Twitter is finally dead. We have killed it! I can't get to the website, my phone isn't bleeping and my IM client isn't flashing. I try to ping messages to it over the command line, but we get nothing. It was too good to last! 
We speak of values with regards to Bush's conservatism - but there is only one value at work in the White House: "don't let anybody find out what we're up to".
Speechless 
Andrew Sullivan has a quote from John Yoo on the subject of torture. Yoo is the man who made torture the done way of things in the Bush administration. His argument takes this form:
1. The intentional killing of an other is the highest moral evil.
2. There are circumstances where the intentional killing of another is morally permitted - war, capital punishment etc.
3. If you accept (2), then you have to accept that an absolute moral rule against intentional killing of another is impossible.
4. Since we can not defend an absolute moral rule against intentional killing of another, any absolute moral rule is out of the question and has to be rejected.
Yoo's argument doesn't work though. There is a leap of logic from point three and four. His appeal to "moral common sense" lacks a certain something. I certainly don't think that an absolute moral rule against intentional killing of another is justifiable - there are too many cases where that rule falls apart. I think that war can be justified, as can killing another in pursuit of self-defence.
On the other hand, there are things which I do see an absolute moral prohibition against. Rape, for instance. I can not think of any circumstance in which rape can be justified. Under Yoo's argument, I am not entitled to hold an absolute moral position at all.
Yoo's argument fails for other reasons too. It fails to take in to account the difference between action and intention - which is where the sphere of morality is most important. Actions and intentions are important in moral consideration. Snatching a child can be a moral or immoral act - are you snatching it in order to kidnap it or to save it from being run over by a train? Yoo's argument does not take account of the intention of the action.
With torture, the intention is completely different from the intention of war. The intention of war may be noble - to protect the human rights of a group of people or to topple a brutal dictator. I am not cynical enough to believe that Bush, Blair et al. set out to kill Iraqis. Instead, that is a tragic consequence of the war. The moral issue with war is whether it is entered in to honestly and justifiably, and whether the war is undertaken in a fashion that minimizes the harm done to others. With torture, the intention can never truly be noble.
Yoo also ignores the fact that torture doesn't actually work very well. It is quite easy to lie or give misinformation to a torturer, especially if you do not actually know the information that the torturer thinks you know. He also fails to take account of the fact that evidence obtained by torture doesn't hold up in court.
New Grazr launch
This hasn't been officially announced yet, and Marjolein scooped me!
A while back, I heard about the new procedural programming mode in Grazr. This is an extension to GrazrScript to let you use JavaScript to control elements within the Grazr widget.
The GrazrScript tutorial has now been updated to contain documentation of the new functions. You can read that documentation here.
What does this mean? Well, you can now dynamically create outline elements, and test things using a lot of the functions of JavaScript. The limits of this really are the limits of your imagination. A few things that the tutorial suggests are field validation and searching.
What some of the Grazr mashups I've built do is exploit Grazr as a kind of mini-web browser to show 'pages', often which are grabbing data from RESTful interfaces. This opens up another set of possibilities with dynamically updating items.
There are even plans to implement the Document Object Model within the system - all JavaScript is currently executed on the server side for security reasons. If you are a JavaScript person, try this out. I certainly will be when I'm not snowed in with work and commitments...
Tags: grazr, javascript, opml, grazrscript
