The Anger of Compassion

Steroid Hysteria

Nick Gillespie on athletes using steroids:

Performance-enhancing drugs are simply one tool among many that top-level athletes use to maintain their edge. Yes, yes, if a given organization or sporting authority bans them, players should respect those rules. But I'm convinced that one of the main reasons drugs are banned is simply because they are "drugs" and we have a bizarre, fucked-up relation to drugs: We all practice better living through chemistry but we are quick to cordon off good drugs from bad.
Much of the anti-drug rhetoric in sports is that certain substances screw up the "natural" essence of the players and that they disrupt "the level playing field." If any of that is true, then why not ban weight training? Or off-season conditioning? Or players who fall outside of certain heights and weights that might give them "advantages"? Or any semi-secret strategy plans or routines devised by cagey coaches and managers? Or a countless number of other things that can give some players an edge? Why are drugs seen as contaminating sports in a way that other interventions--all of which are precisely designed to give indivduals and teams an advantage in competition--are not? Especially since, in the end, it's far from clear that drugs, any more than hugs, "raw talent," or a winning attitude, make the player? Success in sports is an unpredictable mixture of a thousand different variables. So why single out drugs--or more precisely a small subset of drugs--as pernicious?

I agree with Gillespie's "bizarre, fucked-up relation to drugs" diagnosis. In many cases that relationship is, I believe, one of simple Puritanism: people resent steroids because steroids work. Steroid use makes it possible to achieve things rapidly, in terms of strength, recovery, and hypertrophy, that are otherwise obtainable only through long, hard slogging. Therefore, use of steroids constitutes "cheating." I don't buy it.

Do people -- athletes and fans -- have a legitimate right to expect that a sports federation which bans anabolic steroid use among its athletes will not feature athletes who do incorporate steroids into their training regimen? Sure they do. Powerlifters who compete raw are at a serious disadvantage against those who compete juiced. But that doesn't make steroids, or steroid use, evil. And does Dianabol, to take one example, have a lot of side effects? Yep. So does aspirin. All drugs have side effects.

There's a more balanced -- even positive -- examination of steroid use and its application to anti-aging medicine here. Sample quote: “There’s a joke in the medical community: When someone has something nice to say about the work we’re doing, they use the word hormones. When they don’t have something nice to say, they like to call them steroids.”

Ahhhh, did someone mention Puritanism?

And They Lived Happily Ever After

According to this site's calculation of my biorhythms, these are my compatible celebrity matches:

Catherine Bach 99%
K.D. Lang 98%
Heather Thomas 98%
Tanya Roberts 98%
Janeane Garofalo 98%

Obviously there's quite a bit of validity to the idea of biorhythms, except that Ms. Lang is, er, not a meat-eater, shall we say?

(Hat tip: Tim Worstall)

Which Firefly Character Am I?

Cool.

You are Captain Malcolm Reynolds, aka. Mal or
Captain Tightpants. You saw most of your men
die in a war you lost and now you seek solitude
with a small crew that you are fiercely devoted
to. You have no problems being naked.


Which Firefly character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Hat tip to Daniel Schwartz)

Shaken, Not Stirred

When first we meet Admiral Sir Miles Messervy, he's reading a memo in his office:

Barely three months later, on the 13th April, there was passed in France Law No. 46685 entitled Loi Tendant a la Fermeture des Maisons de Tolerance et au Renforcement de la Lutte contre le Proxenitisme.

(When M. came to this sentence he grunted and pressed a switch on the intercom.

'Head of S?'

'Sir.'

'What the hell does this word mean?' He spelt it out.

'Pimping, sir.'

'This is not the Berlitz School of Languages, Head of S. If you want to show off your knowledge of foreign jawbreakers, be good enough to provide a crib. Better still, write in English.'

'Sorry, sir.'

M. released the switch and turned back to the memorandum.

"This" refers, of course, to the fictional world of M.I.6, the Secret Intelligence Service, and Admiral Sir Miles is the legendary M., the quite competent and completely in control Head of the Service. Actually, we don't even discover his name until we've read almost every book in the series. He's just M. Secret Service indeed!

S, by the way, is, according to the source, "the section of the Secret Service concerned with the Soviet Union." We don't meet him again in Casino Royale, although one of his subordinates is important to the story. Nor do we meet Clements, the head of Bond's department, although in the third story, Moonraker, we do learn that Bond is the senior operative of three in that department, in which one earns a Double-O number due to having had to kill in the course of an assignment.

As for James Bond himself, we meet him, and the series of books, thus:

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling -- a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension -- becomes unbearable, and the senses awake and revolt from it.

James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough, and he always acted on the knowledge. This helped him to avoid staleness and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes.

He shifted himself unobtrusively away from the roulette he had been playing and went to stand for a moment at the brass rail which surrounded breast-high the top table in the salle privee.

Le Chiffre was still playing and still, apparently, winning. There was an untidy pile of flecked hundred-mille plaques in front of him. In the shadow of his thick left arm there nestled a discreet stack of the big yellow ones worth half a million francs each.

Bond watched the curious, impressive profile for a time, and then he shrugged his shoulders to lighten his thoughts and moved away.

Le Chiffre is the villain in 1953's Casino Royale, and quite the villain he is. The evil organization in this tale is SMERSH, Russian for "Death to Spies," but the action between Bond, Le Chiffre, and SMERSH is ... well, just read Casino Royale.

We also meet the American Felix Leiter, Bond's CIA pal in many of the novels and movies:

'I may be able to help,' said Leiter. 'I was a regular in our Marine Corps before I joined this racket, if that means anything to you.' He looked at Bond with a hint of self-deprecation.

'It does,' said Bond.

It turned out that Leiter was from Texas. While he talked on about his job with the Joint Intelligence Staff of N.A.T.O. and the difficulty of maintaining security in an organization where so many nationalities were represented, Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemd to come from Texas.

Casino Royale, Ian Fleming's first novel, was followed in the spring of 1954 by Live and Let Die, and the two form a kind of pair, really, in that they are far more violent than any of the rest of the books in the series. Another quality they share is that they are quite unlike the James Bond films which share their names -- actually, most of the Bond movies depart radically from the novels, to the detriment of the movies. The very best, by far, of the onscreen Bond jobs was the first one, Dr. No. Those accusing me of arriving at this judgment because of the presence of Ursula Andress in the movie are obviously not among the literary and artistic cognoscenti, to say the least.

So there you have it. The James Bond of the Ian Fleming novels had it all: the facility with languages, with unarmed combat, and with women; the cars (Bentley coupe); the pistols; the languages (French and German, at least, and some Russian); the Macedonian cigarettes rolled for him by Morland's of Grosvenor Square; the patriotism (even if he hated the new pound notes of the 1960s); the wit; the ruthlessness. The Bond of the movies wasn't witty, he was a wise-cracking fop with a Walther PPK.

Oh, and he had, of course, a drink: the Vesper, but you'll have to read Casino Royale to find out what it was, because it's in none of the movies, and I'm not revealing it here. "Shaken, not stirred..." well, check it out.

And what about "he always acted on the knowledge," huh? How's that for integrity in action?

Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, died on August 12, 1965.

Healthy Forest, Rotten Trees?

One of the gems in The Ayn Rand Column is "The Only Path to Tomorrow," which appeared in the January 1944 issue of The Reader's Digest. I have an interest in Ayn Rand's early writings, partly because of the generosity she showed in giving credit to her own favorite writers and those who influenced her (consider her comments about Victor Hugo, Aristotle, the Founding Fathers, Dostoyevsky, von Mises), and partly because she came to prominence as a writer at about the same time as many of the lights of America's own "Old Right" began to fade (John T. Flynn, for example, and Garet Garrett and H.L. Mencken).

Anyway, a project of mine is re-reading a lot of Rand's work in its chronological order, so spending some time on "The Only Path to Tomorrow" is part of that, too. In conjunction with my audio cassettes of Basic Principles of Objectivism and a close re-reading of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (with some help from Gary Hull's excellent little booklet, A Study Guide to Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, I should have quite the nice little organized study of Objectivism laid out, using only materials I already own. (For the record, I'll also be using another booklet, A Study Guide to the Ethics of Objectivism by Leonard Peikoff and David Kelley, of historical only as it's out of print, and I intend to acquire the Understanding Objectivism lecture series as well. In the fullness of time...)

"The Only Path to Tomorrow" begins this way:

The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.

How true! Consider that for Ayn Rand, writing this as she did at the end of 1943, it was already clear that America's military enemy, the totalitarian Nazi Germany, would lose World War II: by then, it was only a matter of time (Fascist Italy had already surrendered). It was already clear, too -- to Ayn Rand if not to many of America's political and "moral" leaders -- that in our wartime ally, Soviet Russia, we already had another threat, indeed, mortal enemy. A threat which existed because of its totalitarianism.

Stripping away the concrete differences (such as who benefitted from specific policies in each totalitarian regime), it's also clear that the German and Russian states of the day were totalitarian in the same way and to the same degree. It's hard to split hairs, after all, over the meaning, interpretation, and implementation of "total." This supports Rand's use of the term "totalitarian philosophy" as opposed to "Nazi" or "Fascist" or "bushido" or even "Marxist-Leninist" philosophy, a use which I think is well-defended by her comments, later in the column, on individualism.

Such use also points the way, though, to today's struggles within the Republican Party (free markets and capitalism vs. capture by the Religious Right), the Democratic Party (individual liberties vs. doctrinaire Leftism), and, on a larger scale, to today's war between Islam and the West. It is with this last that we see the truth of Rand's comment that the best ally of totalitarianism is not "the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies." As evidence, consider anyone who brands Islam as a "religion of peace."

"Confusion of its enemies," indeed.

Rand then attacks the idea of using force to impose a condition of "the common good." In an economical number of paragraphs, she begins with "Horrors which no man would dare consider for his own selfish sake are perpetrated with a clear conscience by 'altrusist' who justify themselves by -- the common good," and concludes with

We must learn to reject as total evil the conception that "the common good" is superior to individual rights. General happiness cannot be created out of general suffering and self-immolation. The only happy society is one of happy individuals. One cannot have a healthy forest made up of rotten trees.

That last sentence, incidentally, should be a more well-known Rand quote than it is.

The column goes on to advocate limits on government and includes a beautifully succinct justification of the right to property:

The right of liberty means man's right to individual action, individual choice, individual initiative and individual property. Without the right to private property no independent action is possible.

Nicely put. In other words, property rights are human rights.

"The history of mankind," Rand continues, "is the history of the struggle between the Active Man and the Passive, between the individual and the collective."

While men are still pondering upon the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, every page of history cries to us that there is but one source of progress: Individual Man in independent action. Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. A savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ah, the climax of the piece, and one of her most famous one-liners as well. By this standard there never was any Nazi civilization, never was any Soviet civilization. I think most rational people will agree with me here. But I'll go beyond that: by the standard of "setting man free from men," there was never any "Christian" civilization, either, with the exception of the Renaissance (quite an exception, that) and there damn sure never was any sort of "Islamic" civilization. Never was, ain't none now, never will be.

The Only Path to Tomorrow. Great little piece.

To Our Childrens' Childrens' Children...

A cave, somewhere deep in the Hindu Kush…

ANAS: They’ll go in to the subway system here, get on separate trains going in different directions, then detonate their nail bombs simultaneously at 9am. Once they have killed and maimed dozens of innocent people, we issue our demands. Any questions?

ABDULLAH: Demands? We’ve never done that before… What exactly are the demands?

USAMA: We're giving Bush two weeks to withdraw completely all infidel soldiers from the Lands of the Believers, and if he doesn't agree immediately, we’ll blow up more trains.

AYMAN: In London?

ANAS: In London, New York, Rome, Sydney, Berlin, Tokyo, Toronto, Paris, Amsterdam…

USAMA: And of course, we point out that they bear full responsibility when we slaughter their people, and that we shall not submit to blackmail!

TERRORISTS: No blackmail!

USAMA: They've bled us dry, the infidels. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers.

See how far you read before you recognize it. Well done, Citizen Smash.

(Hat tip: Dean Esmay)