Irving Kristol is Dead. Good Riddance.

Irving Kristol, one of the major founders of the modern conservative movement, is dead. Like Bill Buckley, he wanted to found a movement with some intellectual credibility. As we now know, he has failed. The twin pillars of a religious moralism and unrestricted capitalism were inevitably doomed: the marketplace will move to satisfy our most trivial desires, a universal acid dissolving the existing morality in our baser nature.

Kristol's solution was to deny both democracy and universal truth. In order to preserve his idea of a great nation, the intellectual elites, the very people loathed and feared by the Teabaggers, must engage in a Noble Lie:

There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.

Conservatives gleefully point out that whenever some liberal talks about overturning the existing political order (which is insanely conservative by all historical standards, thanks to people like Kristol and Buckley), those liberals never seem to understand that they're likely to end up among the ruled and not the rulers.

Kristol believed he was already among the "happy elites" capable of steering a docile public for their common good, "chosen by History." The neoconservative movement remains animated by this belief: that they are better than everyone else, and it is not education people need, but leadership and obedience. The Bush years were populated with calls to "deference the president," something that neither Clinton nor Obama ever got. That kind of poison, the notion that one side somehow deserves different treatment, will rot in the national veins for years to come, and yet the right has seized it through glib deceit and an illicitly seized penumbra of religious conviction.

So good riddance to Irving Kristol. I'd rather deal with Pat Buchanan's honest conservatism, however befouled it maybe with trite racism and anti-Semitism, than the dishonest flavor put forth by people committed to a tribal "winning at all costs," even of their own respectability.

Sex. Robots. Sex with Robots. Sex with Robots: The Christian Response

As everyone who reads my stuff knows, I'm fond of sex, robots, and sex with robots. It's rather too bad that there aren't any really good sex robots out there, but in the meantime, humans do just fine. I suspect I'll be one of those perverts who'll continue to find sex with humans interesting long after the robots have exceeded Aria Giovanni or Gavin Tate for exceptional human, ahem, quality.

So imagine my pleasure at stumbling upon Why Sex With Robots Is Always Wrong, a rather peculiar little diatribe in which the author takes the idea that sex with robots will be so much better than anything else that, long before reproduction stops, lolicon, shotacon and zoophile bots will have so corrupted us that society will grind to a halt.

Unfortunately, although his mainstreaming is intriguing, his actual imagination is paltry enough that I didn't find much interesting there to exploit for my own work. He kinda blows his own premise by insisting that the acronym he dreams, FACA or "Female Anatomically Correct Android", will persist long after society has shaded into his dystopian ideals of fuckable sexbots shaped like little boys, stuffed pandas or toaster ovens. And his "the day we accepted that they're robots" scenario churned my stomach for its biochauvanism. Still, it's fun to see more and more the Christians are worrying about the posthuman future.

I used to say this a lot back when I was young and dealing with whacked-out religious types who insisted "Jesus was coming soon:" He'd better get here in the next 40 years or so or he's gonna be outclassed.