, competitive disadvantage, etc. can both take choice away from individuals and pose problems of negative externalities that effect all of society–and that makes it government’s business. In that sense, I have no problem with stringent government regulation of extremely dangerous drugs (like most narcotics), highly addictive drugs (like heroine or tobacco), or drugs that make people prone to harm others (like steroids). But I have serious problems with the assumption that any and every mood altering drug ought to be banned.
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I’m back!
I’ll have a longer post later, but for now I wanted to note a minor campaign absurdity. Campaign commentators are complaining about the supposedly unfair treatment that the networks are bestowing on the Obama campaign. And let’s be honest here: they have a point. I don’t want to get into a long breakdown of media bias because I don’t find those conversations to be particularly helpful or enlightening; but it does seem to me that Obama has been getting a lot more coverage than McCain, at least measured in airtime. (Not that all of that coverage is flattering, of course, but there is a lot of truth to the old adage that any publicity is good publicity.)
That being said, McCain is not entirely blameless here. Continue reading »
There is an old joke that an optimist is someone who believes that things can’t possibly get any worse than they already are. I was reminded of that today, reading this article on patriotism. It’s a moderately interesting article in which the author argues that as part of his campaign Obama ought to attempt to expand traditional definitions of patriotism. But the part of the article that really jumped out at me was the following passage:
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