Lazy Days of Summer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Am I Still a Red-Meat Conservative?

It's been oddly gray and cloudy the last two days, but I doubt it has much to do with Obama's pick to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Sonia Sotomayor (So-toe-my-YORE) is probably headed for easy confirmation, despite a rather average record on the bench and some troubling comments she has made. Apparently, 60% of her rulings on the Court of Appeals bench have been overturned by higher courts, which seems very high. However, I have no idea what the average is, so I can't tell you if that's a real minus. However, does it denote someone who should be on the nation's highest court, from which there is no appeal? I read an interesting piece with interviews with fellow judges, clerks, and lawyers who had argued cases in front of Sotomayor, and their verdict was not as positive as one would expect. She sometimes argues with lawyers, gives hasty opinions, and is nasty in general on the court. She does not seem to like hearing arguments she disagrees with. On the other hand, she has carefully-written, comprehensible, and precedent-based opinions, and by all accounts absolutely pwns the oral arguments.

Sotomayor has never heard an abortion-related case, and her views on abortion can only be assumed, which might cause the pro-choice partisans some anxiety. However, I ask you: a liberal (if not leftist) female judge of Puerto-Rican ancestry who grew up in a single-parent household after her father died in a Bronx public-housing project. What would you expect her view on abortion to be? I dare you to count the stereotypes in that last sentence, but as far as I know most of them are true. However, I guess the question that might make Planned Parenthood is: how much DOES she support abortion? Hillary Clinton has been moving distinctly rightwards on the issue, to the point of saying that the ideal number of abortions was zero, and that it was imperative that Americans unite to move toward that number. Sotomayor's religion is, to me, unknown, but I'd guess Catholic. Catholicism strictly forbids abortion, so who knows? 

The main bones that commentators have to pick with Sotomayor are several troubling comments she has made, in speeches and in print. For example, she wrote in an essay that she "would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Rush Limbaugh called this "reverse racism." Rush, there's no such thing as "reverse" racism. Racism is racism, and this is rather bald-faced. Politico has an interesting discussion about this. Slate Magazine, however, says that in the context of the rest of the speech, Sotomayor was merely musing on how one's ethnic and family background affects your decision-making process. Still, it sounds like the remarks Larry Summers, the Dean of Harvard, made when he suggested that maybe, just maybe, there was a natural gap between men and women in scientific and mathematical achievement. He was fired in disgrace, but Sotomayor is a Hispanic woman so obviously she's entitled to say things like that. Uh-huh. 

Her other, more telling boo-boo:

This is more distressing. You may say: Well, what's wrong with that? That's because the courts have moved very far away from their original Constitutional mandate of interpreting the law, and truly more liberal courts have been doing so for years: that's how abortion and gay marriage became legal. Clearly, Sotomayor is of this school. Frankly, I have great contempt for them, just as I hate historical and Biblical revisionists who try to fog the truth to further their own agenda. 

Most commentators think Sotomayor is headed for a fairly easy confirmation, because the Republicans are a minority huddling behind the last stockade with their tails between their legs and because she didn't shoot anyone and is a woman. 

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It's summer! And this day, the second day of work on this post and the third of summer vacation, has been absolutely gorgeous; balmy and warm and delightful. I love it. I'm really not bored: I've been playing computer games, reading, and mindlessly web-surfing. It's the reading part I get the most pleasure out of, however. I'm on Book 15 of a 20 book series, as most of you know: the Master and Commander series ( also known as the Aubreyad), which is simply delightful. 

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I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh, and frankly, I still think he makes sense. However, during the waning years of the Bush administration and especially since I read Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher, I've moved away from the part of conservatism that he represents. I know longer find "Liberal hunting permits" and jokes about Barack Obama's middle name (Hussein) all that funny. This is slightly awkward since my dad (and, it must be confessed, most of the people with whom I discuss politics) are rabid Republicans. Have I moved to "the Left?" Absolutely not! It would still take a huge amount of soul-searching to get me to vote for a Democratic candidate even if he/she mirrored my views more closely than a Republican one. I think, instead, that I've moved from a booyah, America-worshipping, give-'em-both-barrels self-congratulatory unthinking set of beliefs to something deeper. I now believe that the modern Republican party is not the voice of true conservatism, and that capitalism has been mistaken for conservatism for many voters. Some Republican policies now seem absurd to me, like corporation-cozy government regulations that hurt small businesses, resistance to tax not because the government should be smaller and less thirsty but because we should have more money, and opposition to birth control (don't get me started on this: frankly, my view is that if a condom prevents an abortion, then go for it. Sexual immorality only wounds. Abortion is murder.) 

I think this move away from Rush Limbaugh (I still enjoy listening to him) has parallelled my move toward a deeper faith: at some point, one realizes that some Republican policies are as greedy and worshipful of Mammon as some Democratic policies are depraved and worshipful of the body. Both extremes distract from Christ, and so both are hindrances on our journeys toward Him. To many Americans, country and Christ go hand in hand. They need to remember that America is not the world's panacea, and that in the end it will pass away and anyone who was deluded into thinking that America-worship and Christ-worship are the same thing will be, to use a singularly American crudity, caught with their pants down. 

I don't know why I hid that confession (not, indeed a confession of wrong. More along the lines of St. Augustine's Confession: a confession of truth) at the end of this post, but I did. I hope everyone is having a great summer.

Movie Review: Wall-E

Abe, Dad, and I saw Wall-E last week. In short, it lived up to all the hype. Although somewhat...different at first (no dialogue, minimal characters, not much happening), it definitely got better. Wall-E and his pseudo-love interest EVE were incredibly animated, and the romantic moments they shared, dialogue-free as they were, were still incredibly touching.

I won't spoil the plot for you, but suffice to say that the humans depicted in the movie are almost scary. After a long time away from Earth in an enormous spaceship, they have grown used to moving around in hover-chairs and not interacting with the people around them. Their limbs have grown vestigial, and they are incredibly lazy. They are being ruled in an inoffensive way by the ship's computer, Otto, which is set on maintaining the status quo of comfortable boredom for the humans.

There are blatant overtones to Stanley Kubrick's incredibly well-made but exceedingly creepy and (to me) unenjoyable 1968 sci-fi movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." Wall-E's soundtrack even mimics 2001's minimalist, horn-centric style. Although less biting than Kubrick's movie, Wall-E still has an aura of actually making a statement--a first in a Pixar film. Previously, they have been very enjoyable but in the end largely meaningless children's movies. With Wall-E, Pixar has grown up. Older children, and even teenagers such as myself (although I've always been fascinated by Pixar--I was just at the right age when "Toy Story" came out. I was the original audience), will enjoy it more than younger children, simply because they will be able to understand it better. Anyone who has seen 2001, however, and thought it creepy as I did, might see a little too much of that in Wall-E.

Wall-E, the precocious and outmoded packrat garbage robot, the last of his kind on Earth, still cleaning up the junk after seven hundred years, is the most lovable Pixar character since...since forever. My favorite Pixar movie remains "The Incredibles," but I have to say that Wall-E is a better character by far than any in that movie.

On a wider scale, Conservative critics--namely Frederica Matthewes-Greene, have faulted the movie for its environmental message, but Rod Dreher on his blog, Crunchy Con (my favorite Conservative blog of all time), thinks that it is Aristotlean and even Conservative.

I have to say, I think he's right. If not Conservative, it's certainly traditionalistic. And that, for a Hollywood movie, is quite a departure. Pixar truly breaks the Hollywood stigma.

Synopsis: Watch it!

The Wiki Paradox

Wiki is the new web. The "wiki," according to Wikipedia--Wiki Rex--is a "collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content..." This sounds rather boring, but in reality, it's nothing short of incredible. Consider that among the 2,411,306 English-language articles on Wikipedia with more being added as we speak, only five or ten are protected from edition by non-members. I, being a member, can edit any one of these articles. This is jaw-dropping, at least for me. Anyone with an email address can join, and if they wished it, could potentially destroy--if not the entire system, than various important articles--and it would be very hard, nay, impossible, to bring it back to it's former state.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the greatest development in democracy since representative government: Wikipedia.

Why, you ask, does Wikipedia work? Why don't people use their power of edition to destroy it? The answer is at once simple and complicated: it works because democracy does. They don't destroy it because they believe in it, as we believe in democracy.

I have taken, I'm not exaggerating, a LOT of heat over the fact that I love Wikipedia and edit it. In fact, according to Weird Al Yankovic's song "White and Nerdy," editing Wikipedia is one of the chief hallmarks of a white nerd. I already knew I was a white nerd, so that doesn't worry me overmuch.

I can see why a certain person who will remain nameless can scoff at Wikipedia; in many instances it falls short of a good source of information, especially where schoolwork is concerned. As a reference source, it falls short of, say, the Encyclopedia Brittanica--but more about that later. So, if you want to learn much about one thing, especially where the accuracy of the information has a direct correlation with your GPA, Wikipedia is not the best source for you. If, however, you want to learn a little about many things, then nothing--I repeat, nothing--is better than Wikipedia.

John J. Miller had an interesting article about Wikipedia in the April 21 issue of National Review, entitled "Liberal Web." It was mainly concerned with the liberal bias of many Wikipedia editors, but some illuminating general facts about the website as a whole appear as well.

A couple of years ago, the journal Nature compared a sampling of scientific entries found on Wikipedia with those published in Encyclopedia Brittanica. It determined that the newcomer was almost as trustworthy as the old hand.

That's quite impressive; even more so when we consider that if this study was made in, say, 2004, a web lifetime has passed since then. Heck, in 2004, AOL was still a heavy-hitter and Netscape Navigator was still a respectable web-browser, and Mozilla Firefox and Facebook didn't exist. We can only assume that it's become far more accurate since then.

The article goes on to blame the defeat of Sen. George Allen (R-VA) in 2006 to the disparity between his Wikipedia article and that of his opponent, Jim Webb. That sounds like grasping at straws, but with more and more voters making their decision by what they see when they google a candidate--and Wikipedia is almost always near the top of these searches--it's all too possible.

In some aspects, this article is unsatisfying. It concentrates on the partisan elements of Wikipedia, ignoring to some extent its redeeming qualities. The article concludes by exhorting Conservatives to become Wikipedians, or else "the Wikipedia entry for 'United States general elections, 2008' may include results that no amount of clever editing will rub away." That may indeed be true, and in some aspects that is a scary thought. I am the only Conservative, nay the only person, I know who has a Wikipedia membership, so I gather that it's my responsibility to tackle liberal bias on Wikipedia. I will do my best.

Wikipedia is a true democracy, not a representative one like our own. Wikipedia has done to the encyclopedia what Athens did for government, and with the inestimable influence of the internet--and it can only grow more so--Wikipedia may even have the same far-reaching consequences that Athens, a petty city-state on a fragmented peninsula, had on the world. And that, for something completely intangible, is a paradox. Welcome to the digital age.

Update: For a shock at what Wikipedia can do, check this out.