I’m an armchair design buff. I love typefaces and color schemes and knowing the difference between esoteric design styles and complex color theory (like why brown and pink look great together, but not brown and red). Somehow this negates my having a penis, and the more complex set is clearly unnecessarily so. This is exemplary of how people elevate elective ignorance. “Blue is blue” except when it’s not. Teal and turquoise are clearly different. And why is this a gender thing? Last time I checked, every kid in school preferred the 64 colors box of crayola crayons to the 8 color box. Or maybe feminism is responsible for this.

Crap like this is why Ron Paul is in the same party as Dick Cheney and why Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and Sarah Palin are more well known than Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek among “limited government” types. Because everything gets lumped together under a guise of populist bullshit. Stop cowering behind your ignorance by making it seem like being more specific and informed is somehow frivolous.

In academic life, the word has comparably mischievous uses. Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies: “gender studies,” “women’s studies,” “Asian-Pacific-American studies,” and dozens of others. The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves—thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine. All too frequently, such programs are job-creation schemes for their incumbents, and outside interest is actively discouraged. Blacks study blacks, gays study gays, and so forth.

As so often, academic taste follows fashion. These programs are byproducts of communitarian solipsism: today we are all hyphenated—Irish-Americans, Native Americans, African-Americans, and the like. Most people no longer speak the language of their forebears or know much about their country of origin, especially if their family started out in Europe. But in the wake of a generation of boastful victimhood, they wear what little they do know as a proud badge of identity: you are what your grandparents suffered. In this competition, Jews stand out. Many American Jews are sadly ignorant of their religion, culture, traditional languages, or history. But they do know about Auschwitz, and that suffices.

I’m not 100% with him on the “identity studies people study only themselves” idea, given I’m a straight male studying feminism and queer theory. But it certainly doesn’t disprove his point. I’m the exception to the rule in that department. The whole essay is marvelous.

Ultimately, the bioethicist presents his analysis to the designated decision-maker–typically a physician or an administrator–who is accountable to his patients and his employer. Bioethicists should not advocate for patients or physicians or hospitals; they should advocate for disinterested moral deliberation. Nor should they mistake consensus, which is required in order to take action, for the discovery of moral truth. The role of the bioethicist, then, should be to illuminate debates, not to settle them. In the parlance of medicine, they do not have prescribing privileges.

Regardless of what one things of Satel or the AEI, this is a true statement. Unlike typical screeds from the AEI, Satel’s piece applies to advocates and opponents of frontier biotech research alike. Whether one is for or against therapeutic cloning and genetic enhancement, Satel lays out reasons why an ethicist’s position in policy should be limited. Of course, her writing isn’t all even handed. She takes a nasty swipe at Arthur Caplan – whose position on organ donation I disagree with, but of whom I am generally a fan – and uses him to typify a liberal bioethicist:

Caplan is a bioethicist; his titles [at UPenn] imply an expertise in ethics. [Douglas] Hanto served as the chair of the Ethics Committee at the American Society of Transplant Surgeons. Yet what are we to make of their willingness to issue life-and-death pronouncements involving other people? Well, we know a few things about them. First, that they share an absolutist approach to egalitarianism: If all cannot benefit, then none should benefit. Second, as ethicists they presume to know how despairing patients should conduct their private affairs. And third, they appear to have few qualms about conveying to desperately ill people a message of hopelessness: Be passive, dying patients–wait your turn and take no initiative to save your own life.

Clearly over the top, but there are kernels of truth in her rhetoric. Neither Caplan or Hanto cheerfully tell someone they are going to die anymore than Leon Kass or Francis Fukuyama does when they say that “death gives life meaning.” Isn’t it funny how Satel managed to not mention that, for Kass and Fukuyama, pain and suffering are the great character builders and all you sick people should just toughen up, grin, and bear it? What an odd omission. But she wins back major points with her general critique of conservative bioethics:

So deft are some conservative bioethicists at conjuring apocalyptic visions of a post-human future that the journalist Will Saletan has characterized them as “standing athwart history, sighing ‘Oy.’” He has a point. To be sure, they sigh with erudition and with eloquence. Should conservative bioethicists–or any bioethicist, for that matter–counsel us on reasons for vigilance? Yes, but too often they warn us not to make any progress at all. There is an irony here. For all the deference that conservative bioethics pays to the implicit wisdom of the ages, it rarely mines the recent past for lessons. Instead of concentrating on the ancients, why not also study the history of in vitro fertilization, paid egg donation, and surrogate motherhood to learn about cultural resistance and adaptation to such practices?

Even better, why not consider earlier practices that were deemed repugnant in their day but are now unexceptionable? The list of these moral apocalypses that never were is a distinguished one: vaccination, anesthesia, blood transfusions, life insurance, artificial insemination. Perhaps the systematic analysis of these practices holds little interest for conservative bioethicists because most of society now regards them as nonissues. Or more likely, they regard an objective assessment as irrelevant given their convictions that certain practices pose such an affront to human dignity that they should not be pursued at all, no matter how much good can come of them.

True that. (H/T Dvorsky)

“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically,” he reportedly said. “Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children.”

“In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord,” he added. “There’s a special punishment Christians would suggest.”

I wonder why Palin isn’t in arms. But then again, she did contemplate aborting Trig. Maybe God knew what was in her heart and afflicted the poor child with Down. But she did flip out over the whole Family Guy retard joke. Speaking of:

“I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line ‘I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska’ was very funny. I think the word is ‘sarcasm.’ In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes,” – Andrea Fay Friedman, the girl with Down Syndrome who voiced the character for Family Guy.

(H/T Kink on Tap and The Daily Dish)

Look around the globe. One of every three people in China now uses the Internet. The same is true in Iran. Hundreds of millions of users are on Facebook, often communicating across borders. Four billion people now have mobile phones. India has nearly 400 million; Bangladesh has another 50 million. And phones are getting smarter. Apple has sold 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches. Another 25 million people use BlackBerrys. In the United States, the number of text messages sent each month has passed 100 billion.

How powerful is wireless communication? Consider this: Three years ago, we upgraded the software of two vehicles on Mars. On Earth, we’re mobilizing people and solving problems at unprecedented speed. Last month, the U.S. government put 10 red balloons in random places around the country and challenged contestants to find them. The winning team, using social networking, succeeded in less than nine hours.

Gadgets have swept the world before, but mobile computing devices are different. Through applications and upgrades, they can acquire new powers. Apple alone offers more than 100,000 apps and has delivered more than two billion downloads. Phones are becoming maps, TVs, libraries, shopping tools, video cameras, car keys, and credit cards.

If you aren’t following Saletan on twitter, you should be.

["Apple vs Obama" - Slate]