Unnecessary Hypocrisy; Relativist Menus; Rube Goldberg; Geeks - see where I'm going?

I really should be making separate entries here. Well eff that. 4 Really Interesting Things.

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I’m curious why Frist et al keep using “we just want the nominees to get an up or down vote”. Railing against the filibuster, well Republicans haven’t used said filibuster in ages (because they didn’t have to), so they can safely do that. But they certainly prevented many judicial nominees from getting yes-no votes by delaying them in committee during Clinton’s term. Now this isn’t the same thing clearly, but both are “not letting nominees get an up or down vote”. Why be so hypocritical when you can avoid it?

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The Ethical Werewolf has a series of discussions going on what relativism really means, and even better, why the actual definition of it matters in our current political debate. Good reading.

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Mises.org has a paean to Rube Goldberg who was pretty anti-New Deal, for his understanding of government. Apparently his overly complicated machines were not just humorous, but metaphors for human endeavor. In particular, for our government. I take this to heart, in terms of pointing out the absurdity of our complex decision making system.

Simple is better (not always true, but a good first premise).

(In one of the science camps I went to as a nerdy kid, our final project was to make Rube Goldberg machines. To be all deep and stuff, I must say it wasn’t the complicated and confusing parts that didn’t work, but getting the very (apparently) simple steps to function as well as you imagine them to, that was unreliable.)

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Lastly, I’d be remiss to not point out Totalitarianism Today on geekiness. Why? Because it really plays into what I was saying Monday about aesthetics and how much many political people look on politics as more of a game. Now I love games, and am definitely the type of geek described both there and here. As I imagine all the readers of my blog are. So we would do well to not forget that we are probably pretty buffered from the effects of bad policy or government waste, and to analyze how our passions for debating the news matches so closely to our passions for watching Firefly or playing Puerto Rico.