Tue, December 12, 2006
Ban Whatever I Hate
Avid clickers of the Buzzworthy links will already be familiar with Reason magazine; we read their South Park interview today, and a few other articles, including this one:
The Race to Ban What's Bad For Us
The article says it's not cool to treat adults like children who need their decisions made for them. One segment of the population shouldn't get to tell another what it can't do. Woo hoo! Legalize gay marriage – it's not hurting you! Nudity on network TV – don't look if you don't want to! Abortions for teens – it's their business!
Whoa, wait a minute. The fine folks at Reason have lumped smoking bans in with all this. I can't stand up for that – smoking sucks! And – damn what Penn & Teller say – it's bad for the people around you, not to mention way obnoxious. And only stupid people do it, who should have their decisions made for them! If you've got a cigarette in your mouth and you're not an actor playing a pedophile in a movie-of-the-week, you've proven that you're not capable of making good decisions, and society should step in.
Of course, the reality here is that I'm just a giant hypocrite. (If you define your terms vaguely enough, everyone is.) I wholeheartedly agree with this article, but I want to make an exception for smoking bans – not because I have a really valid argument for doing so, but because I hate smoking. I do think people should be free to make their own informed choices, but I also think I shouldn't have to throw a perfectly good sweater in the wash just because you want to suck down a Lucky Strike on the same cafe patio where I'm eating my crab cakes. I know, I know: When they came for the smokers, I said nothing... It's a slippery slope from non-smoking restaurants to eugenics; I get that. But I'm happy with a pretty big part of that slope, so I say, let's slide! At least it'll make for some smoke-free lunches along the way.
That's the fun of onebee. In Debate class, you could hand my ass to me if I stood up and said "freedom is for everyone... except smokers." You could cry "hypocrisy!" and win. But here, I can wrap it up and take home the trophy with nothing more than: "Yeah. AND?!" Because nobody's going to change anybody's mind here; we're just having fun.
Also, on the subject of eugenics, what was so bad about that again? I mean, of course it's cruel and horrible on paper, but doesn't it make a lot of sense? Once a species has evolved to the point where it recognizes the benefits of selective breeding, isn't there a biological imperative to give that a shot? Instead we've got the welfare state (which I wholeheartedly embrace) essentially subsidizing the exact opposite. Of course it would be deplorable to make generalized judgments based on race or class or anything. But shouldn't it be okay to take people who get really into Deal or No Deal and just zap-fry their babymakers? I'm not talking about some self-appointed tribunal of "reasoned elders" making the call: let's just say if you can convince someone to sterilize him/herself – either by trickery, or by giving them a trade-off for something more important to them than genetic propagation (say, NASCAR tickets) – then that's okay. And bonus points if you kill a baby who cries on a plane. It's not the baby's fault at all; but I'm convinced in a dozen generations or so, we could weed that right out of the gene pool.
© onebee · all rights reserved
"danny" — Wed, 12/13/06 6:48pm
my school is having a math bee
Joe Mulder — Thu, 12/14/06 1:00pm
I'm sorry. I must take umbrage with this. This is patently ridiculous, and I can't allow it to go unchallenged.
(not because I have a baby myself; my baby doesn't cry on airplanes)
If I may first take issue with the casual assumption that it would only take "a dozen generations or so" to weed crying on airplanes out of the gene pool. The height of absurdity!
Even if, however, we were to take this laughable proposition as a given, I hardly share Mr. Simmons's supreme confidence that commercial air travel twelve generations hence – i.e., centuries from now – will resemble commercial air travel at present to such an overwhelming degree. Suppose that babies who cry while flying are bred out of existence, and that, years later, a mode of air travel is devised that is cheap, efficient and eco-friendly in degrees that are inconceivable to even the brightest minds of today, and in whose operation the cries of babies are essential! Mr. Simmons has obviously failed to consider such an eventuality.
What then? Will Mr. Simmons be around to offer yet another of his ever-so "helpful" suggestions?
I submit that he will not.
Bee Boy — Thu, 12/14/06 3:40pm
I was not a plane-crier either. Anna and I are the two awesomest babies I've ever known; don't think that wasn't a cornerstone of my theory.
But, you nailed me. I was absolutely, forehead-slappingly wrong about the future of air travel. In truth, the entire industry will collapse in mid- to late-2008 under the weight of increasingly absurd and costly security screening procedures. The only people with the patience to fly will be very clever terrorists, and all the planes not destroyed by the first few waves of their unchallenged attacks will be grounded and converted into kitschy retro-themed restaurants. ("The winner? Eastern Airlines cola!")
However! Humankind will be increasingly awesome because all the non-awesome babies will be aborted a few months post-partum. Think of it: most personality disorders can be corrected with good parenting. (Good parenting is in scarce supply these days, but that's a separate problem for now. And, again, Anna got very lucky.) If your toddler is an asshole, you can reason with it, and hope to raise a decent kid. But if you've got a plane-crying baby, you can't reason with it. Otherwise you'd patiently explain the havoc that fluctuating cabin pressure is wreaking on its Eustachian tubes, and the social covenant that prevents us from throwing a wailing tantrum in a confined space with strangers just because we're uncomfortable. (Without which we'd all be howling the whole time – have you seen what passes for "leg room"?!) But you can't reason with a baby; just like foreigners, they don't understand. So you have to select for the ones that don't need to be reasoned with – they're already awesome. By the time they're old enough to respond to parental input, you're already 9/10ths of the way there!
About that hypothetical future airliner powered by the cries of babies, though? You can always force an otherwise docile infant to cry if you want to. If we learned nothing else from Snakes on a Plane – or the works of Jill Greenberg – it's this. So, y'know... there!
(The point is: Mulder Fake Mad(tm)! Yay!)