Accidental Blogger

If you wish to believe that certain certain kinds of conservatism are caused by bugs in the brain, I offer up some tentative evidence:

Recently, Mark Krikorian at the National Review has decided to bless us with the insight that vegetarianism is immoral:

The problem is that none of this is vegetarianISM, which, if words have meaning, is the normative principle that the consumption of animal flesh (and dairy and eggs, for vegans), under any circumstances, is wrong. None of the practical reasons offered for such a moral principle hold any water, which is why the only meaningful basis for such a normative stance is that animals are on the same moral plane as human beings.

The claim was picked up by Julian Sanchez, in whose comments thread a PETA vice president shows up and says even he doesn't believe non-human animals and people have the same moral worth. He points out, quite reasonably, how strange such a view might be for him to hold as a practicing Catholic.

As I read that thread, I suddenly remembered I myself had only recently seen someone at NRO make the truly bizarre claim that it's wrong to not anglicize foreign names. Yep, it's Krikorian again, insisting that it's wrong to pronounce 'Sotomayor' with the stress on the final -or:

This may seem like carping, but it's not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

Here I offer an entire comments thread jumping all over this pap, if you care to see it done.

We may, in trying to understand why anyone would arrive at these bizarre nooks of idea-space, try to consider differing models and assumptions underlying political reasoning. Maybe we should incorporate in our toolkit different theories of multicultural coexistence, for instance. Here at least I think it's all a lot simpler though: Mr Krikorian has achieved a wiring mistake in his head, and has confused the 'not obligatory' with the 'absolutely forbidden'. He has lost the bucket in his head that corresponds to the 'optional', so whenever he decides he doesn't need to do something, he jumps from there to the conclusion that everyone ought to do the opposite. Assuming the twice-in-two-months repeat time is typical, I expect two or three more performances this year.