| Wednesday, March
13, 2002
Workmen at the house replacing ceiling exhaust fans. This ought to be
fun.
The Internet clearly wants to drive me mad. Whenever I am in a hurry, I
cannot establish a connection to upload to my site. Then when I say to
heck with it and start something else, I get the "Hy, now I am
connected!" signal. Shesh.
There is lots of mail
today, some important.
In another place someone commented on the Yates verdict. I decline to
comment on that, which is a very disturbing situation. Then a discussion
followed in which I took no part. Several women denounced Yates's husband
for making her have more kids, home school them, and giving her no free
time. I presume that is a true statement: as I say the case is disturbing,
and happened a long way from here, and I don't have to think about it, so
I don't. But then someone else said
"Sounds like Texas all across the board. I don't think
civilization
has reached there yet."
That prompted a response from me:
Is it your contention that the state should intervene in these
situations? A psychiatrist says she ought not have more kids. The husband
insists on unreasonable conditions in the home. The wife doesn't leave,
doesn't go to the authorities, broods, and kills the kids. At what point
did you want the uncivilized state of Texas to intervene?
How do you draft the legislation that allows the interventions?
Like New York, where a woman telephones a help line to ask if it is
normal to get sexually excited when breast feeding her first-born, and
hours later Social Services shows up, takes the infant away from her,
jails her briefly, and makes her and her husband spend every cent they
have getting the child back? Is that a good model of 'civilization'?
A republic assumes its citizens are more or less competent. Other forms
of government make different assumptions about the subjects, and put the
enlightened in charge on the grounds that everyone else is benighted.
Which is "civilized"?
It is, I fear, a serious question. Is it possible to have a 'civilized'
republic? Freedom will inevitably leave people free to do things many will
not approve of. Where do you draw the line? And, if we are to have a
completely secular republic uninformed by religion and religious
traditions, why do you draw the line? That is, blasphemy was once
considered a very serious crime: it was more serious to defame God than to
defame the king, and the punishments were more severe. Civilized countries
understood this: only barbarous places made it a worse crime to defame a
man, even the King, than to defame God. We today don't consider blasphemy
a crime at all. There was a trend for a while to decriminalize defaming
the state, but I would not try it today in, say, an airport, and I
particularly would not advise defaming the President in his presence: the
Secret Service, at least in Clinton's time, routinely handcuffed people
who shouted insults at the president. They may still do that, in the name
of "security".
[My point here, missing in the original, was that either there is a
well-spring of law or law is what the civilized people agree it is; and we
have often opted for the 'law is what you can get a legislature to say is
law, even if the legislators never intended that result and no one thinks
it is good law. Law is following rigid procedures without regard to the
intent of the legislation." There's a lot of that going around.]
Texas may or may not be "uncivilized". The Texas system seems
to be to make the laws clear and enforce them severely. This is one way to
run a government. California, on the other hand, has fuzzy laws and
enforces few of them because if every California law were rigidly enforced
there would be few of us out of jail. We in California by necessity have a
government of men (and women) rather than a government of laws, because
there are so many laws they cannot all be enforced.
Well, thank you for making me think about the subject.
====
It was, of course, a rant, and I am not sure I even agree with all I
said; but it does seem worth putting out for discussion.
So. I see someone in the AMD community has now managed to forge my
return address
http://www.byte.com/tangledthreads/
thread.jsp?forum=257&thread=10216
and put up an obscene message in my name. There is apparently no length
to which these people will not go. Which tells me enough about writing
about that particular subject. There are a lot of things to write
about.
I bought and paid for the dual processing board and the Athlon chips to
test out the AMD Dual processing system. I recommended the system. That is
not enough, apparently. Well, a day.
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