I Hate the Red Sox

I might hate them almost as much as I hate the Yankees.

Almost.

Now the kids all tell Old Feemus not to "playa hate." I only vaguely understand what that means, but I am afraid that I might be in violation. Because hate I do. But I don't hate the playa, I hate the front office.

After paying over $50 million JUST TO TALK to Daisuke Matsuzaka, the Sox have now signed him to a $50+ million contract, bringing the total amount of their investment to over $103 million. For one player.

That's more than many teams spend for their entire payroll.

It's not just the obscenity of outlay. It's that the cloyingly self-described "Red Sox Nation" persists in whining about how much money the Yankees have.

Get fucking over it, Sox fans. You won the World Series already.

Peel the tired "Yankees Suck" bumper stickers off the cars you don't know how to drive and get used to this fact: You're one of the fucking Haves. Let the Have-Nots do the whining.

They should get at least that much.

A Christmas Story

My department had its holiday party last night.

These are always interesting affairs. The logic of getting a hundred or so socially awkward people together and adding alcohol eludes me. I always think that there is a really good parlor game just waiting to be invented for events like these. I see it involving the DSM-IV, a copy of Jane Eyre, and a dart board. I think I'll call it "Guess My Affliction!"

The details aren't quite worked out yet.

At any rate, I ended up talking to this guy I quite like. But the holiday party just brings out awkwardness.

Him: Did you hear that Sting has a new album out?

Me: [In full avoidance mode] I like The Police...

Him: It's lute music.

Me: Oh...

Him: Renaissance lute music.

Me: Well, um, is there any other kind?

Him: I just can't think of anything more awesome. I mean, Sting and lute music.

Me: We're very different people, you and I.

Let Him Dangle

Florida and California have suspended execution by lethal injection after it took over half an hour to kill Angel Diaz.

There's no painless way to kill people and we should stop pretending that there is. Death to a healthy body requires traumatic injury. Traumatic injury brings with it a pretty darned big risk of pain.

I applaud the humanity of Jeb Bush's decision (not a sentence I ever thought I'd write in sincerity--just one of life's surprises, I guess). I don't think, though, that we are going to find an unproblematic way to kill people. We should stop trying.

This search for a painless way to execute prisoners isn't new, of course. We all know that the guillotine and the electric chair and the gas chamber were all devised as humane ways of exectuing prisoners. But I don't think it's the prisoner's pain that we are trying to palliate so much as our own sense that there is something overreaching in a death sentence. We are so invested in finding a a method that isn't cruel, because we know on some level that the whole enterprise is contrary to some fundamental value.

We're looking for clinical solutions to a moral problem. We won't find them. To look for a painless way of ending life is to mystify the fact that it necessarily involves inflicting injury.

What's disturbing to me is the way the death penalty has become a litmus test for politicians' "toughness on crime." The turning point was assuredly Mike Dukakis's response to Bernard Shaw's question: "If your wife were raped and murdered, wouldn't you support the death penalty?"

You notice that Kitty Dukakis didn't just get murdered, she had to get imaginatively raped first. Nice, Mr. Shaw.

Old Mike stuck to his principles and the American people thought he was a jerk and ever since the Democrats have tried to prove their equal bloodthirstiness. The most chilling example has to be Bill Clinton's return to Arkansas during the 1992 election season to preside over the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a man who was essentially lobotomized in a suicide attempt. He was not capable of participating in his own defense. He had no memory of his crimes and did not understand either the legal procedings or what was at stake in the death penalty.

He didn't eat the pie from his last meal--he was saving it for later.

And Bill Clinton thought that justice would best be served by having this man executed. That's a peculiar notion of justice.

Of course, one of the big problems with the death penalty is in its administration--over a hundred death row inmates have been exonerated of their crimes. Not had their cases revisted on the basis of legal problems with the trial, but exonerated. Not to mention all the folks who are on death row and being denied an appeal (or a DNA test), even though, say, their lawyers were sleeping during the trial. And the poorer and blacker the inmate, the more likely he is to get the needle.

But it falsifies the matter to talk about the death penalty in terms of its inherent moral value and the way it is administered. The way that it's administered isn't neatly separable from its ethical status. To claim that it is, is to exist in the world of the thought experiment: "What if there was this really really unredeemable bad guy, and we know he did it and he had a really good lawyer and we have this humane way to kill him and he raped Kitty Dukakis--well then would you support capital punishment?"

Sorry, it just doesn't work like that.

Worst. Sentence. Ever,

'The in-choate in-fans ab-original para-subject cannot be theorised as functionally completely frozen in a world where teleology is schematised into geo-graphy.'

Who says it can't?

I Wish I'd Said That...

Today I heard the greatest definition of sentimentality:

Unfelt emotion, profoundly unfelt.

Beta Ate My Blog

Does anyone know how to unBeta this blog?

I switched over to Beta because Blogger kept pestering me to. And apparently, I am a very compliant guy.

But I hate it. You can't "search all blogs" from it. I hate that.

But I can't figure out how to return the old blog back to the way she was. When she was just alpha.

Help?