Month: March 2010

Obama the Sneak, DeMint the Babbit

Here’s a small example of why I no longer consciously will call myself a Republican, though I may reflexively still think of myself that way.

The thought that anyone might want to seal off a basin in Colorado to keep it from being stripped for oil and gas development or to create wildlife reserves in New Mexico seems ludicrous to Senator DeMint, nonsense from the “environmentalist left.”

I guess the change of the Republican party into brain-dead boosterism and my concurrent shift into a more “paleo” versions of conservative thought, are some of those pesky mesofacts we humans have trouble absorbing.

Contingent Vegetarianism

“Premiss [sic; I guess the Brits spell “premise” with two esses] one: we don’t need to eat animals; premiss two: eating animals in the way we now eat them causes suffering on an unimaginable scale; premiss three: eating animals in the way we now eat them is environmentally catastrophic. Conclusion: we should not – for both moral and prudential reasons – eat animals in the way we now eat them.”

Thus a reviewer summarizes a recent book, Eating Animals, that argues for (or perhaps just bears testimony to the author’s) “contingent vegetarianism.” Contingent vegetarianism is vegetarianism that the author might reconsider if we raised and slaughtered our food animals differently.

Eating is about as basic an animal activity as there is. For humans – a unity of body and spirit – it is traditionally as basic a social activity as there is, and I admire those who live out that reality still today. I want no reductionist “refueling” metaphors to dominate my view of food and the fellowship that accompanies. How and what we eat is important.

The arguments for vegetarianism of late have focused on the current realities of what we used to call “animal husbandry,” which now frankly has become “factory farming.” That’s this author’s second and third “premiss.”

But there’s at least one other argument, current when I was a young adult, that is based on the inefficiency of turning sun, water and soil into concentrated food through the bellies of beasts. For instance, Diet for a Small Planet.

Going back another generation, one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, worried a great deal about the ethics of vivisection. When did you last hear anyone worry about that? How many of you need a dictionary right now? Frankly, I need one to remember exactly what that refers to, though I know generally.

It worries me a lot that something of keen concern to a man of Lewis’s stature isn’t even on our radar screen any more. On my radar screen. Dare I suggest that we have a great capacity for tolerating ethically dubious practices that are convenient for us, from vivisection to factory farming, abortion on demand and embryonic stem cell research?

I have a metabolic disorder of longstanding, currently under control with a lot of expensive medicines, whereby a diet of almost pure meat and other animal protein (i.e., a very low carbohydrate diet) is a very attractive convenient option. It’s hard and time-consuming for me to fashion healthy meals without animal products, as we Orthodox do in Lent. I actually tend to gain weight in Lent with my “fasting,” and I frankly don’t want a lipid profile done immediately after Pascha. But I’m convinced that I could do it if I would take the time. An Orthodox friend lost his taste for meat during Lent, and now is essentially vegetarian year-round.

I could. Should I?

Afterthought: Bound up in my discomfort with factory farming is my antipathy to megacorporations generally. Tyson is not just a great producer of chicken waste, but a major political player in Arkansas – at the very least. And as the linked article shows, the factory farmers have stripped terms like “free range” of any real meaning (through the very cozy relationship megacorporations develop with their putative regulators). I’m flirting with distributist economic thought – “not fewer capitalists, but multiple more” – and I am just plain angry at bailouts of “too big to fail” corporations. So I’m not all that interested in questions like Wal-Mart versus Whole Foods; give me CitiFoods, please.

Controlling health care costs

I came across this stimulating article on medical trade-offs. (No, I don’t routinely read the American Scientist.)

The question is why, since we buy good-enough furniture at Ikea (those lucky enough to have one around) and in other areas, why do we always go for the very best in medicine?

The concept of QALYs has been around for quite a while now. My biggest concern since first encountering it is that people with disabilities will get shoved by government edict into what the author calls “the southwest quadrant” where the cost is less but the benefit is less, too. But who can object to voluntary decisions to shop in the southwest quadrant?

Okay: You can stop holding your breath now.

I decided to blog when I saw how different my FaceBook posts were from anyone else’s. It seems the most interesting things in my life – things that aren’t too personal to share, anyway – are ideas I encounter. That’s a problem – people ought to be more important to me than they seem to be when it comes down to how I actually live my life day-to-day, week-to-week. That probably makes me a fairly typical intellectualoid 21st Century American. I’m working on changing that, so don’t expect me to blog as if my life depended on it.

G.K. Chesteron wrote:

Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas.  He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer.  Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas.  The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaler.

I’m perhaps the teetotaler, but I hope you’ll like at least some of the ideas that intoxicate me.

As I begin this conceit, I anticipate that I will have mostly links with a few comments. In politics, the links are apt to be from the New York Times or the Washington Post editorial pages – not because I’m under illusions that these liberal institutions are right about things, but because as NPR beats heck of of Rush or Beck, these serious papers put to shame most others simply as newspapers and as troves of interesting editorial thinkers – and my favorite, the Front Porch Republic blog. The comboxes at FPR can be pretty lame at times, but the contributors are top-notch guys (and a few gals) who are in the tank for neither major party.

In religion, Father Stephen Freeman’s Glory to God blog produces more gems-per-post than any other I’ve yet found. Subscribe yourself and eliminate the biased middle-man. Of course, he’s Eastern Orthodox, as am I; so if you’re not Orthodox, I venture you’ll find his thinking unusual – a different sort of Christianity than is normally seen in North America.

I’m not sure I’ve followed all the rules for a canonical blog. I picked a title, a subtitle, a theme, and posted an “about.” Then I posted this. So the look of the blog is itself a work in progress.