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Prohibition was a curious and unusual time. What convinced a nation of alcohol consumers to turn on a dime and outlaw a drug so famously successful in the West for thousands of years?

We’ve gotten back on track now: Alcohol is both a blessing and a vice. We treat alcohol addiction as not merely a personal failing, but as a medical problem as well. Which is as it should be. Addiction is more than vice. Addictions effects are societal, not merely personal. Societies have a vested interest in reducing the effects of alcoholism. We may want to punish the alcoholic for his moral problem (which it is), but we recognise that it’s cheaper and more effective to treat the problem as an addiction (which it also is). So for the moral component, we’ve turned to support groups like AA. But for the addiction problem we’ve also turned to medicine, which is by far the most effective way to treat addiction.

Cooler minds have prevailed in the war against prohibition, though neo-prohibitionist groups like MADD still exist. (For all the good work MADD has done with drinking and driving, they’re still just another bunch of prohibitionist crazies, and it’s no co-incidence that they’re mothers. The nanny state is almost always driven by mothers who “know best”.)

The war against drugs is another thing altogether. Our culture is schizophrenic with regard to drugs. The number of people incarcerated for drug offences in the US is startling, and almost certainly a great evil perpetrated against the citizens of that nation.

Why have we collectively chosen the legal system (police, lawyers, judges, prisons, parole boards, etc.) as the best way to deal with addiction in this case? And when addiction isn’t a widespread problem, especially in the case of pot, why have we criminalised it?

It seems to me that drugs need to be treated the same way that alcohol is treated. That’s not to say we need to legalise all drugs. Some drugs are very dangerous indeed and need to be controlled if not eliminated. But why not treat drug addiction with support groups and medical intervention instead of cops and courts? It seems the rational way to move forward, at least to me.

Maybe we’re at the point now in our pointless, expensive, and liberty-infringing “war on drugs” that we were almost a century ago with prohibition: Figuring out that it’s not worth it.

There’s a lot to be said for the preservation of life. It’s a good thing: All men and women are made in the image of God, and every life is precious. Killing someone who is made in the image of God is an abominable crime, no matter how you slice it. Even when the ancient scriptures of Genesis sanction the death penalty (for instance), Jesus takes it a step further and asks only those who are without sin to kill. Clearly, we’re not supposed to do it. This is why I detest (among other things) murder, abortion, and the death penalty. Death before its time is horrific. Death itself, even in the natural course of things, is described in scripture as a great enemy, a destroyer. So even what we see as the natural course of things is highly unnatural.

But this isn’t the last word on the subject, of course. This is my idealism, that death is unnatural, that war shouldn’t happen, and that every life is precious. The less poetic reality is that too many lives endanger all lives. Overpopulation is a grave concern, even if it is slowing. Giving every person a good life in a world populated with over 6 billion people is impossible without turning the entire planet into a gaunt, ravaged version of what God declared “good” in Genesis. Surely, when God said “go forth an multiply” he didn’t mean multiply until a large percentage are starving, and when he said “subdue the Earth” he didn’t mean to beat it into submission and then pour engine oil on it!

I have to face the reality that although life is precious, an unlimited population surge isn’t ideal. I have to admit that individually life is good and must be promoted, but collectively too much of it is bad and must be controlled. This is among the reasons I don’t have a problem with birth control, for instance (I know this seems silly to say in this day and age, but still, it must be said, as a great percentage of the world still has a problem either getting access to fertility control, or accepting it into their belief system).

This isn’t the only prosaic reality I have to face, either. Another reality is war. Ideally, wars shouldn’t happen. Christian nations, especially, shouldn’t start them. (That a supposedly Christian president not only started two, but started at least one of them by lying about his reasons, using a national tragedy as a smokescreen, is especially ironic and heart-rending.)

We do start them, however. And because we’ve all partially accepted the idea that life is precious, we can’t end them very well. In Afghanistan, for instance, we just don’t have the guts to do what we need to do: Kill a lot of people. I think the Byzantine Empire (also nominally Christian but not hamstrung by our tricky morality and our even more tricky political system) internalised this quite well. They didn’t hesitate to simply raze wide swaths of their occupied countries to make a point.

In the West the morality that we’ve internalised (that live is precious) doesn’t allow us to take part in a proper war. We start wars, but we can’t end them. We invade and try to build and civilise and try to leave behind democracy and human rights. We try to leave behind the very things that make it impossible for us to win the war. We simply can’t do what’s necessary to end wars. We can’t absolutely decimate a country, carpet-bomb it back into the stone age, make a point, and leave. We can’t even properly occupy a country!

It’s no co-incidence that the British Empire began to wane as the British monarchs became less powerful, as they morphed into figureheads instead of actual heads of state. You can’t run a proper war while trying to be elected to office. You can’t conduct a long term operation, because even when the bloodlust of a people may be awakened at a certain time, that bloodlust is almost certain to die down as soon as the people’s sons and daughters start dying in a foreign land for a reason that the people suddenly realise they don’t understand.

Democracies can’t fight wars. Christian democracies even more so. We shouldn’t be starting them. Our foreign policies should be non-interventionist at the very least. Let the rest of the world figure it out for themselves. The West can’t be the world’s police, and by this I really mean can’t. We don’t have an ideological foundation that permits it. We are too gentle, assuming that everyone has the same ideological and moral foundation, when of course they don’t. Where we try to avoid collateral damage, other ideologies actually encourage it. We can’t compete on our terms and win, and we can’t compete on their terms without selling our souls.

War is the ultimate zero-sum process. No-one ever really wins. It never accomplishes anything because it is simply a tool of destruction. There is no such thing as a just war. No such concept exists in scripture, as hard as we try to shoe-horn it in.

The idea that we can invade a country and change it is flawed from the get-go. The idea that we can sway hearts and minds at the end of a weapon is as silly as it is when Islamists try it. Real change happens on an individual basis. Real political change, real cultural change, real change period happens when the people individually and collectively make a decision. You can’t bring democracy to a people who will simply elect dictators. You can’t convince a population to value human life when life seems (for good reason) exceedingly cheap, especially by killing to make the point.

Sometimes a tv show, a book, or a film comes out, and the pedigree of those involved is so strong that it must be good. You feel compelled to love this product. But you don’t. And maybe you feel guilty about that, or disloyal for not loving their creation.

It happens to everyone. It happens to me regularly. So I’ve decided to put together a list of things I should have liked, but didn’t.

Steven Erikson’s “Dust of Dreams”

“Gardens of the Moon” is such a wonderful book, as are most of the rest of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, up until “Reaper’s Gale”, which is good but muddled and very, very slow. “Dust of Dreams” is muddled writ large: The book slogs its way through 800 unnecessary pages before anything actually happens. I like a good character study as much as anyone, but like the TV show “House”, a large part of the book seems to be people’s and creatures’ mumbled introspection. Most of this introspection reads like they just got their character description and used a thesaurus.

I’m reading through “Dust of Dreams” a second time; hopefully this second reading will help change my mind about the book (which I desperately want to like), but so far it seems to be clarifying why I didn’t.

Snow Patrol’s “A Hundred Million Suns”

“Eyes Open” was a fantastic album. It wasn’t an ambitious technical and artistic masterpiece, but it was full of great riffs, great tunes, and get-to-the-point lyrics. Even “Final Straw”, with it’s many missteps, can be forgiven its weaknesses in light of its strengths. But “A Hundred Million Suns” was utterly forgettable. I listened to it once and forgot about it… until I was unfortunately reminded of it again today.

When “A Hundred Million Suns” first came out, I was excited to hear it. I love Snow Patrol, in spite of myself. I wanted it to be another permanent-repeat record like “Eyes Open”. But it wasn’t. It’s alright, I suppose, but a thousand other bands are doing more exiting things.

The Good Guys

Let’s be clear here: I love Matt Nix. Burn Notice is a fantastic television series (and USA is a fantastic network for a particular type of tv show). I love Bradley Whitford. If he wasn’t part of the cast of The West Wing, I don’t think I could watch the show. I love Colin Hanks. He has a sort of baby-faced good-boy charm, which explains his casting. His appearances on Numb3rs were some of that show’s highlights for me.

But The Good Guys? Meh. Blah. Feh. It should work. It’s got that impressive pedigree. It’s got the low-key humour, the action, all that stuff, but it doesn’t have the edge that Burn Notice has. It’s lacking a certain je ne sais quoi. Hard to put into words, but I get fidgety when I watch The Good Guys. I want to do something else. And so it is that I’ve stopped watching.

Finding Nemo, A Bug’s Life, Cars

Ah, Pixar. So very many fabulous films have flown from your beautiful nest. Toy Story was (literally) a revolutionary film, but also a film full of wonder and adventure. Toy Story 2 was even better than Toy Story in almost every way. Monsters Inc (still the best Pixar film in my opinion) was stunningly original. The Incredibles is probably the best superhero film ever made, bar none. Wall-E was minimalistic, retro-futuristic, delightful, and showed that even without much dialogue and exposition, a film can be moving and pointed. Up was almost indescribable; it had at its core a love story, but a love story wrapped in action and adventure. It was delightfully different from any other animated film I’ve ever seen, not simply in content, but in theme (who else could build an animated film on nostalgia alone?).

And then there are the other. Finding Nemo. A Bug’s Life. And especially, Cars. I didn’t connect with these films or enjoy watching them. I wanted to like them. I really did. I want to think the whole Pixar canon magical. But I can’t. Because of these three films.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

I’m starting to think Aaron Sorkin is a one-hit-wonder. He probably shouldn’t exist in television, instead sticking to plays and films. But there he was, first with Sports Night, an utterly baffling sitcom/not-sitcom. Not surprisingly, Sorkin was writing about writing. Then came the West Wing, where once again, Sorkin was writing about writing but managed to find a way to wrap the writing about writing in something a bit more exciting. The West Wing was a fantastic show for 4 seasons, and a middling show for 3 more, but it deserved the praise and the viewership it got. I especially enjoyed Matthew Perry’s bit part, as I quite like a lot of Perry’s work.

So let it be said that I adore Mr Sorkin’s writing (about writing or about anything, really; he could write about a toaster and toast and I would watch it), I like Mr Perry and wish him every possible success, and I think Mr Whitford is among the best television actors of our times.

How did Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip manage to stink so much? I’m not exactly sure. But its cancellation was a mercy killing. While writing about writing (again!), Mr Sorkin displayed a stunning lack of the funny that he somehow managed to bring to The West Wing, which was truly charming at its most jovial, and bitingly awesome at its most pointed. Something that Studio 60 lacked. Completely. For a show about comedy… it was too serious.

I’m not sure what Mr Sorkin has in store for the rest of his career (though I can image we’re going to have a show where Mr Sorking writes about writing something), but I think there’s a lesson to be learned here.

That’s All, Folks

I’m out of time here… but I’d love to hear some feedback on this. Anything you were supposed to love but didn’t? Hit me up in the comments.

Now, I’m no American. I’m apparently pretty close (I’m Canadian) but honestly, a lot of the stuff that goes on south of the border mystifies me. One thing we could all get behind here in Canada was that Barack Obama wasn’t white, was the underdog, and wasn’t George W. Bush. He seemed different. He seemed to believe in change. He seemed to want to run Washington differently. He seemed… fresh, unlike the string of tired politicians and has-beens both the Republicans and Democrats have been dragging up from the bottom of the barrel lately.

And then he won. It was hard not to get caught up in the groundswell of optimism. It was hard to not feel the great thrill of the victory, the inauguration, the speeches. I don’t usually get swept away with the crowds of hero-worshippers, but even I felt it. It was an almost magical time.

Reality always gets in the way though. There has been a wave of disappointment at Mr Obama’s handling of… well, almost anything. As a liberal, I’m disappointed; as a realist I’m not really surprised.

Let me sketch out a few reasons I’m disappointed in particular and liberals are disappointed in general.

We wanted something to wash the taste of George W. Bush out of our mouth. Instead we got George W. Bush 2.0.

Civil liberties. Warrantless wiretaps. Surveillance on citizens. Guantanamo Bay. The slow erosion of the right to privacy. These are some of the reasons we disliked Mr Bush. (Quite apart from his general buffoon-like public appearance.) And we came into Mr Obama’s administration thinking that was all going to change.

Of course, it didn’t change. Guantanamo Bay is still open. Civil liberties are still being pissed upon. The right to privacy is denied and privacy itself is disappearing. Warrantless wiretaps are still happening.

And Mr Obama is using the same legal language, the same arguments to continue these policies. We have a strange continuity between administrations that gives lie to the chant of “change”. There’s no change. It’s business as usual. Nero is gone, but the human torches are still burning.

We wanted wars to end. Instead we got two wars that aren’t ending.

The Iraq war was a huge, awful blemish on the already-soiled presidency of Mr Bush. No one really knows why the war was fought. No one really understands the motivations of Mr Bush or those people controlling him. All we know is that many bald-faced lies were told to start the war. A national tragedy was exploited to start the war. Sons, daughters, parents, grandparents: People of all stripes died in the way. And for what reason? No one knows. We can only guess.

It sounds like something out of 1984. It really does. We have always been at war with Iraq; and for a long time it seemed like we always were going to be at war with Iraq. And we just wanted it to end. I can’t speak for Americans, but from what I’ve read and from what I can imagine there was a nationally-felt sense of fatigue. The war that would not end needed to end, and soon.

Mr Obama promised that the war would be over. He said he would withdraw troops from Iraq. Yet here we are, and the war hasn’t ended. The troops are still there.

Not only that, but Mr Obama is sending more troops to Afghanistan! So instead of one war, there are two wars, neither of which seems likely to end soon.

We wanted fiscal discipline. Instead we got a radical increase in spending.

The jury is still largely out on whether stimulus helps or hinders an economy. Yet here we are spending (literally) trillions of dollars on stimulus, which has to be the most incredibly inefficient way to get an economy going every invented.

Add to that a badly-timed health care plan, and suddenly Mr Bush’s spendthrift ways seem again like a pattern Mr Obama is continuing. Instead of change, instead of a move towards austerity and fiscal constraint, we have a runaway train of spending that becomes more difficult to stop with every passing budget. (Pardon the pun.)

Our children will have to pay for our spending. Maybe their children’s children as well. They’re going to pay with coin or with collapse, but they will pay.

We should be looking at austerity measures Germany is so fond of. We should be adopting a posture of shoring up the fundamentals of the economy instead of plugging every hole in the dam with cash. We run the very real risk of developing an economy so addicted to the feedback loop of federal and state money that it can’t develop an innovate on its own (and I say this as a Canadian whose economy has been like this for decades; we a very, very low comparative productivity rate in Canada and I have a sneaking suspicion this might be way).

We should be adopting that posture of repayment long before reaching crises like Greece and Spain have been seeing. I don’t think the US will change until things become unbearably bad, but a visionary leader who wants change should probably be able to see at least that far ahead and be able to sell austerity to a waiting nation.

We wanted reform with teeth. Instead we got compromise and pandering.

I’m not going to say the Republicans are without fault here. They almost never are. This time around Republicans have taken a turn for the crazy, with birthers, and tea partiers, and Sarah Palin, and all sorts of crazy leaking out from under the floorboards. But the one thing that’s really characterized the Republicans during this administration is no willingness at all to play nice. No bipartisanship whatsoever. They oppose everything Mr Obama does, and this makes is hard to do things. So we need to compromise.

Good government is not made of compromise, just like good products are not designed by committee. There is no bravery in compromise, no radical break with the past in compromise, there is no glory in compromise. What compromise does have, though, is less risk.

You know, I’m going to say that it’s better to go big and fail than to go middle-of-the-road and succeed. It’s better to try to do the right thing than try to do the popular thing, or the easy thing, or the politically expedient thing.

You’re always going to have a hard congress to deal with. But that doesn’t mean you get to compromise on everything. You don’t get to give the farmhouse away but keep the silos.

We got more of the same.

Mr Obama promised not to be more of the same. Yet here he is, more of the same.

This is horrible in two different ways. First of all, he’s made a liar out of himself.

But to add insult to injury, with that he’s also proven himself to be every bit the “politics as usual” politician, who will say anything, promise anything, to get into power. And then when in power try desperately to hold onto it.

That’s why I’m deeply disappointed in Mr Obama. Not because he didn’t live up to the hype and the euphoria, but that he didn’t even try.

• The G-20 site, the police build up, the protesters, the violence: It’s all artificial.
• The site, Toronto, was chosen to showcase the city. Yet Toronto is pretty well known on the world stage. It’s not really hidden. And a summit of this type doesn’t give anyone a real positive image, you know? They could have chosen a remote Northern location (like Huntsville) to hold the G-20 and saved a billion dollars or so.
• The police buildup wasn’t about the police buildup per se, and certainly wasn’t about the G-20. It was more about the Mr Harper’s crime & punishment mentality (that has failed so very brutally in the US), and his desire to give more powers and more equipment to the police. They got their new toys, a shitload of money, and the power to arrest people and search bags for no reason whatsoever (a policy that has failed so brutally in the UK)
• The protests aren’t really about anything. They’re professional protesters who like to burn & break things. They bus in from other places, and the protests aren’t organic. Plus the protests were fairly small. Nothing much happened. The media are reacting like overactive children, the police are treating protesters like they’re the Vietcong, and our beloved Mayor Miller is running around flapping his hands like an angry chicken. Over a few burning police cars and a few broken windows. Compare that to, say, the 1999 WTO protest in Seattle. If anything, the protests have convincingly demonstrated that Canada is a hayseed backwater ruled by tinpot dictators and hysterical nannies.

Who are these man-children who get on the internet and act like spoiled teenagers? You can’t play video games until three in the morning anymore? You have chores and responsibilities? You can’t give every woman who walks by the old lingering leer? You can’t drink seventeen beers in a row because your internal organs and your children protest?

Well no shit. You’re a grown up. Act like it.

Listen, no-one forced you into any particular kind of life. You chose it. You chose to get married, to buy a house, to have kids, to get a dog. If you didn’t want those things, you could have had a different life, one where you just barely hung onto a job while paying the minimum possible attention to anything except your vapid male stereotype. Of course you don’t actually want that life, or you’d be doing it. So what’s with the bellyaching?

Man up. The default position of every life is hard. It’s not going to be easy, at least not very often, and you need to get used to that. You’re going to have to push your way through a lot of crap to get where you want to be. Stop whining about it. If you need help, get help. Get some friends to lean on.

All that stuff you have? The wife, the house, the kids? It’s what you chose. It’s worth it. You’re doing something important. Do it well and for the love of holy Moses, stop shitting up my interwebs with your whiny fake crises.

I have it at work and at home. People that just don’t answer email. You send them something… and nothing. Not a peep. No indication that they received your message, no quick reply, no courtesy.

It’s just rude. Don’t do it. It’s not Facebook or something where people just shout into the abyss and expect to hear nothing back. It’s an email. It carries a bit more weight, especially if you’re a friend or a business partner.

Just saying. If you email me and I don’t email back, you’re excused for thinking I’m not really that interested in you.

Yesterday, on Twitter, I asked how to define friendship. It set me thinking, though, about the different ways people interact, and the different kinds of friends people are.

I think people weight friendships with different values. I know, personally, I have several different values. They are:

How Much Would I Miss You If You Were Gone

Gotta be honest, apart from Laura, there aren’t really a whole lot of people that score high by this metric. There are few people I genuinely enjoy interacting with, and whose presence I would miss, but not acutely. And then there are my friends who I wouldn’t miss at all. I don’t know what to think of these people, really. Can you call someone a friend who you wouldn’t miss if they disappeared?

How Much I Enjoy Being Around You

This is mostly for irl friends only. I have a few pseudo-friends who make me feel awkward and uncomfortable. Others make me feel comfortable and at home in my own skin. There are people at church, for instance, in both camps.

How Often Do We Talk or Hang Out

I talk most often to my internet friends. We hang around on Twitter or the Rumor Forum and chat back and forth. In fact, by this metric, most of my real friends are online. And I have to be honest, this is one of the more important metrics to me. Or at least it feels that way. If I never communicate with you, or if you’re pretty bad at the internet (like, for instance, most of my church friends), and we just don’t talk, how much can I really know about you? How can I know your story and feel like you’re a friend if we never talk? In that sense I feel closer to people in Iowa and Alabama than to people who live 15 minutes away.

Are there any metrics that you can think of that you use to rank your friendships?

The internet is a pretty harsh place. If you’re a large site, you’re going to get flamed and spammed no matter what you do. If you run a new site, your most vocal readers, who are by far the most polarizing–and let’s admit it, downright idiotic–can really get out of hand. They can make your comment section look like a public washroom wall. Not pretty. And of course you want to clean it up.

Okay. But you need to ask yourself a question first. What do you want your comments to do?

If you just want a place where people can respond with brief messages of congratulations, or with additional information, a standard non-threaded comment form should be just fine. Registration need not be required. Just have good spam filters, you know?

If you’re a new organization, you’re probably looking for members of the public to discuss & debate with the added goal of keeping it sticky and rolling eyeballs to your advertisers. Nothing wrong with this: You get to turn a profit like everyone else. Large news organizations are odd fish because there are additional liabilities to be considered, but I think there’s something to be said for approaching trolls head-on in this situation. Let the reporters roam within the comments instead of weeping quietly to themselves when their work is unfairly attached by axe-wielding peasants. You’d be surprise how much more civil and pleasant even anonymous people are when they know someone is reading and someone is replying to their comment. Of course you’ll always have trolls, but you can learn to distinguish pretty quickly. Always have your finger over the delete button.

If you’re an aggregator, you’re probably looking for a great deal more discussion than a news site. Slashdot, Lifehacker, and (to some degree) Boing Boing are aggregators. They don’t create content at all. They exist as a layer in between content producers and content consumers, a layer that accumulates content in the form of discussion. (It’s a pretty slick way to make money, actually; you don’t have to do much but build a cool site and scrape the web and let people talk and click.) If you’re an aggregator, you want lots and lots and lots of discussion.

Slashdot is really good at this. It’s an ass-ugly site and there’s tonnes and tonnes of trolling going on, but the karma system works fairly well. It’s not perfect and it does promote groupthink, but it turns the whole site into a sort of game, and there’s nothing more sticky than a game. They’ve tried to de-emphasize this in recent years, which I think is wrong-headed. But between threading & moderation, Slashdot does a pretty good job. The downside of this system is that it’s fairly complex. Add the metamoderation layer on top of that, and there’s maybe a tad too much moderation going on. This is okay for technical types, but not really user-friendly for your stupid uncle.

Boing Boing is a site that has succeeded despite its commenting system, in my humble opinion. From needing to be moderated before a post appears (maybe they had a bad experience with wide-open posting in the past or something) to the complete lack of threading, the comments are usually a mess. There’s no conversation or debate to be had there. Every comment seems isolated. They could add at least a level or two of threading and some simple community moderation.

Lifehacker has a balance of both. There’s not a lot of threading going on there, but there is a bit of moderation. By default only approved commenters appear (the commenters with stars beside them), and you can view the rest of the discussion if you with by toggling a link. This works because once you have a star you’ve gained a level of trust and of status and you don’t want to lose it. You’re chosen for your quality posts and you want to go on making them. There’s enough threading to make discussions make sense, but not so much that it breaks tables. I think they’ve got a pretty good thing going there.

So riddle me this, my dear blog readers: Do you know of a site that does comments really well? Do you have an idea? Disagree? Hit me up in the completely open, non-moderated comments.

Here’s a quick question. Why are we biased in favour of new music in worship?

I get this a lot when talking about worship, and I see it in myself too. I lean towards new music. I like to sing songs that reflect my comfort zones, songs that exist in my vernacular.

There’s something disconnected about that, I think. Something off. I mean, we don’t exist apart from the rest of church history. Why would we sing only our own songs? Why not the songs (and Psalms, too; remember that Israel is as much a part of church history as the early church) of our forefathers? We have their faith, after all. We use their theological terms. We rest our faith at least partly on the tradition passed down through history. So why do we so quickly jettison one of the great traditions of the church, namely the songs?

Giving the saints of yesteryear a voice in the goings-on of the modern church is a good exercise in continuity that we’re missing out on. Hymns and psalms aren’t just for the grumpy old people ossifying in their seats. They’re for everyone; they’re a way of saying that we place ourselves firmly in the flow of church history, that we’re not modernist snobs who think we’ve got the best music ever invented.

There’s another question, about why we assume that people jumping around and showing energy and “getting into” the music is always a good thing, or why we assume the Holy Spirit is synonymous with adrenaline, but I’ll leave that for another time.