"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
29.5.04
OY: John Kerry's foreign policy:
"While Kerry said it was important to sell democracy and "market it" around the world, he demurred when questioned about a number of important countries that suppress human rights and freedoms. He said securing all nuclear materials in Russia, integrating China in the world economy, achieving greater controls over Pakistan's nuclear weapons or winning greater cooperation on terrorist financing in Saudi Arabia trumped human rights concerns in those nations...
Kerry also accused the administration of having no plan to deal with North Korea's rush to build its nuclear weapons arsenal. He derided the Bush administration's long effort to set up six-nation talks to resolve the impasse over North Korea's nuclear ambitions as a "fig leaf" designed to cover up its failure to have a coherent policy.
Kerry said he would immediately begin bilateral negotiations with North Korea -- a goal the Pyongyang government has long sought—but, perhaps in a nod to the sensitivities of the Japanese, South Koreans and Chinese, he also would not abandon the six-nation talks. "I would keep them both going," Kerry said. "I would do the six-party, but I would engage in bilateral discussions."
The Bush administration has argued that bilateral talks would reward North Korea for its behavior, and it was necessary to include the other nations to ensure a regional solution. Kerry declined to say what he would offer North Korea as inducements to give up its weapons but said he would be willing to discuss a broad agenda that includes reducing troop levels on the Korean Peninsula, replacing the armistice that ended the Korean War and even reunifying North and South Korea."
"While Kerry said it was important to sell democracy and "market it" around the world, he demurred when questioned about a number of important countries that suppress human rights and freedoms. He said securing all nuclear materials in Russia, integrating China in the world economy, achieving greater controls over Pakistan's nuclear weapons or winning greater cooperation on terrorist financing in Saudi Arabia trumped human rights concerns in those nations...
Kerry also accused the administration of having no plan to deal with North Korea's rush to build its nuclear weapons arsenal. He derided the Bush administration's long effort to set up six-nation talks to resolve the impasse over North Korea's nuclear ambitions as a "fig leaf" designed to cover up its failure to have a coherent policy.
Kerry said he would immediately begin bilateral negotiations with North Korea -- a goal the Pyongyang government has long sought—but, perhaps in a nod to the sensitivities of the Japanese, South Koreans and Chinese, he also would not abandon the six-nation talks. "I would keep them both going," Kerry said. "I would do the six-party, but I would engage in bilateral discussions."
The Bush administration has argued that bilateral talks would reward North Korea for its behavior, and it was necessary to include the other nations to ensure a regional solution. Kerry declined to say what he would offer North Korea as inducements to give up its weapons but said he would be willing to discuss a broad agenda that includes reducing troop levels on the Korean Peninsula, replacing the armistice that ended the Korean War and even reunifying North and South Korea."
LINK: Oh, that Bush administration, so bad with diplomacy:
"Sudanese peasants will be naming their sons "George Bush" because he scored a humanitarian victory this week that could be a momentous event around the globe — although almost nobody noticed. It was Bush administration diplomacy that led to an accord to end a 20-year civil war between Sudan's north and south after two million deaths.
If the peace holds, hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved, millions of refugees will return home, and a region of Africa may be revived."
"Sudanese peasants will be naming their sons "George Bush" because he scored a humanitarian victory this week that could be a momentous event around the globe — although almost nobody noticed. It was Bush administration diplomacy that led to an accord to end a 20-year civil war between Sudan's north and south after two million deaths.
If the peace holds, hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved, millions of refugees will return home, and a region of Africa may be revived."
DEVIL'S ADVOCATE: Counterargument to the below, as I think it might be sketched:
1. successful republican democracies coordinate around a few key components: a liberal rights-conception, the rule of law, and the protection of minorities. Social network theory tells us that as groups interact more, they tend to coordinate on certain behaviors--some of this can be seen in the rise of the free-trade principle. Consequently, one might think that an international super-state would be more like the government in one of those individual countries, rather than the sort of leviathan state critics conceptualize.
2. one might think, plausibly, that even if an international apparatus is bound to failure in at least some, or maybe most, of its ventures, it would still be capable of doing a lot of good (or at least some good), and that's not a benefit that should be lightly dismissed.
1. successful republican democracies coordinate around a few key components: a liberal rights-conception, the rule of law, and the protection of minorities. Social network theory tells us that as groups interact more, they tend to coordinate on certain behaviors--some of this can be seen in the rise of the free-trade principle. Consequently, one might think that an international super-state would be more like the government in one of those individual countries, rather than the sort of leviathan state critics conceptualize.
2. one might think, plausibly, that even if an international apparatus is bound to failure in at least some, or maybe most, of its ventures, it would still be capable of doing a lot of good (or at least some good), and that's not a benefit that should be lightly dismissed.
I actually have something to say! Mostly because it doesn't involve my opinion, but an interesting one I read by someone else.
Discussing Bush's motives for war, this person had a lot to say that we've all discussed, but the end was a bit unique:
"Tangential to this is a political motive to gut social programs and contract government services on a much larger scale. Wars cost money, but we're getting tax cuts? How can that be? We're getting deeper and deeper in debt. If we keep this administration, that trend will only continue until eventually we're told we have to make some major cuts. But, we'll still be in the middle of an ongoing War on Terror. We can't risk our entire nation's security by cutting the military budget. That would be unconscionable! So what will get cut? Oh, sorry, they won't be "cut" per se, they'll either become the burden of the states or pushed off to corporate America under a privatization plan. Social Security will go private (which would be a disaster, but I won't go into that here) and other programs will simply disappear."
Cynical, a little bit conspiracist, and I can't say that I buy it. But it's certainly a perspective I've never heard before. Thoughts?
-Dara
Discussing Bush's motives for war, this person had a lot to say that we've all discussed, but the end was a bit unique:
"Tangential to this is a political motive to gut social programs and contract government services on a much larger scale. Wars cost money, but we're getting tax cuts? How can that be? We're getting deeper and deeper in debt. If we keep this administration, that trend will only continue until eventually we're told we have to make some major cuts. But, we'll still be in the middle of an ongoing War on Terror. We can't risk our entire nation's security by cutting the military budget. That would be unconscionable! So what will get cut? Oh, sorry, they won't be "cut" per se, they'll either become the burden of the states or pushed off to corporate America under a privatization plan. Social Security will go private (which would be a disaster, but I won't go into that here) and other programs will simply disappear."
Cynical, a little bit conspiracist, and I can't say that I buy it. But it's certainly a perspective I've never heard before. Thoughts?
-Dara
28.5.04
WELL: Dara, who has not yet figured out she could just make this into a post, says in the comments below:
"On a much less specified, intelligent, and knowledgeable note, I'd like to dispute your claim that international law is handicapped before it starts -- at least, I'd say, it's not more handicapped than regular law. Given that individuals, under the same principle, will try to get away with as much as they can, yet we still employ law within a city, state, nation, etc. to try to ensure that they get away with less of what we don't want them to get away with, why shouldn't the same principle apply at an international level? Certainly there are a lot of problems, but I don't see why it's fundamentally different."
My Hobbes and Kant are a little rusty, but the argument, I believe, goes something like this: any international regime is either going to be 1. ineffectual or 2. despotic. It will be ineffectual because it's incomplete, and there is no overarching apparatus capable of instilling order wherever it needs to be instilled, and because (as Kant pointed out) the interests of republican democracies and autocratic governments are, generally speaking, fundamentally opposed, and the last thing anyone should want to do is equalize power between them on the international level (this is, in short, the problem a lot of conservative-types have with the UN).
The second problem is that even if you had nothing but republican democracies, and they were able to agree on a super-national oversight apparatus that had real power to enforce its standards, it's definitionally going to be despotic: unlike national regimes, where one at least has the (however difficult) option of leaving for someplace else, the super-national apparatus' reach is everywhere--if it doesn't like you, you're in trouble. Throw that fact in with some less-crazy version of Lord Acton's dictum, and you have a recipe for disaster.
There's probably also an argument that you can make that this situation would be different because everyone would consent and so the dictates of the super-national apparatus would be tacitly approved of. The first counterargument to that is the old Hobbesean one: just because people consent to a state which fufills their minimal desires for what a state should do doesn't entail that the state is normatively desirable, even from the view of the people consenting, only that it's more desirable than the other available options. The other is that removing alternate options, as you'd have to do to create an actually effective super-national apparatus, falls into Montesquieu's old "if liberty has a price to the buyer, it is beyond all price to the seller" principle.
"On a much less specified, intelligent, and knowledgeable note, I'd like to dispute your claim that international law is handicapped before it starts -- at least, I'd say, it's not more handicapped than regular law. Given that individuals, under the same principle, will try to get away with as much as they can, yet we still employ law within a city, state, nation, etc. to try to ensure that they get away with less of what we don't want them to get away with, why shouldn't the same principle apply at an international level? Certainly there are a lot of problems, but I don't see why it's fundamentally different."
My Hobbes and Kant are a little rusty, but the argument, I believe, goes something like this: any international regime is either going to be 1. ineffectual or 2. despotic. It will be ineffectual because it's incomplete, and there is no overarching apparatus capable of instilling order wherever it needs to be instilled, and because (as Kant pointed out) the interests of republican democracies and autocratic governments are, generally speaking, fundamentally opposed, and the last thing anyone should want to do is equalize power between them on the international level (this is, in short, the problem a lot of conservative-types have with the UN).
The second problem is that even if you had nothing but republican democracies, and they were able to agree on a super-national oversight apparatus that had real power to enforce its standards, it's definitionally going to be despotic: unlike national regimes, where one at least has the (however difficult) option of leaving for someplace else, the super-national apparatus' reach is everywhere--if it doesn't like you, you're in trouble. Throw that fact in with some less-crazy version of Lord Acton's dictum, and you have a recipe for disaster.
There's probably also an argument that you can make that this situation would be different because everyone would consent and so the dictates of the super-national apparatus would be tacitly approved of. The first counterargument to that is the old Hobbesean one: just because people consent to a state which fufills their minimal desires for what a state should do doesn't entail that the state is normatively desirable, even from the view of the people consenting, only that it's more desirable than the other available options. The other is that removing alternate options, as you'd have to do to create an actually effective super-national apparatus, falls into Montesquieu's old "if liberty has a price to the buyer, it is beyond all price to the seller" principle.
27.5.04
LINKS GALORE: My Foreign Correspondent asked how people in America were reacting to the Gore speech.
OxBlog. Joe Carter. Jared Bridges. Bill Wallo. ASV. Power Line (really good). Robert Tagorda. Obviously, these are all reasonable pro-war bloggers (I've been unable to find anything of note on MY.com, though my reading in the liberal blogsophere is not what it once was).
I do think liberals and conservatives generally agree on this characterization of Al Gore. He went a little, you know, totally insane after he lost the presidential election (and considering how big a fan of his I was beforehand--perhaps the only happily voluntary Gore voter not actually in the Gore family), I think he's been really off his game for a long while. Which is a shame, really, because I still harbor great love for his father.
Other people can comment on what they know well; I'll just point out that Gore's grasp on the political motivations of the Founders is a little, well, shaky:
"He decided not to honor... what Jefferson described as "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.""
As Jefferson wrote: "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to [act]."
So it's a good thing Bush never bothered to state his reasons for going to war with Iraq. Oh, wait.
"And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral U.S. right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat."
Perhaps it's too much Thucydides, but I'm rather of the opinion that every nation gets away with as much as they think they can get away with. This is part of the reason I think international law is handicapped before it even starts (even Kant didn't think a rigorous system of international law was possible, or even necessarily normatively desirable, for pretty sensible reasons).
"Our founders were insightful students of human nature. They feared the abuse of power because they understood that every human being has not only "better angels" in his nature, but also an innate vulnerability to temptation - especially the temptation to abuse power over others."
Potentially true (I wouldn't want to get into the psychologies of Hamilton and Madison, but there's always "if men were angels, there'd be no need of government"). Odd, then, that most of the structural features of the US constitution remove political power from individuals and put it in the hands of (comparative) elites. They were concerned about abuses of power by the leadership, to be sure, but there's a very real anti-democratic tendency in American politics, and that sometimes gets lost in the leftist tendency to prattle on about how wonderful American democracy is. The problem, in short, does not cut as clearly as Gore would want it to.
"Our founders understood full well that a system of checks and balances is needed in our constitution because every human being lives with an internal system of checks and balances that cannot be relied upon to produce virtue if they are allowed to attain an unhealthy degree of power over their fellow citizens."
I'd love to get his citation for this.
OxBlog. Joe Carter. Jared Bridges. Bill Wallo. ASV. Power Line (really good). Robert Tagorda. Obviously, these are all reasonable pro-war bloggers (I've been unable to find anything of note on MY.com, though my reading in the liberal blogsophere is not what it once was).
I do think liberals and conservatives generally agree on this characterization of Al Gore. He went a little, you know, totally insane after he lost the presidential election (and considering how big a fan of his I was beforehand--perhaps the only happily voluntary Gore voter not actually in the Gore family), I think he's been really off his game for a long while. Which is a shame, really, because I still harbor great love for his father.
Other people can comment on what they know well; I'll just point out that Gore's grasp on the political motivations of the Founders is a little, well, shaky:
"He decided not to honor... what Jefferson described as "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.""
As Jefferson wrote: "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to [act]."
So it's a good thing Bush never bothered to state his reasons for going to war with Iraq. Oh, wait.
"And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral U.S. right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat."
Perhaps it's too much Thucydides, but I'm rather of the opinion that every nation gets away with as much as they think they can get away with. This is part of the reason I think international law is handicapped before it even starts (even Kant didn't think a rigorous system of international law was possible, or even necessarily normatively desirable, for pretty sensible reasons).
"Our founders were insightful students of human nature. They feared the abuse of power because they understood that every human being has not only "better angels" in his nature, but also an innate vulnerability to temptation - especially the temptation to abuse power over others."
Potentially true (I wouldn't want to get into the psychologies of Hamilton and Madison, but there's always "if men were angels, there'd be no need of government"). Odd, then, that most of the structural features of the US constitution remove political power from individuals and put it in the hands of (comparative) elites. They were concerned about abuses of power by the leadership, to be sure, but there's a very real anti-democratic tendency in American politics, and that sometimes gets lost in the leftist tendency to prattle on about how wonderful American democracy is. The problem, in short, does not cut as clearly as Gore would want it to.
"Our founders understood full well that a system of checks and balances is needed in our constitution because every human being lives with an internal system of checks and balances that cannot be relied upon to produce virtue if they are allowed to attain an unhealthy degree of power over their fellow citizens."
I'd love to get his citation for this.
AN ANTI-WAR ARGUMENT I CAN SUPPORT ENTIRELY: Or, at least, how one might be phrased:
"I'm angry at Bush, Rumsfeld and company for their mistakes and failures, and especially for allowing or creating the atmosphere that led to the Abu Ghraib horrors. But damn it, I don't want to let these people down."
In other words, maybe the whole thing was a mistake, and shouldn't've happened, but that means we should only redouble our efforts to get the best possible result.
"I'm angry at Bush, Rumsfeld and company for their mistakes and failures, and especially for allowing or creating the atmosphere that led to the Abu Ghraib horrors. But damn it, I don't want to let these people down."
In other words, maybe the whole thing was a mistake, and shouldn't've happened, but that means we should only redouble our efforts to get the best possible result.
WELL: So I've spent a lot of time thinking about the argument on placing morality for governmental actions with individuals who support those actions (of which much below). It looks like an entailment of believing that no one is morally responsible for a decision they make where there is no could've-done-otherwise is that, well, no one can ever be responsible for an action their government undertakes. This seems to undercut the "not in our name" idea quite a bit.
I've done a lot of thinking, and I've concluded: you couldn't possibly tenably hold people morally responsible for the actions of their government. It's just incoherent as a concept.
Follow me here: let's use the extreme example: Nazi Germany. Am I contending, in other words, that's it's foolish to hold the German people responsible for, say, the Holocaust? Yes and no. It's foolish insomuch as the people who made the decisions and carried out the actions were probably not the bulk of the people (I'm not saying, in other words, that Hitler, Eichmann, the army or the people who rounded up the Jews are off the hook--they're on for the straightforward could've-done-otherwise reason). You might think they were still on the hook morally (for not resisting as fully as they might, for attending rallies, for passively accepting what was going on), but they're on the hook because of their own actions, not those of the government they happened to be under*.
In the Iraq case, you might think that people are on the hook, morally, for certain aspects of their decision-making (supporting Bush, hating the UN, whatever), but certainly you don't hold them responsible for the decisions the government itself makes, any more than you hold the average person responsible for other decisions the government makes (setting the prime interest rate, opening a new office, declaring today to be "national blogs are great" day). The fact that this particular decision has a moral character to it doesn't (in this case) make it any different from any other decision.
*It did, in a sense, define the options for action they had available, but, well, our options for action are always determined from an outside source. The particular nature of it is no exception.
I've done a lot of thinking, and I've concluded: you couldn't possibly tenably hold people morally responsible for the actions of their government. It's just incoherent as a concept.
Follow me here: let's use the extreme example: Nazi Germany. Am I contending, in other words, that's it's foolish to hold the German people responsible for, say, the Holocaust? Yes and no. It's foolish insomuch as the people who made the decisions and carried out the actions were probably not the bulk of the people (I'm not saying, in other words, that Hitler, Eichmann, the army or the people who rounded up the Jews are off the hook--they're on for the straightforward could've-done-otherwise reason). You might think they were still on the hook morally (for not resisting as fully as they might, for attending rallies, for passively accepting what was going on), but they're on the hook because of their own actions, not those of the government they happened to be under*.
In the Iraq case, you might think that people are on the hook, morally, for certain aspects of their decision-making (supporting Bush, hating the UN, whatever), but certainly you don't hold them responsible for the decisions the government itself makes, any more than you hold the average person responsible for other decisions the government makes (setting the prime interest rate, opening a new office, declaring today to be "national blogs are great" day). The fact that this particular decision has a moral character to it doesn't (in this case) make it any different from any other decision.
*It did, in a sense, define the options for action they had available, but, well, our options for action are always determined from an outside source. The particular nature of it is no exception.
WELL: I've been trying to wrap my head around this series of posts at normblog, not because I disagree with any of them, but rather because the view they're criticizing seems so odd. I keep coming back to this quote from Lenin in Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky:
"Everyone has a sacred right to approach a question in whatever way he pleases. One must only distinguish a serious and honest approach from a dishonest one."
There's an argument of anti-war-types that goes something like this: we should find moral fault with those who supported the war not merely because the consequences of the war were bad, but because those consequences were entirely forseeable, their decision to support the war must be held suspect. It's pretty clear to me that the consequences argument can put no moral responsibility on your average citizen: there's nothing an individual who did not fight in or vote on the war could do to make things happen otherwise than they did. It's also pretty clear to me that the attempt to link consequences back to poor decision-making has to fail, because anyone who seriously contemplated the war generated numerous counterfactuals, and simply put their faith in a certain set of them as being most likely to happen. The only information that would change the decision is the very information you can't possibly have when making it.
All the talk about being morally responsible for "forseeable" consequences is silly; just because we ended up in the world where a certain set of actions took place doesn't mean we couldn't just as easily have ended up in a nearby possible world without these particular problems. We actually never hold people responsible on the basis of "forseeable consequences."*
But, I'm increasingly concluding, the shift from talking about the morality of consequences to the morality of decision-making is key. Anti-war-types can't thwack pro-war-types on consequences--everyone agrees that torture is bad, or more troops are needed, or that having a democracy is good. I think a lot of the reappraising of decisions that is going on is just an attempt to score points and not really an attempt to be serious about the moral implications of political action, which is a shame, since there's a lot of important thinking to be done in this context.
*generate any counterexample you like: it'll merely be an instance of the could've-done-otherwise criterion.
"Everyone has a sacred right to approach a question in whatever way he pleases. One must only distinguish a serious and honest approach from a dishonest one."
There's an argument of anti-war-types that goes something like this: we should find moral fault with those who supported the war not merely because the consequences of the war were bad, but because those consequences were entirely forseeable, their decision to support the war must be held suspect. It's pretty clear to me that the consequences argument can put no moral responsibility on your average citizen: there's nothing an individual who did not fight in or vote on the war could do to make things happen otherwise than they did. It's also pretty clear to me that the attempt to link consequences back to poor decision-making has to fail, because anyone who seriously contemplated the war generated numerous counterfactuals, and simply put their faith in a certain set of them as being most likely to happen. The only information that would change the decision is the very information you can't possibly have when making it.
All the talk about being morally responsible for "forseeable" consequences is silly; just because we ended up in the world where a certain set of actions took place doesn't mean we couldn't just as easily have ended up in a nearby possible world without these particular problems. We actually never hold people responsible on the basis of "forseeable consequences."*
But, I'm increasingly concluding, the shift from talking about the morality of consequences to the morality of decision-making is key. Anti-war-types can't thwack pro-war-types on consequences--everyone agrees that torture is bad, or more troops are needed, or that having a democracy is good. I think a lot of the reappraising of decisions that is going on is just an attempt to score points and not really an attempt to be serious about the moral implications of political action, which is a shame, since there's a lot of important thinking to be done in this context.
*generate any counterexample you like: it'll merely be an instance of the could've-done-otherwise criterion.
26.5.04
LINK: Jacob Levy has a good rebuttal to this Crooked Timber post. Me likey:
"I do trust Amnesty's reporting to a very high level of confidence. I don't trust either the organization's priorities, its understanding of human rights, or its understanding of the relationship between human rights and other things very far at all. Amnesty says
AI is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it support or oppose the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect. It is concerned solely with the impartial protection of human rights.
This impartiality is in part a necessary pose, in part justified, and in part moral obtuseness. It seems to me necessary to remember simultaneously that torture is torture, and is reprehensible under whatever regime it takes place and that some political regimes and systems are built on and centrally dedicated to the violation of human rights and some aren't. Not to oppose "any government or political system"-- not Nazi Germany, Stalin's USSR, apartheid South Africa, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Pinochet's Chile, or insert-your-least-favorite-example-here-- isn't being an honest impartial assessor of human rights violations. It's radically misunderstanding where human rights violations come from, and how they're stopped. AI does great work embarrassing governments into releasing what the organization terms "prisoners of conscience." But some political systems rely on, and endorse as a matter of principle, punishing people for their religious and political views. Others don't. The one-prisoner-at-a-time, don't-judge-the-system approach maintains the organization's credibility with some governments. But it damages the organization's moral credibility."
"I do trust Amnesty's reporting to a very high level of confidence. I don't trust either the organization's priorities, its understanding of human rights, or its understanding of the relationship between human rights and other things very far at all. Amnesty says
AI is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it support or oppose the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect. It is concerned solely with the impartial protection of human rights.
This impartiality is in part a necessary pose, in part justified, and in part moral obtuseness. It seems to me necessary to remember simultaneously that torture is torture, and is reprehensible under whatever regime it takes place and that some political regimes and systems are built on and centrally dedicated to the violation of human rights and some aren't. Not to oppose "any government or political system"-- not Nazi Germany, Stalin's USSR, apartheid South Africa, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Pinochet's Chile, or insert-your-least-favorite-example-here-- isn't being an honest impartial assessor of human rights violations. It's radically misunderstanding where human rights violations come from, and how they're stopped. AI does great work embarrassing governments into releasing what the organization terms "prisoners of conscience." But some political systems rely on, and endorse as a matter of principle, punishing people for their religious and political views. Others don't. The one-prisoner-at-a-time, don't-judge-the-system approach maintains the organization's credibility with some governments. But it damages the organization's moral credibility."
LINKS: On the whole Washingtonienne thing. I liked this column on the topic:
" Cutler and Cox, 31, appeared together on Fox News Channel this week, where they giggled and guffawed and rolled their eyes as they reveled in their sleazy celebrity. When Fox anchor Brigitte Quinn (who deserves a medal for her restraint) asked Cutler whether her parents knew about her raunchy sex life, she snorted: "They do now!" Cox cackled and went on to coo about Cutler's writing talent and future book publishing prospects. Cox generously mentioned she didn't want too much "credit" for Cutler's newfound notoriety. ("Credit?" Quinn mused subtly. "That's an interesting word.")
This female Beavis and Butthead duo illustrate what normal Americans hate about the Capitol scene: narcissism, moral bankruptcy and self-congratulatory media-political incest. The Washington Post's legitimization of this shallow "story" illustrates something else: the mainstream media's perverted moral values. The paper's recent profiles and features of social conservatives drip with condescension and ridicule. Religious activists are portrayed as intolerant homophobes; Republicans as gun-toting rubes; abstinence promoters as freaks.
But give The Washington Post two vain, young, trash-mouthed skanks who couldn't care less about what their parents think of their sex-drenched infamy, and the newspaper can't wait to help make them full-fledged members of the media elite."
Also, Sara Butler has good thoughts on what this means for being a young-ish woman who wants to be taken seriously in a professional capacity in Washington DC. Hey, I happen to have one of those on the blog. Maybe OGIW would like to share her thoughts on whether it's harder to be taken seriously as a woman and/or intern.
" Cutler and Cox, 31, appeared together on Fox News Channel this week, where they giggled and guffawed and rolled their eyes as they reveled in their sleazy celebrity. When Fox anchor Brigitte Quinn (who deserves a medal for her restraint) asked Cutler whether her parents knew about her raunchy sex life, she snorted: "They do now!" Cox cackled and went on to coo about Cutler's writing talent and future book publishing prospects. Cox generously mentioned she didn't want too much "credit" for Cutler's newfound notoriety. ("Credit?" Quinn mused subtly. "That's an interesting word.")
This female Beavis and Butthead duo illustrate what normal Americans hate about the Capitol scene: narcissism, moral bankruptcy and self-congratulatory media-political incest. The Washington Post's legitimization of this shallow "story" illustrates something else: the mainstream media's perverted moral values. The paper's recent profiles and features of social conservatives drip with condescension and ridicule. Religious activists are portrayed as intolerant homophobes; Republicans as gun-toting rubes; abstinence promoters as freaks.
But give The Washington Post two vain, young, trash-mouthed skanks who couldn't care less about what their parents think of their sex-drenched infamy, and the newspaper can't wait to help make them full-fledged members of the media elite."
Also, Sara Butler has good thoughts on what this means for being a young-ish woman who wants to be taken seriously in a professional capacity in Washington DC. Hey, I happen to have one of those on the blog. Maybe OGIW would like to share her thoughts on whether it's harder to be taken seriously as a woman and/or intern.
25.5.04
LINK: I wholeheartedly agree with Discoshaman's defense of raising children outside the big city:
"Nevertheless, every choice made closes off other opportunities. My first ten years were spent deep in the countryside of Lancaster. Most of my neighbors were Amish. It's sad that my boys will probably never spend their afternoons building forts in the woods, catching eels under the old bridge, and waving to the Amish kids as the buggy drives by. Living on the 15th floor, they won't know how good the breeze smells on a summer night blowing in through your window, the sounds of crickets, or the constellations of lightning bugs on a darkened lawn."
and I would only add that all of the above plus a couple hundred books of your parents' to read will make for about the perfect childhood.
"Nevertheless, every choice made closes off other opportunities. My first ten years were spent deep in the countryside of Lancaster. Most of my neighbors were Amish. It's sad that my boys will probably never spend their afternoons building forts in the woods, catching eels under the old bridge, and waving to the Amish kids as the buggy drives by. Living on the 15th floor, they won't know how good the breeze smells on a summer night blowing in through your window, the sounds of crickets, or the constellations of lightning bugs on a darkened lawn."
and I would only add that all of the above plus a couple hundred books of your parents' to read will make for about the perfect childhood.
QUOTE: Eugene Volokh:
"Oh, good heavens:
The universe is apparently "at least 156 billion light-years wide", even though it's only about 13.7 billion years old. (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the pointer.)
Yes, I know those zany scientists have their own zany explanations. But between this and strings and umpteen dimensions and Schroedinger and his poor cat, I'm finding the elephants and the turtle to be a more and more appealing alternative . . . ."
"Oh, good heavens:
The universe is apparently "at least 156 billion light-years wide", even though it's only about 13.7 billion years old. (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the pointer.)
Yes, I know those zany scientists have their own zany explanations. But between this and strings and umpteen dimensions and Schroedinger and his poor cat, I'm finding the elephants and the turtle to be a more and more appealing alternative . . . ."
UM: Going to disagree a bit with this Matt Yglesias post:
"The case for the LP is that no one really knows how many small-l libertarians are out there, other than that there are some of them, and they are usually aligned with the GOP. So how many anti-war, small government types are out there? 2 million, 4 million, who knows? It would be in their interests to be counted."
I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be at all smart (if your goals in politics are to get people with views similar to your own elected). A libertarian defection in 2004 would likely have the following proximate effects:
1. Every LP candidate would lose, and most of them would probably get demolished, a la the Green Party for the last few years.
2. The Republican Party would treat libertarians of this stripe rather poorly, should they decide to come crawling back to the party.
As long as elections are high-stakes affairs, it will never be rational to vote in a way that assures your side is going to lose. The premise that seems to be troublesome is the belief that there are a lot of small-l libertarians out there. Maybe there are, but their votes are undifferentiatable from everyone else's (unless you had tons of crosstabs on candidates, proposals, etc), so there's a high chance that there are probably fewer than the optimists (maybe even the realists) think there are.
If libertarians really wanted to get an idea how strong a force they are, they'd muck around in Republican or Democratic primaries.
"The case for the LP is that no one really knows how many small-l libertarians are out there, other than that there are some of them, and they are usually aligned with the GOP. So how many anti-war, small government types are out there? 2 million, 4 million, who knows? It would be in their interests to be counted."
I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be at all smart (if your goals in politics are to get people with views similar to your own elected). A libertarian defection in 2004 would likely have the following proximate effects:
1. Every LP candidate would lose, and most of them would probably get demolished, a la the Green Party for the last few years.
2. The Republican Party would treat libertarians of this stripe rather poorly, should they decide to come crawling back to the party.
As long as elections are high-stakes affairs, it will never be rational to vote in a way that assures your side is going to lose. The premise that seems to be troublesome is the belief that there are a lot of small-l libertarians out there. Maybe there are, but their votes are undifferentiatable from everyone else's (unless you had tons of crosstabs on candidates, proposals, etc), so there's a high chance that there are probably fewer than the optimists (maybe even the realists) think there are.
If libertarians really wanted to get an idea how strong a force they are, they'd muck around in Republican or Democratic primaries.
WELL: Enjoyed a nice, long, unexpected weekend at the Fortress of Solitude. Four books and an interesting article by Viktor Frankl on existentialism and psychology were consumed. Also realized:
1. There is no musical experience, anywhere, ever, that tops the first half of the Rolling Stones' 12 x 5 on vinyl.
2. The Magician's Nephew really is the best of the Narnia books.
3. The really meaningful schism in britpop in the 90s wasn't between Blur and Oasis, it was between the Johnny Greenwood school of guitar-playing and the Nick McCabe school of guitar playing, which also has a lot to do with the proximate effects of being influenced by, to varying extents, Johnny Marr, John Squire, Bernard Butler, Genesis, Can, and Spacemen 3. It's scary to remember how much energy I devoted to music before I discovered political science.
anyway, back to real blogging tomorrow
1. There is no musical experience, anywhere, ever, that tops the first half of the Rolling Stones' 12 x 5 on vinyl.
2. The Magician's Nephew really is the best of the Narnia books.
3. The really meaningful schism in britpop in the 90s wasn't between Blur and Oasis, it was between the Johnny Greenwood school of guitar-playing and the Nick McCabe school of guitar playing, which also has a lot to do with the proximate effects of being influenced by, to varying extents, Johnny Marr, John Squire, Bernard Butler, Genesis, Can, and Spacemen 3. It's scary to remember how much energy I devoted to music before I discovered political science.
anyway, back to real blogging tomorrow
20.5.04
LINK: I was amused by this Slate piece on why voting turnout is so low. Let's just say the gloves came off with this:
"Usually, the outcome of a presidential election "depends on the turnout of the Democrats." So says Nelson Polsby of the University of California-Berkeley. For once, I agree with a political scientist."
Good to hear. Mr. Geoghegan then proceeds to define Democrats ("people with hourly jobs, high-school dropouts, high-school grads, single moms, single dads—anyone at or below the median household income.") in a way I'm pretty sure is not an accurate reflection of their demographics, though I'm not an Americanist, so I could be wrong about that.
This was amusing:
"I know that the country's turned to the right. But we'd still have the New Deal if voters were turning out at New Deal-type rates. (Between 1936 and 1968, voter turnout in presidential elections fell below 56 percent just once. Since 1968, it has never exceeded 56 percent.)"
Mr. Geoghegan's sop to changing demogaphics aside, this looks like a weak argument. What does the alignment of voters in 1936 tell us about the alignment of voters today? Considering most everyone who voted in 1936 is dead, not very much. Since democrats have been getting their clocks cleaned regularly in presidential elections since 1968, and since voter turnout has declined since then, the only possible explanation is that democrats aren't turning out anymore. Alternate hypotheses that explain the same data: Roosevelt and Truman (and Johnson and Kennedy) were dynamos that everyone just naturally liked, which provided Democrats with a surplus of votes over what their normal support level would be. Carter and Mondale and Dukakis and McGovern weren't especially likeable. Other alternate hypothesis: many people were okay with the way Republicans were running things, and didn't feel the need to register disapproval by voting against the Rs (note this would also mesh well with a thesis that Americans have become more conservative over the last few decades).
Then there are the suggestions. Oy:
"First, offer two ballots, a long one and a short one. Let's call the short one Fast Ballot. President. Congress. Governor if there's a race on. That's all. You're done. Someone else will vote the long ballot."
Nothing like encouraging civic responsbility by making people not have to worry about those boring local races! And I'm pretty sure this is a good institutionalization of a violation of one-man, one-vote.
"One free drink. Let's take the 10 biggest population centers. In each one, set up a business-type council, full of media types and celebrities, to push voting. In September and October, have them sign up bars and restaurants to put up a red-white-and-blue logo on Election Night. What does the logo mean? With your ballot stub, first drink is on the house. Soon everybody will want to have a logo, the way in the New Deal, businesses showcased the Blue Eagle. Put the word out on college campuses. Get them to compete to throw the biggest party. Pump it up, the way we've done with Halloween."
I never quite grasped why it's a good thing to have people vote if they don't actually care about the outcome. Why not just go in, not vote for anyone, hand in your ballot, and get your drink? Or, better still, just randomly vote for candidates? I'd like to minimize the appeal of voting to people who don't know much about what's going on, but that's probably just my authoritarian tendencies poking their head through again.
"In October, in every public school, call the kids into assembly. Bring in the PTA. Bring in speakers. Tell the kids: "You have to vote. It's what America is about." Set the kids up with voting-related projects for the next month, and write letters to parents urging them to take the kids with them to the polls."
Yes, because we all know kids listen to speakers at assemblies and harbor great love for outside projects they're required to do.
"Ask college presidents to send a letter to every student telling them to register. Why? "Student funding. Financial aid." They'll get the message."
I'd wager that if you polled the average college student, they'd be aware of the fact that their financial aid is determined by the people they could vote for, and they probably don't care. It's an amusing fallacy to me that people think that if only people understood the importance of voting, everyone would do it. Makes about as much sense as Socrates' insistence that anyone who knew the good would always do it.
"Usually, the outcome of a presidential election "depends on the turnout of the Democrats." So says Nelson Polsby of the University of California-Berkeley. For once, I agree with a political scientist."
Good to hear. Mr. Geoghegan then proceeds to define Democrats ("people with hourly jobs, high-school dropouts, high-school grads, single moms, single dads—anyone at or below the median household income.") in a way I'm pretty sure is not an accurate reflection of their demographics, though I'm not an Americanist, so I could be wrong about that.
This was amusing:
"I know that the country's turned to the right. But we'd still have the New Deal if voters were turning out at New Deal-type rates. (Between 1936 and 1968, voter turnout in presidential elections fell below 56 percent just once. Since 1968, it has never exceeded 56 percent.)"
Mr. Geoghegan's sop to changing demogaphics aside, this looks like a weak argument. What does the alignment of voters in 1936 tell us about the alignment of voters today? Considering most everyone who voted in 1936 is dead, not very much. Since democrats have been getting their clocks cleaned regularly in presidential elections since 1968, and since voter turnout has declined since then, the only possible explanation is that democrats aren't turning out anymore. Alternate hypotheses that explain the same data: Roosevelt and Truman (and Johnson and Kennedy) were dynamos that everyone just naturally liked, which provided Democrats with a surplus of votes over what their normal support level would be. Carter and Mondale and Dukakis and McGovern weren't especially likeable. Other alternate hypothesis: many people were okay with the way Republicans were running things, and didn't feel the need to register disapproval by voting against the Rs (note this would also mesh well with a thesis that Americans have become more conservative over the last few decades).
Then there are the suggestions. Oy:
"First, offer two ballots, a long one and a short one. Let's call the short one Fast Ballot. President. Congress. Governor if there's a race on. That's all. You're done. Someone else will vote the long ballot."
Nothing like encouraging civic responsbility by making people not have to worry about those boring local races! And I'm pretty sure this is a good institutionalization of a violation of one-man, one-vote.
"One free drink. Let's take the 10 biggest population centers. In each one, set up a business-type council, full of media types and celebrities, to push voting. In September and October, have them sign up bars and restaurants to put up a red-white-and-blue logo on Election Night. What does the logo mean? With your ballot stub, first drink is on the house. Soon everybody will want to have a logo, the way in the New Deal, businesses showcased the Blue Eagle. Put the word out on college campuses. Get them to compete to throw the biggest party. Pump it up, the way we've done with Halloween."
I never quite grasped why it's a good thing to have people vote if they don't actually care about the outcome. Why not just go in, not vote for anyone, hand in your ballot, and get your drink? Or, better still, just randomly vote for candidates? I'd like to minimize the appeal of voting to people who don't know much about what's going on, but that's probably just my authoritarian tendencies poking their head through again.
"In October, in every public school, call the kids into assembly. Bring in the PTA. Bring in speakers. Tell the kids: "You have to vote. It's what America is about." Set the kids up with voting-related projects for the next month, and write letters to parents urging them to take the kids with them to the polls."
Yes, because we all know kids listen to speakers at assemblies and harbor great love for outside projects they're required to do.
"Ask college presidents to send a letter to every student telling them to register. Why? "Student funding. Financial aid." They'll get the message."
I'd wager that if you polled the average college student, they'd be aware of the fact that their financial aid is determined by the people they could vote for, and they probably don't care. It's an amusing fallacy to me that people think that if only people understood the importance of voting, everyone would do it. Makes about as much sense as Socrates' insistence that anyone who knew the good would always do it.
WELL: Dara in the comments below:
"Yes. So, the way I see it, a sociopath is "responsible for his actions" but not morally so, since he cannot distinguish between right and wrong. We can hold him responsible in that we convict him of a crime, etc., but it's difficult to make a moral judgement if this person is truly incapable of making moral judgements. Having free will, he's still able to make decisions, and therefore holds that kind of responsibility. Is that what you mean?"
Er, well, maybe: it depends on what you mean by "sociopath." I'm at the end of moral thinking that says that the could've done otherwise criterion is the primary or sole determinant of moral responsibility, or, at least, that could've done otherwise entails moral responsibility. So I think everyone is potentially responsible for just about everything they do (there are lots of actions and decisions that just don't have any moral character, uncontroversially).
There's a famous paper about a dictator with such a ridiculous name I'm not going to rewrite it here, which essentially argues that sociopaths shouldn't be on the hook morally, but not because he can't distinguish right from wrong*: but because his conceptions of right and wrong are reversed, and he's never been in a position to know otherwise. He would be, on my view, stil morally responsible for his actions because I believe that the basic tenets of morality are sufficiently obvious that it's reasonable to expect people to come up with them on their own, even if they've never had other exposure to them.
But you could imagine cases of a condition which effectively wipes out the ability to do otherwise: OCD is a generally given case, though not usually moral in character: you can't but engage in the behavior again, regardless of what you want or think is best. Paradigmatically unfree. Then you have the case of the addict acting in the throes of addiction, generally considered to be unfree but (in my view), still a situation in which moral responsibility can be assigned because there's still a relevant could've done otherwise (not done whatever action began the addiction, which should be paradigmatically free.
The grey areas where we might assign blame but not of the same kind would be, for example, acts you did under hypnosis, where you couldn't (for generally physiological or unalterable-by-you psychological reasons) avoid doing what you did.
I hope that's a little clearer.
*this is generally, I think, not taken to be a good reason to suspend moral judgment, ergo "ignorance of the law is no excuse"
"Yes. So, the way I see it, a sociopath is "responsible for his actions" but not morally so, since he cannot distinguish between right and wrong. We can hold him responsible in that we convict him of a crime, etc., but it's difficult to make a moral judgement if this person is truly incapable of making moral judgements. Having free will, he's still able to make decisions, and therefore holds that kind of responsibility. Is that what you mean?"
Er, well, maybe: it depends on what you mean by "sociopath." I'm at the end of moral thinking that says that the could've done otherwise criterion is the primary or sole determinant of moral responsibility, or, at least, that could've done otherwise entails moral responsibility. So I think everyone is potentially responsible for just about everything they do (there are lots of actions and decisions that just don't have any moral character, uncontroversially).
There's a famous paper about a dictator with such a ridiculous name I'm not going to rewrite it here, which essentially argues that sociopaths shouldn't be on the hook morally, but not because he can't distinguish right from wrong*: but because his conceptions of right and wrong are reversed, and he's never been in a position to know otherwise. He would be, on my view, stil morally responsible for his actions because I believe that the basic tenets of morality are sufficiently obvious that it's reasonable to expect people to come up with them on their own, even if they've never had other exposure to them.
But you could imagine cases of a condition which effectively wipes out the ability to do otherwise: OCD is a generally given case, though not usually moral in character: you can't but engage in the behavior again, regardless of what you want or think is best. Paradigmatically unfree. Then you have the case of the addict acting in the throes of addiction, generally considered to be unfree but (in my view), still a situation in which moral responsibility can be assigned because there's still a relevant could've done otherwise (not done whatever action began the addiction, which should be paradigmatically free.
The grey areas where we might assign blame but not of the same kind would be, for example, acts you did under hypnosis, where you couldn't (for generally physiological or unalterable-by-you psychological reasons) avoid doing what you did.
I hope that's a little clearer.
*this is generally, I think, not taken to be a good reason to suspend moral judgment, ergo "ignorance of the law is no excuse"
YES! This is the one where Aslan sings the world into being, right? (am I mixing up my stories?)
The sixth book written, you're nevertheless the first chronologically. You not only describe the creation of Narnia and tell where the White Witch, the lampost and the wardrobe came from, you get to bounce between worlds with the help of Uncle Andrew's weird magic rings.
Find out which Chronicles of Narnia book you are.
The sixth book written, you're nevertheless the first chronologically. You not only describe the creation of Narnia and tell where the White Witch, the lampost and the wardrobe came from, you get to bounce between worlds with the help of Uncle Andrew's weird magic rings.
Find out which Chronicles of Narnia book you are.
THAT WAS MOSES, YO: Juan Cole:
"Chalabi came on television on Thursday and said his message to the US was "Let my people go!" He is now playing an Iraqi Martin Luther King!"
"Chalabi came on television on Thursday and said his message to the US was "Let my people go!" He is now playing an Iraqi Martin Luther King!"
WELL: I feel confident saying this is just plain wrong:
"At any rate, I think where Brooks really went astray was by making the common mistake (at least it's a mistake according to me) of thinking that questions of responsibility hinge in some important way on the free will topic."
If there's anything that hard determinists, compatibilists, indeterminists and incompatibilists by and large can all agree on, it's that free will is the criterion for moral responsibility**#.
**you can argue, and they do, on what sets of facts entail free will, but they'd all agree that free will, if there were such a thing, would entail moral responsibility.
#there might be some other cases where we might 'hold someone responsible' for their action, but not in the sense that we'd ascribe moral responsibility as such.
"At any rate, I think where Brooks really went astray was by making the common mistake (at least it's a mistake according to me) of thinking that questions of responsibility hinge in some important way on the free will topic."
If there's anything that hard determinists, compatibilists, indeterminists and incompatibilists by and large can all agree on, it's that free will is the criterion for moral responsibility**#.
**you can argue, and they do, on what sets of facts entail free will, but they'd all agree that free will, if there were such a thing, would entail moral responsibility.
#there might be some other cases where we might 'hold someone responsible' for their action, but not in the sense that we'd ascribe moral responsibility as such.
19.5.04
WELL: I promised to come back to this normblog post with more substantive commentary. Well, here we are:
"It all happened, as the phrase is, on Rumsfeld's watch. Even if he didn't know, he should have known; he should have made it his business to know."
I take it that norm here is offering up a version of the positive argument of free will that says that you're morally responsible for relevant could've-done-otherwises that were within your power to change. I think the underlying principle to assigning moral blame on this basis is troublesome, if not in this case, then in some imaginable cases.
Uncontroversially, we can all agree that someone like Rumsfeld would be responsible in two cases: where he expressly created or approved a policy of torture (or whatever you like), and the one in which he was aware of instances of torture but chose to ignore them. Obviously he has to go then, but not because of this special case of could've-done-otherwise (he should've known, but didn't)--this is just the regular case.
But there are two counterfactual cases that should be troublesome:
1. Torture, or whatever you like, is going on, and Rumsfeld is making inquiries to various military types, who tell him nothing's going on, send reports that nothing's going on, and all the relevant parties agree not to let him in on what's happening. It doesn't seem like you can hold him responsible in that situation, because he had no way of knowing*.
2. Rumsfeld is actually being quite scrupulous in checking to make sure that all the relevant units aren't engaging in torture or the like, being so thorough, in fact, that he's hasn't gotten to the ones that have tortured by the time they do. You can't really seem to fault him for not trying or not caring in that hypothetical case: at best, you can argue he went to the wrong places first.
But what looks like the best reason to reject this particular form of moral responsibility is that there's just a lot of stuff he has to know about, a lot of people he has to keep tabs on. It seems inevitable that given enough people and enough time, you'll get torture, and getting your attention to the right place at the right time is probably immensely difficult.
I'm not trying to let him off the hook--merely pointing out that it looks like norm's particular criterion accomplishes nothing that the regular could've-done-otherwise criterion doesn't do, but it does manage to generate a few prominent complicating cases.
*To deflect the natural Nazi analogy: it's not the same as making the argument that what the Nazis did was okay because they grew up in a culture that was normatively warped, so they couldn't possibly have known (these two positions get conflated on some occasions in the philosophical literature on free will). The key difference is that hypothetical-Rumsfeld isn't engaging in the actions himself. We all agree (presumably: if we don't, that's a different argument than this one) that if Rumsfeld knew, he'd have the same moral revulsion the rest of us have.
"It all happened, as the phrase is, on Rumsfeld's watch. Even if he didn't know, he should have known; he should have made it his business to know."
I take it that norm here is offering up a version of the positive argument of free will that says that you're morally responsible for relevant could've-done-otherwises that were within your power to change. I think the underlying principle to assigning moral blame on this basis is troublesome, if not in this case, then in some imaginable cases.
Uncontroversially, we can all agree that someone like Rumsfeld would be responsible in two cases: where he expressly created or approved a policy of torture (or whatever you like), and the one in which he was aware of instances of torture but chose to ignore them. Obviously he has to go then, but not because of this special case of could've-done-otherwise (he should've known, but didn't)--this is just the regular case.
But there are two counterfactual cases that should be troublesome:
1. Torture, or whatever you like, is going on, and Rumsfeld is making inquiries to various military types, who tell him nothing's going on, send reports that nothing's going on, and all the relevant parties agree not to let him in on what's happening. It doesn't seem like you can hold him responsible in that situation, because he had no way of knowing*.
2. Rumsfeld is actually being quite scrupulous in checking to make sure that all the relevant units aren't engaging in torture or the like, being so thorough, in fact, that he's hasn't gotten to the ones that have tortured by the time they do. You can't really seem to fault him for not trying or not caring in that hypothetical case: at best, you can argue he went to the wrong places first.
But what looks like the best reason to reject this particular form of moral responsibility is that there's just a lot of stuff he has to know about, a lot of people he has to keep tabs on. It seems inevitable that given enough people and enough time, you'll get torture, and getting your attention to the right place at the right time is probably immensely difficult.
I'm not trying to let him off the hook--merely pointing out that it looks like norm's particular criterion accomplishes nothing that the regular could've-done-otherwise criterion doesn't do, but it does manage to generate a few prominent complicating cases.
*To deflect the natural Nazi analogy: it's not the same as making the argument that what the Nazis did was okay because they grew up in a culture that was normatively warped, so they couldn't possibly have known (these two positions get conflated on some occasions in the philosophical literature on free will). The key difference is that hypothetical-Rumsfeld isn't engaging in the actions himself. We all agree (presumably: if we don't, that's a different argument than this one) that if Rumsfeld knew, he'd have the same moral revulsion the rest of us have.
LINK: Diotima is back!
and there was much rejoicing.
I like this:
"Now, I'm all about questioning feminist orthodoxy, but I'm sorry, this is mostly just a fancy justification for following one's own impulses instead of questioning and judging them."
also:
"So, I said something along those lines in class yesterday, and now I think the graduate student co-teacher (she's not a T.A., we're way too non-hierarchical for that)..."
...though I'll bet you she gets paid like a TA.
and there was much rejoicing.
I like this:
"Now, I'm all about questioning feminist orthodoxy, but I'm sorry, this is mostly just a fancy justification for following one's own impulses instead of questioning and judging them."
also:
"So, I said something along those lines in class yesterday, and now I think the graduate student co-teacher (she's not a T.A., we're way too non-hierarchical for that)..."
...though I'll bet you she gets paid like a TA.
LINK: Michael Totten has a good critique against "moral" arguments against the war. I think we can all agree the writer he's criticizing is an idiot.
GOOD POINT: Discoshaman:
"First, God chose to give us a very large book filled with teachings on lots of thngs other than salvation. If He considered them important enough to communicate, then they're important enough to discuss and debate."
"First, God chose to give us a very large book filled with teachings on lots of thngs other than salvation. If He considered them important enough to communicate, then they're important enough to discuss and debate."
HEH: This is good for a spin or twenty. I especially enjoyed this one:
"COULD BRUSSELS RUIN YOUR DAUGHTERS?"
ah, double entendres.
"COULD BRUSSELS RUIN YOUR DAUGHTERS?"
ah, double entendres.
LINK: Bill Wallo has an amusing post on his own National Honor Society experience. Mine? I recall getting a letter at the end of the year informing me that I hadn't done enough hours of "service" (selling Pumpkin-grams, Val-o-grams and Easter-grams, I kid you not), which caused the sponsors of the program to threaten to send a letter to U of M telling them I had gotten kicked out of NHS. The kicker? I didn't put NHS on my U of M application, so they probably would've just been befuddled (or, more likely, not cared at all).
My best story, by the way:
my best friend was Student Council president, and had to miss one of our big monthly meetings, so he asked me to take notes for him. For a one-hour meeting, he got about a dozen pages of single-spaced notes, which mostly consisted of a stream-of-consciousness account of being there: "someone got up and said some stuff about an activity... did you ever wonder why the ceilings in schools have all those dots in them?" There was also a running joke throughout the notes about my checking out a girl who was a friend of ours. Needless to say, it was a running joke for the rest of the year.
My best story, by the way:
my best friend was Student Council president, and had to miss one of our big monthly meetings, so he asked me to take notes for him. For a one-hour meeting, he got about a dozen pages of single-spaced notes, which mostly consisted of a stream-of-consciousness account of being there: "someone got up and said some stuff about an activity... did you ever wonder why the ceilings in schools have all those dots in them?" There was also a running joke throughout the notes about my checking out a girl who was a friend of ours. Needless to say, it was a running joke for the rest of the year.
LINK: This Choice Sicha goodness is quite amusing:
"Three new Furies have suddenly appeared over Manhattan, inducing faux-shock in the media and nervous laughter at parties. Please welcome the Million-Dollar Apartment, the $200 pair of jeans and the $10 cross-town cab fare—you’ll be seeing a lot of them.
The taxi-fare hike was eight years in the making, but it arrived exactly as the dam was breaking—the one that, for a couple of years there, held prices in the city fairly steady. The result has been a new flood of price hikes in everything from a bagel and cream cheese at Murray’s on Sixth Avenue (now $1.75, up 35 cents from a year ago), to a martini at Whiskey Park ($12, up from $10), to a pedicure at Avon Salon & Spa ($58 for the basic; last year it was $56).
As a city, New York is no longer upper-middle-class—it’s übermiddleclass, and the shifting of the ground under our feet is just beginning to register.
"I noticed somebody in New York magazine, an organizer who was charging $450 an hour to organize your closet," said Tim Geary, a novelist who lives in the East Village. "That’s when it hit me."
It was the new $10.25 movie ticket that jolted theatrical publicist Richard Kornberg. "It’s that extra fucking quarter for a movie that just kills you. If $10 was bad enough, then they tack on another quarter? Come on. You don’t mind paying for tickets; it’s that extra little thing that puts a capper on it.""
"Three new Furies have suddenly appeared over Manhattan, inducing faux-shock in the media and nervous laughter at parties. Please welcome the Million-Dollar Apartment, the $200 pair of jeans and the $10 cross-town cab fare—you’ll be seeing a lot of them.
The taxi-fare hike was eight years in the making, but it arrived exactly as the dam was breaking—the one that, for a couple of years there, held prices in the city fairly steady. The result has been a new flood of price hikes in everything from a bagel and cream cheese at Murray’s on Sixth Avenue (now $1.75, up 35 cents from a year ago), to a martini at Whiskey Park ($12, up from $10), to a pedicure at Avon Salon & Spa ($58 for the basic; last year it was $56).
As a city, New York is no longer upper-middle-class—it’s übermiddleclass, and the shifting of the ground under our feet is just beginning to register.
"I noticed somebody in New York magazine, an organizer who was charging $450 an hour to organize your closet," said Tim Geary, a novelist who lives in the East Village. "That’s when it hit me."
It was the new $10.25 movie ticket that jolted theatrical publicist Richard Kornberg. "It’s that extra fucking quarter for a movie that just kills you. If $10 was bad enough, then they tack on another quarter? Come on. You don’t mind paying for tickets; it’s that extra little thing that puts a capper on it.""
LINK: I refer you to A Small Victory for my view on the whole court-martial process. Say this for the armed forces, if nothing else: they don't muck around with it, they make guilty people pay Fast (imagine how long this would've gone as a criminal trial).
WELL: Angel is done (and managed not to completely disgrace itself, a la Buffy, in it's final episode, even though it dropped the whole shan-shu prophecy thing pretty easily). Now onto higher ground: Gilmore Girls. Seriously. So best. See the forthcoming TWoP recap of the season finale. Also, put the dvds of season one in your netflix queue. Trust me on this one.
Who says when you get a real job you can't be hip anymore? My organization is currently running an ad on Pitchfork which is the premiere snobby internet music review website. We're so hip that it hurts.
-OGIW
P.S. The ad is a banner ad at the top right. You may have to reload the page a few times to see it.
P.P.S. I suppose I'm giving away the "secret" of which organization I work for. Oh well.
-OGIW
P.S. The ad is a banner ad at the top right. You may have to reload the page a few times to see it.
P.P.S. I suppose I'm giving away the "secret" of which organization I work for. Oh well.
LINK: norman geras has an interesting post on what the current situation in Iraq means for supporters of the war. Best part:
"So I don't believe I have something to answer here - unless Hitchens was only meaning to say that we who supported, and support, the war have an obligation to speak out against what has happened, and to be clear and forthright about what remedial action should be taken. I don't believe it in general, and I especially don't believe I have something to answer for to, or before, all those who favoured a course of action towards Iraq the consequence of which would have been the persistence, the continuation, of tortures and atrocities in that country of a far worse kind and on a much greater scale for who knows what period of time. Note well here (since one can never be too careful about how quick to misunderstand one's meaning people will be who want to be) that I am not criciticizing anyone for their horror over the Abu Ghraib abuses because of the worse things that happened in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Anyone who was horrified, outraged, shocked, upset, was perfectly right to be so. But what I am saying is that I'll take no lessons in this matter from people who were either not similarly outraged by the tortures of the Saddam Hussein regime, or who, even if they were, were rather quieter and more discreet about their outrage (and the horrors that should have given it greater voice) in speaking about the future of Iraq than they are now in speaking about Abu Ghraib. To their sort, whether in the media or on the blogs, who challenge us, 'So what do you have to say now after Abu Ghraib?', I have a number of sharper responses than the one I'll give here, but the one I'll give here is: 'Excuse me? To you I owe no explanation about this.' To others, yes, I'll give an answer and it's simple: the reason I supported the war against Iraq was in the hope of bringing to an end the gross abuses of human rights for which the Iraqi regime was responsible, and nothing I'm aware of in my support for the war has ever implied condoning anything like the shameful betrayal of that hope which the Abu Ghraib abuses represent."
I have some critical stuff to say about his "should have known" criteron for moral responsibility (seems shot through with troubling hypothetical cases), but more on that after work.
"So I don't believe I have something to answer here - unless Hitchens was only meaning to say that we who supported, and support, the war have an obligation to speak out against what has happened, and to be clear and forthright about what remedial action should be taken. I don't believe it in general, and I especially don't believe I have something to answer for to, or before, all those who favoured a course of action towards Iraq the consequence of which would have been the persistence, the continuation, of tortures and atrocities in that country of a far worse kind and on a much greater scale for who knows what period of time. Note well here (since one can never be too careful about how quick to misunderstand one's meaning people will be who want to be) that I am not criciticizing anyone for their horror over the Abu Ghraib abuses because of the worse things that happened in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Anyone who was horrified, outraged, shocked, upset, was perfectly right to be so. But what I am saying is that I'll take no lessons in this matter from people who were either not similarly outraged by the tortures of the Saddam Hussein regime, or who, even if they were, were rather quieter and more discreet about their outrage (and the horrors that should have given it greater voice) in speaking about the future of Iraq than they are now in speaking about Abu Ghraib. To their sort, whether in the media or on the blogs, who challenge us, 'So what do you have to say now after Abu Ghraib?', I have a number of sharper responses than the one I'll give here, but the one I'll give here is: 'Excuse me? To you I owe no explanation about this.' To others, yes, I'll give an answer and it's simple: the reason I supported the war against Iraq was in the hope of bringing to an end the gross abuses of human rights for which the Iraqi regime was responsible, and nothing I'm aware of in my support for the war has ever implied condoning anything like the shameful betrayal of that hope which the Abu Ghraib abuses represent."
I have some critical stuff to say about his "should have known" criteron for moral responsibility (seems shot through with troubling hypothetical cases), but more on that after work.
18.5.04
CREEPY: Maybe it's something about ethics and morality, but Will Baude's ethics professor apparently went on a bit about ice cream:
"No! We're talking about ice cream, not morality. I know the course is called 'Ethics' and we'll get back to that in a minute, but right now we're talking about ice cream! . . . Ice cream is more relevant to morality than you might think."
Which is odd, because my freedom and moral responsibility seminar professor's favorite example of a desire was the desire to have ice cream... she'd seriously bring it up all the time (naturally, for the last day of class, we went and had ice cream).
"No! We're talking about ice cream, not morality. I know the course is called 'Ethics' and we'll get back to that in a minute, but right now we're talking about ice cream! . . . Ice cream is more relevant to morality than you might think."
Which is odd, because my freedom and moral responsibility seminar professor's favorite example of a desire was the desire to have ice cream... she'd seriously bring it up all the time (naturally, for the last day of class, we went and had ice cream).
BLOG NEWS: We may be having another voice joining us soon, as I've just extended an invitation to my good friend Dara Smith. Dara is doing her undergrad work in linguistic anthropology, plans on attending law school for international law (though she refuses to look at Duke, for some reason). She's also a rule utilitarian (read: closet deontologist) and generally good intellectual foil. Hopefully, she will not be the tremendous disappointment OGIW was been*.
*Apparently, she has a "job" which requires her to "work" during the day. Something about it being "election season." Also, I'm joking.
*Apparently, she has a "job" which requires her to "work" during the day. Something about it being "election season." Also, I'm joking.
LINK: Kevin Yaroch:
"I saw the Waldenbooks at Briarwood Mall today, and they actually have a "CHICK LIT" section. Yes, their words. It's not a small section, either."
"I saw the Waldenbooks at Briarwood Mall today, and they actually have a "CHICK LIT" section. Yes, their words. It's not a small section, either."
With regards to The Michigan Difference campaign, I hardly think it's a devious plan for subtle privatization. Having grown up in a household with a combined total of three U of M degrees in it, they do this kind of thing to milk the alumni all the time. Recent graduates: brace yourself for an avalanche of solicitations.
LINK: My Foreign Correspondent, in part of her neverending quest to become the new madpony, has an amusing review of Troy up on her blog. It's worth pointing out, re: the sexism in the movie, that's it's there in The Iliad, too. It was either Peter Euben (soon-to-be Greek political theory professor) or Arlene Saxonhouse (old Greek political theory professor)* who told me that they like to begin teaching the Iliad by pointing out that the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles is over who gets to rape the slave girl. Not exactly forward-thinking. Nevertheless, for a more sympathetic treatment, there's always Euripedes' Trojan Women.
*or perhaps something I read on a blog months ago, in which case it's lost it the mists of time, but I'm pretty sure it was Peter.
*or perhaps something I read on a blog months ago, in which case it's lost it the mists of time, but I'm pretty sure it was Peter.
17.5.04
A BRIEF NOTE OF INTEREST TO AN AUDIENCE OF ONE, UNFORTUNATELY: So I'm pretty sure one of my good friends is back in town. I say "pretty sure" because she left a comment on a blog post earlier today. But she would've totally let me know she was back in town, if only so I didn't worry about whether she made it back safely, right?
Oh, and if you have time, I'll totally get you set up to start blogging on here.
Oh, and if you have time, I'll totally get you set up to start blogging on here.
QUOTE: The Curmudgeonly Clerk, who missed an awful good career as a political theorist, I think:
"The commonplace retort to my content with majority rule is usually a longwinded lecture on the dangers of the Tyranny of the Majority.™ The immediate difficulty with this response is that it fundamentally distorts the concept of tyranny (i.e., "a government in which absolute power is vested in a single ruler") beyond recognition. "Tyranny of the Majority" is, in fact, a rhetorical flourish and nothing more. Majority rule, by definition, cannot constitute tyranny."
I first read that and objected that it was an attempt to get an easy out via linguistics, but what he goes on to say is quite good:
"Majority rule certainly can be tyrannical in the metaphorical sense of being oppressive where minority rights are concerned. But I am afraid that those who expect the law to correct such injustices would have it supplant the role of moral and political suasion (however that not fully rational process is understood to operate). Although we are in the midst of a celebration of Brown v. Bd. of Educ. at the moment, it is hard to say that Brown changed societal attitudes about racial arrangements so much as it reflected changing attitudes about race in America. In the South, it was met with open resistance. Although the relation between seminal cases like Brown and societal change is too complex to accurately characterize in a sentence, the later outcome of the Court's school busing decisions (which was white flight from urban school districts) indicates that the Court cannot lead where the populace will not follow. Yet that is precisely what libertarians would have the federal courts do: force march a stiff-necked people to their conception of the promised land."
"The commonplace retort to my content with majority rule is usually a longwinded lecture on the dangers of the Tyranny of the Majority.™ The immediate difficulty with this response is that it fundamentally distorts the concept of tyranny (i.e., "a government in which absolute power is vested in a single ruler") beyond recognition. "Tyranny of the Majority" is, in fact, a rhetorical flourish and nothing more. Majority rule, by definition, cannot constitute tyranny."
I first read that and objected that it was an attempt to get an easy out via linguistics, but what he goes on to say is quite good:
"Majority rule certainly can be tyrannical in the metaphorical sense of being oppressive where minority rights are concerned. But I am afraid that those who expect the law to correct such injustices would have it supplant the role of moral and political suasion (however that not fully rational process is understood to operate). Although we are in the midst of a celebration of Brown v. Bd. of Educ. at the moment, it is hard to say that Brown changed societal attitudes about racial arrangements so much as it reflected changing attitudes about race in America. In the South, it was met with open resistance. Although the relation between seminal cases like Brown and societal change is too complex to accurately characterize in a sentence, the later outcome of the Court's school busing decisions (which was white flight from urban school districts) indicates that the Court cannot lead where the populace will not follow. Yet that is precisely what libertarians would have the federal courts do: force march a stiff-necked people to their conception of the promised land."
LINK: heh:
"Thankfully, God can use the most inept of preachers to send forth his word. As the old saying goes (forgive the crudity, but since we're talking about Luther...), "God spoke to Balaam through an ass, and he's been speaking through asses ever since...""
"Thankfully, God can use the most inept of preachers to send forth his word. As the old saying goes (forgive the crudity, but since we're talking about Luther...), "God spoke to Balaam through an ass, and he's been speaking through asses ever since...""
LINK: I meant to post about U of M's massive fundraising drive last week, but forgot, so here goes. Obviously, if you were of the opinion that the University is pretty set on becoming a private institution, you'd see this as an attempt to test whether or not they can replace the state's share of the endowment. They'll probably have rousing success. Look for U of M to privatize around 2010: take it to the bank (so to speak).
WELL: Bomb-throwing question of the week: do we really need a Bill of Rights? Follow me here... if you'd written the constitution still having the ennumerated powers, but in the place of Article I, section 9, you had a clause not unlike the 9th & 10th amendments (e.g. "all rights not specifically given to Congres are reserved to the states and the people"), it seems like you'd miss out on a lot of the grey-area cases no one really likes. In other words, does saying "you can't do this or that" encourage flirting with the boundaries of acceptibility in a way that simply presenting a list of "you can do this, but nothing else" wouldn't?
No specific thoughts myself on this topic as of yet, just looking to see what people's instincts are.
No specific thoughts myself on this topic as of yet, just looking to see what people's instincts are.
LINK: good review of the new Morrissey. Even better, TMFTML's header: "MUSIC CRITIC AWKWARD IN HIGH SCHOOL SHOCKER."
LINK: oh, you mean those WMD?
"Kimmitt said the artillery round was of an old style that Saddam Hussein's regime had declared it no longer had after the Persian Gulf War. He said it was designed to explode after being fired from an artillery piece and that its effectiveness as an improvised explosive device was "limited.""
see also david t at Harry's Place.
"Kimmitt said the artillery round was of an old style that Saddam Hussein's regime had declared it no longer had after the Persian Gulf War. He said it was designed to explode after being fired from an artillery piece and that its effectiveness as an improvised explosive device was "limited.""
see also david t at Harry's Place.
16.5.04
LINK: Chris Lawrence at Signifying Nothing has an update-outline of an argument for getting rid of Rumsfeld I could get behind.
THE PRAVDA-IZATION OF MATT YGLESIAS: continues unabated:
"Joshua Shenk in Mother Jones writes about the conservative story and how liberals need to come up with a better one if we want to win. It's true enough, but the article is suffused with a kind of moral relativism that must be rejected if one wants to understand the scope of the problem. If you're willing to be the bad guy (as Bush clearly is) then it's easy to write a story with a happy ending -- cut taxes and expand entitlements, no need for Kyoto because global warming won't happen anyway, etc.
As a political tactic, it would be easy enough for liberals to respond to this, at least on the core front of social spending by upping the ante and promising even more benefits in the form of broad, universal government programs with no tax increases. The liberal dilemma is that we want -- or at least I want -- to actually do the right thing, which means acknowledging that things need to be paid for and that solving environmental problems requires actual regulations and not wishful thinking."
Now, obviously, in the first place, nothing angers me more than a willingness to ascribe the worst possible motives to your opposition, which Matt's certainly pandering to here. And it's also nice to see the slip-in that conservatives only want to give the appearance of solving problems, without actually solving them (presumably doing something else instead. which trope do you prefer? to get money for halliburton, or to satisfy their own insane lust for power?). Liberals, in their infinite benevolence to humankind, are the only ones who actually want to solve the problems that affect us, who have the courage to do what is necessary to affect what is right.
As a liberal, I'm offended by this sort of characterization: conservatives of all stripes want exactly the same ends as we liberals do; we only differ on what path with be most effective in getting there. As a great, great liberal once said (Hubert Humphrey, before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act):
"men of good will seldom differ about ultimate goals, but these men do differ about means and timing and priorities. But these differences are the stuff of unending political discourse."
I know a lot of people have a lot wrapped up in the Bush is stupid/evil/only getting by on his father's name idea, but doing so only pollutes the political waters even more.
"Joshua Shenk in Mother Jones writes about the conservative story and how liberals need to come up with a better one if we want to win. It's true enough, but the article is suffused with a kind of moral relativism that must be rejected if one wants to understand the scope of the problem. If you're willing to be the bad guy (as Bush clearly is) then it's easy to write a story with a happy ending -- cut taxes and expand entitlements, no need for Kyoto because global warming won't happen anyway, etc.
As a political tactic, it would be easy enough for liberals to respond to this, at least on the core front of social spending by upping the ante and promising even more benefits in the form of broad, universal government programs with no tax increases. The liberal dilemma is that we want -- or at least I want -- to actually do the right thing, which means acknowledging that things need to be paid for and that solving environmental problems requires actual regulations and not wishful thinking."
Now, obviously, in the first place, nothing angers me more than a willingness to ascribe the worst possible motives to your opposition, which Matt's certainly pandering to here. And it's also nice to see the slip-in that conservatives only want to give the appearance of solving problems, without actually solving them (presumably doing something else instead. which trope do you prefer? to get money for halliburton, or to satisfy their own insane lust for power?). Liberals, in their infinite benevolence to humankind, are the only ones who actually want to solve the problems that affect us, who have the courage to do what is necessary to affect what is right.
As a liberal, I'm offended by this sort of characterization: conservatives of all stripes want exactly the same ends as we liberals do; we only differ on what path with be most effective in getting there. As a great, great liberal once said (Hubert Humphrey, before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act):
"men of good will seldom differ about ultimate goals, but these men do differ about means and timing and priorities. But these differences are the stuff of unending political discourse."
I know a lot of people have a lot wrapped up in the Bush is stupid/evil/only getting by on his father's name idea, but doing so only pollutes the political waters even more.
15.5.04
MUSIC BLOGGING:
*Morrissey's new single, "Irish Blood, English Heart," is easily his best since "Everyday is Like Sunday" (which is to say, it's the only other decent thing he's done in his solo career) and is well worth listening to a dozen times in a row.
*I finally got around to listening to Can this week (odd, since two of my all-time favorite bands (The Verve and Spiritualized) were massively influenced by them). "Halleluwah" from Tago Mago is insanely brilliant--I'm always impressed when a 18.5 minute song absolutely demands that I listen to it over and over again. Not for the easily scared (do your prep work on Bitches Brew or perhaps A Storm in Heaven before venturing here).
*Motown song of the week: "Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart" -The Supremes. I swear, Holland/Dozier/Holland can make even the corniest ideas so best ever.
*Morrissey's new single, "Irish Blood, English Heart," is easily his best since "Everyday is Like Sunday" (which is to say, it's the only other decent thing he's done in his solo career) and is well worth listening to a dozen times in a row.
*I finally got around to listening to Can this week (odd, since two of my all-time favorite bands (The Verve and Spiritualized) were massively influenced by them). "Halleluwah" from Tago Mago is insanely brilliant--I'm always impressed when a 18.5 minute song absolutely demands that I listen to it over and over again. Not for the easily scared (do your prep work on Bitches Brew or perhaps A Storm in Heaven before venturing here).
*Motown song of the week: "Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart" -The Supremes. I swear, Holland/Dozier/Holland can make even the corniest ideas so best ever.
WELL: So I'm a little confused by this Will Baude post on his revising his thoughts on the Iraq war. Says Will:
"I was skeptical, but perhaps not as much ex ante as it looks ex post like I ought to have been."
I'm not sure that there's any reason for people who supported the war to back away from that support now, even if you accept the narrative that things are going impossibly bad at the moment. Now, it might be that Will's particular problem is that he didn't do an exhaustive run-through of the counterfactual possibilities of the war (you might, reasonably enough, say you decided wrongly if there were facts you could've known at the time but didn't, for whatever reason).
If you supported the war on deontological grounds (as I did), then nothing in the execution of the war should make you revise your decision to support it. If your relevant principle is that democracy is better than horrible totalitarian dictatorship, and that the war represented the best chance for Iraq to move from one to another in a soon-enough time frame (approximately my rationale), you'd pick to support it again no matter how many iterations of the same you went through, because the principle is always going to trump other considerations (at least, it will if your relevant principle is as strongly held as this one is for me).
If you supported on utilitarian grounds, all things considered, you probably had a mental calculation that went like this:
p(everything goes smoothly) + q(everything goes badly for a little while, but works out well) + r(everything goes badly for a long while, but works out well) > s(everything goes to pot)
where p, q, r and s are probablities of the various outcomes, and each outcome is weighted in an appropriate manner.
But so long as your beliefs ran that way, it's hard to see why you'd revise your decision should you come to it again. The following counterfactual might be helpful: re-imagine the decision on the Iraq war where there was a 99% probability that everything would work out with no hitches and only a 1% chance it wouldn't work at all. Suppose further that it so happens that nothing works out. Did you make the all-things-considered wrong decision? It's hard to see how that claim could be sustained. Does it mean that the next time you faced that decision, based on what happened in the first instance? You'd be a fool if you did. It seems, in other words, to be an odd feature of revising your evaluation of past decisions based on what happens that the rightness or wrongness of your decision changes as information you couldn't possibly have had available to you at the time (what actions would happen after the decision) changes.
And revisionism of one's beliefs looks even weirder in this case than most. In straightforward decisions you make about your own actions, it makes sense (kind of) that you should be penalized twice: once for the consequences of your decision and once again for deciding it in the first place--because, had you decided otherwise, that would've changed the outcome in a relevant way. But it seems odd for people to feel badly about their decisions either way when nothing they themselves could have done would've changed what happened (decisions about the Iraq war were, unless you're GWB, decisions you made about actions that would be entirely in the hands of other people).
I'm not necessarily saying that people shouldn't change their opinions about what should be done based on what happens, just that changing one's beliefs about decisions already made seems to back one into all sorts of weird philosophical problems.
"I was skeptical, but perhaps not as much ex ante as it looks ex post like I ought to have been."
I'm not sure that there's any reason for people who supported the war to back away from that support now, even if you accept the narrative that things are going impossibly bad at the moment. Now, it might be that Will's particular problem is that he didn't do an exhaustive run-through of the counterfactual possibilities of the war (you might, reasonably enough, say you decided wrongly if there were facts you could've known at the time but didn't, for whatever reason).
If you supported the war on deontological grounds (as I did), then nothing in the execution of the war should make you revise your decision to support it. If your relevant principle is that democracy is better than horrible totalitarian dictatorship, and that the war represented the best chance for Iraq to move from one to another in a soon-enough time frame (approximately my rationale), you'd pick to support it again no matter how many iterations of the same you went through, because the principle is always going to trump other considerations (at least, it will if your relevant principle is as strongly held as this one is for me).
If you supported on utilitarian grounds, all things considered, you probably had a mental calculation that went like this:
p(everything goes smoothly) + q(everything goes badly for a little while, but works out well) + r(everything goes badly for a long while, but works out well) > s(everything goes to pot)
where p, q, r and s are probablities of the various outcomes, and each outcome is weighted in an appropriate manner.
But so long as your beliefs ran that way, it's hard to see why you'd revise your decision should you come to it again. The following counterfactual might be helpful: re-imagine the decision on the Iraq war where there was a 99% probability that everything would work out with no hitches and only a 1% chance it wouldn't work at all. Suppose further that it so happens that nothing works out. Did you make the all-things-considered wrong decision? It's hard to see how that claim could be sustained. Does it mean that the next time you faced that decision, based on what happened in the first instance? You'd be a fool if you did. It seems, in other words, to be an odd feature of revising your evaluation of past decisions based on what happens that the rightness or wrongness of your decision changes as information you couldn't possibly have had available to you at the time (what actions would happen after the decision) changes.
And revisionism of one's beliefs looks even weirder in this case than most. In straightforward decisions you make about your own actions, it makes sense (kind of) that you should be penalized twice: once for the consequences of your decision and once again for deciding it in the first place--because, had you decided otherwise, that would've changed the outcome in a relevant way. But it seems odd for people to feel badly about their decisions either way when nothing they themselves could have done would've changed what happened (decisions about the Iraq war were, unless you're GWB, decisions you made about actions that would be entirely in the hands of other people).
I'm not necessarily saying that people shouldn't change their opinions about what should be done based on what happens, just that changing one's beliefs about decisions already made seems to back one into all sorts of weird philosophical problems.
14.5.04
LINK: OxBlog quotes the latest conservative to go wobbly on Rumsfeld. I find the argument that we need to be worried about our international prestige a little odd, because it seems to me that we ought to be worried more about doing what's right to do, regardless of what anyone else thinks (wasn't this a big part of the case for going into Iraq?). If the merits of the case say he should go, he should go, but tossing him aside to score points is as ridiculous as changing anything just to improve the opinions others have of us.
WELL: I was just thinking, trying to make some sense of what it is I want to study besides political theory (I need another field), and I was thinking specifically of my rather limited interest in American politics, aside from political behavior and voting theory, when the following sentence rolled out of my head:
"I mean, I could imagine writing a paper about how coordination games can explain why we don't ever see the sort of policy drift McKelvey and Plott's results would lead us to expect..."
and it occurred to me that this might not be just random words I strung together. Time to see if it's a sufficiently obvious point.
"I mean, I could imagine writing a paper about how coordination games can explain why we don't ever see the sort of policy drift McKelvey and Plott's results would lead us to expect..."
and it occurred to me that this might not be just random words I strung together. Time to see if it's a sufficiently obvious point.
12.5.04
WELL: I hate to pull a t-muffle on y'all, but some days Netflix sends you three great dvds that you have to spend your whole evening watching.
11.5.04
WELL: Bill Wallo has some thoughts in response to my whole little voting thing I've been talking about recently. My fault for posting when my idea was half finished, but this is sort of an outline (I think) of my thought process:
1. There's probably an argument to be made that raising the voting age to 21 isn't completely insane (my rationale was that a lot of the experiences you'd like a voter to have they can make it to 18 without having, but it's harder (if not impossible) for them to not have had them by 21).
2. Attempts to restrict the youth vote artificially* are as silly as attempts to raise it: there is no 'youth vote' that's a cohesive unit in any relevant sense (except that they tend to vote less often than other age cohorts, but there are explanations for that which are more broadly explanatory than that politicians aren't appealing to them**.
3. There are a lot of situations (some of which 18-21 year olds fall under, some of which they do not) that should be troubling to people who believe voting expresses the well-considered will of the people: the possibility of voting for on the basis of no rational considerations whatsoever (the coin-flip example, for certain, possibly also the trend to vote like one's parents); the possibilty of a vote being bought (still, strictly speaking, an expression of the individual's preferences (their well-considered vote is less important than x dollars or favors)); and the reality that people are able to vote for things where the cost gets dumped entirely onto other people (the greenbelt example: it may be the case that people are allowed to vote to, essentially, decide other people's taxes for them, but you'd need another argument to say that it's right that things are like that).
4. You might think, in spite of all these problems (and others, such as the general unknowability of social preferences and the troublingly strong effect voting rules have on outcomes (especially with Arrow's Theorem kept in mind), as I do, that voting is still the best way of expressing preferences in democracy***. I don't think you can argue that it's well-considered and other-minded in any of the ways people who want to talk about democracy generally do.
*which I'm not advocating, but the specific issue as it comes up in Ann Arbor is generally that wards have been divided up to split the student vote so prevent a majority in any ward (though if students actually voted in appreciable numbers, they could probably win all the wards they're in)
**18-21 year-olds tend not to vote because they don't have issues that are defined in the same way as issues (particularly economic) are defined for people who are older. But, you know, get a serious job, start a family, and you start to worry about these things.
***well, second best. I have a theory (which I'll probably elaborate on later), that it doesn't really matter that most people don't vote, because the dimensionality of political space is defined by everyone collectively and prior to party formation, candidate selection, interest group action or voter awareness.
1. There's probably an argument to be made that raising the voting age to 21 isn't completely insane (my rationale was that a lot of the experiences you'd like a voter to have they can make it to 18 without having, but it's harder (if not impossible) for them to not have had them by 21).
2. Attempts to restrict the youth vote artificially* are as silly as attempts to raise it: there is no 'youth vote' that's a cohesive unit in any relevant sense (except that they tend to vote less often than other age cohorts, but there are explanations for that which are more broadly explanatory than that politicians aren't appealing to them**.
3. There are a lot of situations (some of which 18-21 year olds fall under, some of which they do not) that should be troubling to people who believe voting expresses the well-considered will of the people: the possibility of voting for on the basis of no rational considerations whatsoever (the coin-flip example, for certain, possibly also the trend to vote like one's parents); the possibilty of a vote being bought (still, strictly speaking, an expression of the individual's preferences (their well-considered vote is less important than x dollars or favors)); and the reality that people are able to vote for things where the cost gets dumped entirely onto other people (the greenbelt example: it may be the case that people are allowed to vote to, essentially, decide other people's taxes for them, but you'd need another argument to say that it's right that things are like that).
4. You might think, in spite of all these problems (and others, such as the general unknowability of social preferences and the troublingly strong effect voting rules have on outcomes (especially with Arrow's Theorem kept in mind), as I do, that voting is still the best way of expressing preferences in democracy***. I don't think you can argue that it's well-considered and other-minded in any of the ways people who want to talk about democracy generally do.
*which I'm not advocating, but the specific issue as it comes up in Ann Arbor is generally that wards have been divided up to split the student vote so prevent a majority in any ward (though if students actually voted in appreciable numbers, they could probably win all the wards they're in)
**18-21 year-olds tend not to vote because they don't have issues that are defined in the same way as issues (particularly economic) are defined for people who are older. But, you know, get a serious job, start a family, and you start to worry about these things.
***well, second best. I have a theory (which I'll probably elaborate on later), that it doesn't really matter that most people don't vote, because the dimensionality of political space is defined by everyone collectively and prior to party formation, candidate selection, interest group action or voter awareness.
QUOTE: Signifying Nothing:
"Who's crying now?
Alex Tabarrok links to a debunking of the rather lame “smart states voted for Gore” hypothesis—on the basis that there’s no state-level IQ data for anyone to reach such a conclusion.
However, there is individual-level data in the 2000 American National Election Study, conducted by the University of Michigan, and this data supports an opposite conclusion: the mean level of both intelligence and political information-holding for Gore voters was lower than for Bush voters. Not much lower, mind you, but the difference is statistically significant."
"Who's crying now?
Alex Tabarrok links to a debunking of the rather lame “smart states voted for Gore” hypothesis—on the basis that there’s no state-level IQ data for anyone to reach such a conclusion.
However, there is individual-level data in the 2000 American National Election Study, conducted by the University of Michigan, and this data supports an opposite conclusion: the mean level of both intelligence and political information-holding for Gore voters was lower than for Bush voters. Not much lower, mind you, but the difference is statistically significant."
HAHA: My Foreign Correspondent, some say the new madpony:
one of the great things about travels through europe is the abundance of museums. from the louvre and musée d'orsay in paris to the cheese-making museum in gruyère (it's really cool, i promise), there are lots of neat things to see. sometimes, however, my fellow travelers might find themselves confused about appropriate decorum in said halls of knowledge. for these friends, i humbly offer:
la petite princesse's guide to appropriate museum behavior
#1. so as to make the experience of other patrons of the arts more pleasant, please keep comments and insights to a minimum. for example, if you were perusing a collection of the late works of claude monet, it would be best to keep breakthroughs such as "his paintings look, like, fuzzy" to yourself. as in, inside your head.
#2. that pink terrycloth sweatsuit must have cost you a fortune at neiman marcus, but let's face it: even j.lo would look scruffy wearing that in the british museum. how about a nice pair of trousers and a pressed shirt? or, even better, something from the special occasion collection at jcrew? very nice!
#3. an appropriate amount of time to enjoy, say, a painting is approximately one minute or less (emphasis on the "less" when it's crowded-- friends, remember, we can all share in the fun if we work together).
#4. let's also work on the emotions... no crying or laughing hysterically, if possible, pls. (try and stay in the middle-range of potential emotional extremes). i admit, i'd be the happiest person in the world if i could pitch a tent and set up camp in a renoir collection, but even i have managed to contain myself. and this means it's more than possible for the rest of you to attain. :)
#5. i like to bring nutritious snacks along as well, but try not to tuck into the trailmix or crack open the diet coke inside the gallery-- it's not good for the paintings.
#6. don't touch the paintings!!!
#7. don't pretend to touch the paintings!!!
#8. if the person on the loudspeaker in the sistine chapel says to be quiet in fifteen different languages, you should listen to him or her even if "vær rolig! ikke åpner deres munn!" isn't recognizable.
#9. no running through the hallways. you might slip and crash into a priceless fifteenth-century botticelli fresco. or a granny. and that would be bad.
#10. this one is the most important-- do not, under any circumstances, do any of the following:
a. pose in the same stance as the venus de milo in front or to the side of the actual statue
b. take a picture of the mona lisa. i promise the 50 cent postcard will look much, much better
c. use your video camera (even michael moore knows when to shut it off. probably.)
d. stare at the naked people. it's ART.
well, friends, that's all i've got. i feel that with mutual respect and admiration for both fellow art enthusiasts and the works before us, we can all have a fun, safe, and satisfying time in the galleries. :)
one of the great things about travels through europe is the abundance of museums. from the louvre and musée d'orsay in paris to the cheese-making museum in gruyère (it's really cool, i promise), there are lots of neat things to see. sometimes, however, my fellow travelers might find themselves confused about appropriate decorum in said halls of knowledge. for these friends, i humbly offer:
la petite princesse's guide to appropriate museum behavior
#1. so as to make the experience of other patrons of the arts more pleasant, please keep comments and insights to a minimum. for example, if you were perusing a collection of the late works of claude monet, it would be best to keep breakthroughs such as "his paintings look, like, fuzzy" to yourself. as in, inside your head.
#2. that pink terrycloth sweatsuit must have cost you a fortune at neiman marcus, but let's face it: even j.lo would look scruffy wearing that in the british museum. how about a nice pair of trousers and a pressed shirt? or, even better, something from the special occasion collection at jcrew? very nice!
#3. an appropriate amount of time to enjoy, say, a painting is approximately one minute or less (emphasis on the "less" when it's crowded-- friends, remember, we can all share in the fun if we work together).
#4. let's also work on the emotions... no crying or laughing hysterically, if possible, pls. (try and stay in the middle-range of potential emotional extremes). i admit, i'd be the happiest person in the world if i could pitch a tent and set up camp in a renoir collection, but even i have managed to contain myself. and this means it's more than possible for the rest of you to attain. :)
#5. i like to bring nutritious snacks along as well, but try not to tuck into the trailmix or crack open the diet coke inside the gallery-- it's not good for the paintings.
#6. don't touch the paintings!!!
#7. don't pretend to touch the paintings!!!
#8. if the person on the loudspeaker in the sistine chapel says to be quiet in fifteen different languages, you should listen to him or her even if "vær rolig! ikke åpner deres munn!" isn't recognizable.
#9. no running through the hallways. you might slip and crash into a priceless fifteenth-century botticelli fresco. or a granny. and that would be bad.
#10. this one is the most important-- do not, under any circumstances, do any of the following:
a. pose in the same stance as the venus de milo in front or to the side of the actual statue
b. take a picture of the mona lisa. i promise the 50 cent postcard will look much, much better
c. use your video camera (even michael moore knows when to shut it off. probably.)
d. stare at the naked people. it's ART.
well, friends, that's all i've got. i feel that with mutual respect and admiration for both fellow art enthusiasts and the works before us, we can all have a fun, safe, and satisfying time in the galleries. :)
10.5.04
QUOTE: William Riker, Liberalism Against Populism:
"What is different between the liberal and populist views is that, in the populist interpretation of voting, the opinions of the majority must be right and must be respected because the will of the people is the liberty of the people. In the liberal interpretation, there is no such magical identification. The outcome of voting is just a decision and it has no special moral character."
"What is different between the liberal and populist views is that, in the populist interpretation of voting, the opinions of the majority must be right and must be respected because the will of the people is the liberty of the people. In the liberal interpretation, there is no such magical identification. The outcome of voting is just a decision and it has no special moral character."
WELL: I was thinking about the good comments on my post on raising the voting age to 21. I think there are two paradigmatic cases where we might think that a vote was less than desirable:
1. Someone gets into the voting booth, pulls out a quarter, and votes strictly based on whether heads or tails comes up.
2. The Ann Arbor Greenbelt being voted on by students (oddly like Jonah Goldberg's example in the original Amber Taylor post): students who will neither pay the taxes to fund the greenbelt nor be around to see it's effects for good or ill get to vote equally with people for whom this means their money and the neighborhoods they live in.
Maybe you think that neither one of these scenarios is sufficient reason to restrict the franchise somewhat. Perhaps you think no one is so disinvested in politics (if they actually bother to go and vote) as to let it be decided by the flip of a coin. But there's lots of reason to believe that people make decisions off of incomplete or incorrect information, or on deeply ingrained behavior patterns (everyone tends to vote like their parents, for example). You can oppose restrictions on the franchise for a lot of reasons, but not, I think, because a vote is a sacred embodiment of an individual's will about the direction their government should go in--there's just not a lot of evidence to suggest people process political decisions like that.
1. Someone gets into the voting booth, pulls out a quarter, and votes strictly based on whether heads or tails comes up.
2. The Ann Arbor Greenbelt being voted on by students (oddly like Jonah Goldberg's example in the original Amber Taylor post): students who will neither pay the taxes to fund the greenbelt nor be around to see it's effects for good or ill get to vote equally with people for whom this means their money and the neighborhoods they live in.
Maybe you think that neither one of these scenarios is sufficient reason to restrict the franchise somewhat. Perhaps you think no one is so disinvested in politics (if they actually bother to go and vote) as to let it be decided by the flip of a coin. But there's lots of reason to believe that people make decisions off of incomplete or incorrect information, or on deeply ingrained behavior patterns (everyone tends to vote like their parents, for example). You can oppose restrictions on the franchise for a lot of reasons, but not, I think, because a vote is a sacred embodiment of an individual's will about the direction their government should go in--there's just not a lot of evidence to suggest people process political decisions like that.
LINK: I kinda agree with Uncle Grambo's feelings on the new blogger redesign. At the moment, I'm suffering because the text field no longer breaks lines except when it sees a line-break tag, which means I can't just not see the beginning of this sentence, I can't see the beginning of this clause. So beck.
9.5.04
WELL: Johann at Harry's Place:
"The second point is a more complex one. The view it is responding to has best been expressed by Harry here. He explains, "My solidarity is not with ‘the Iraqis’ and it never has been. My solidarity is with Iraqi and Kurdish democrats and it is clear at the moment who their main enemy is." I have a huge amount of sympathy for this, but I fear it contains a logical flaw. How can we side with Iraqi democrats and not the majority of Iraqi people? If a majority of Iraqis want the US out in two months (and god knows, I hope they don't, but it seems to be the case), then how can we be democratic and oppose such a fundamental desire from a mjority of people?
If we defy the majority in the name of democracy, what kind of Iraq will the democrats eventually inherit? Won't it be even more radicalised and angry? Won't the democrats - rightly - look out of touch and be deposed swiftly?"
It certainly looks to be the case that a democracy is bound to begin on an illiberal note. Either it will be the case that everyone agrees there should be a democracy, and you've just begun your vigorous defense of freedome of speech and the rights of minorities with a display by a total majority without any dissent at all, or else you begin over the objections of at least some people. How can a new government possibly claim all the things we want it to if it admits, as a starting point, that at least some opinions are off the official menu?
I hate to bring up the teleological suspension of the ethical (it's a concept I tend to overuse), but it seems pretty reasonable to argue that even the groups who are outside the democratic process can be included in. Thus, the anti-federalists get their Bill of Rights as a condition of the constitution being ratified over their objections.
I've been doing some thinking through various historical examples, and I've not found reason to believe that any democracy or republic can make it very far without some (sometimes longstanding or intense) illiberal periods. They're not normatively desirable, obviously, and it's the job of people in a society to make sure that the run of illiberality is kept to a minimum, but sometimes the right thing has to be done even over the objections of the many.
More troubling than the theoretical/moral considerations are the practical ones. I suppose my answer would be this: there's a chance, to be sure, that undermining the majority in the name of democracy will backfire in a really ugly way. But a non-democratic government is almost certainly going to be as bad (or worse), and it's not clear that you can make it to a good form of government by any other way. It's a small chance, but a chance nonetheless.
"The second point is a more complex one. The view it is responding to has best been expressed by Harry here. He explains, "My solidarity is not with ‘the Iraqis’ and it never has been. My solidarity is with Iraqi and Kurdish democrats and it is clear at the moment who their main enemy is." I have a huge amount of sympathy for this, but I fear it contains a logical flaw. How can we side with Iraqi democrats and not the majority of Iraqi people? If a majority of Iraqis want the US out in two months (and god knows, I hope they don't, but it seems to be the case), then how can we be democratic and oppose such a fundamental desire from a mjority of people?
If we defy the majority in the name of democracy, what kind of Iraq will the democrats eventually inherit? Won't it be even more radicalised and angry? Won't the democrats - rightly - look out of touch and be deposed swiftly?"
It certainly looks to be the case that a democracy is bound to begin on an illiberal note. Either it will be the case that everyone agrees there should be a democracy, and you've just begun your vigorous defense of freedome of speech and the rights of minorities with a display by a total majority without any dissent at all, or else you begin over the objections of at least some people. How can a new government possibly claim all the things we want it to if it admits, as a starting point, that at least some opinions are off the official menu?
I hate to bring up the teleological suspension of the ethical (it's a concept I tend to overuse), but it seems pretty reasonable to argue that even the groups who are outside the democratic process can be included in. Thus, the anti-federalists get their Bill of Rights as a condition of the constitution being ratified over their objections.
I've been doing some thinking through various historical examples, and I've not found reason to believe that any democracy or republic can make it very far without some (sometimes longstanding or intense) illiberal periods. They're not normatively desirable, obviously, and it's the job of people in a society to make sure that the run of illiberality is kept to a minimum, but sometimes the right thing has to be done even over the objections of the many.
More troubling than the theoretical/moral considerations are the practical ones. I suppose my answer would be this: there's a chance, to be sure, that undermining the majority in the name of democracy will backfire in a really ugly way. But a non-democratic government is almost certainly going to be as bad (or worse), and it's not clear that you can make it to a good form of government by any other way. It's a small chance, but a chance nonetheless.
WELL: So Amber Taylor at Crescat Sententia (guest-blogging) has a post on how awful and horrible it is that the youth vote is so disrespected nationwide--this has also been the general topic of various other posts on Crescat for the last few days. Now, then, is probably as good a time as any to make more widely known my support for re-raising the voting age to 21 (and, to calm OGIW's first objection, I'm perfectly okay with the draft age being indexed to the voting age, though I imagine you could make a not-ridiculous argument to support the opposite viewpoint). My commitments in political theory are all to republicanism, not democracy (I adore The Federalist Papers, after all), so I'm about as unconcerned over disenfranchising 18-to-21 year old as I am about our current refusal to enfranchise 15-to-18 year olds.
I suspect that, on balance, the best an 18-year old can do, politically, is be something of a mindless flack for whatever party their parents voted for (Kevin Yaroch will want to make a special note of the bit bolded below)*. You can make it to 18 without having any particularly relevant life experience, but it's a lot harder to have made it to 21 without worrying about holding a job, finding funding for your education, paying bills, dealing with landlords, and learning a bit how things work in life in general--the sort of broadening experiences you want voters to have--so that they can see a little better what would make their own lives, and those of people around them, easier.
I'm not an idiot, though: I recognize the voting age will never be raised (and perhaps this is a very good thing, because the exceptional cases (who do actually know what's going on) are precisely the ones you want in the system as early as possible). My only real consolation is that 18-21 year olds don't really vote, and most of the attempts to get them to turn out fail, for the simple reason that they incorrectly assume there's such a thing as a 'youth vote,' a set of issues that can electrify all young people into participating in politics. Truthfully, 18-21 year olds are no more cohesive a set of potential voters than any other three-year age swath: you'd laugh if part of the Democrats' strategy this year was to win as many 43-46 year olds as possible, because someone obviously didn't understand that's not the best way to work things.
*OGIW will here object, no doubt, that both she and her friends (who are also some of my friends) have all always been very conscientious about picking who to support and what issues to care about. No doubt--social network theory predicts this (people who spend lots of time around each other will coordinate their behaviors, attitudes, etc for the purposes of making their interactions go more smoothly), as it predicts, I'd imagine, that political consciousness will be higher in the communities she's lived in (downtown-ish Detroit, Ann Arbor, DC) than it might be elsewhere in the country. In fact, anyone who's reading this is probably in that top ten or eleven percent of the US population that's well-educated about their politics. There is, however, everyone else, so I feel tentatively confident about saying this as a general rule.
I suspect that, on balance, the best an 18-year old can do, politically, is be something of a mindless flack for whatever party their parents voted for (Kevin Yaroch will want to make a special note of the bit bolded below)*. You can make it to 18 without having any particularly relevant life experience, but it's a lot harder to have made it to 21 without worrying about holding a job, finding funding for your education, paying bills, dealing with landlords, and learning a bit how things work in life in general--the sort of broadening experiences you want voters to have--so that they can see a little better what would make their own lives, and those of people around them, easier.
I'm not an idiot, though: I recognize the voting age will never be raised (and perhaps this is a very good thing, because the exceptional cases (who do actually know what's going on) are precisely the ones you want in the system as early as possible). My only real consolation is that 18-21 year olds don't really vote, and most of the attempts to get them to turn out fail, for the simple reason that they incorrectly assume there's such a thing as a 'youth vote,' a set of issues that can electrify all young people into participating in politics. Truthfully, 18-21 year olds are no more cohesive a set of potential voters than any other three-year age swath: you'd laugh if part of the Democrats' strategy this year was to win as many 43-46 year olds as possible, because someone obviously didn't understand that's not the best way to work things.
*OGIW will here object, no doubt, that both she and her friends (who are also some of my friends) have all always been very conscientious about picking who to support and what issues to care about. No doubt--social network theory predicts this (people who spend lots of time around each other will coordinate their behaviors, attitudes, etc for the purposes of making their interactions go more smoothly), as it predicts, I'd imagine, that political consciousness will be higher in the communities she's lived in (downtown-ish Detroit, Ann Arbor, DC) than it might be elsewhere in the country. In fact, anyone who's reading this is probably in that top ten or eleven percent of the US population that's well-educated about their politics. There is, however, everyone else, so I feel tentatively confident about saying this as a general rule.
7.5.04
WELL: Joe Carter:
"When I was the editor of a small regional paper (The East Texas Tribune)..."
Is there anything he hasn't done? I'm envious, a little.
"When I was the editor of a small regional paper (The East Texas Tribune)..."
Is there anything he hasn't done? I'm envious, a little.
LINK: Walloworld has a good appreciation of The Seven Samurai, which is pretty much one of the best movies ever made, despite the first two hours being so depressing that they'd make Ingmar Bergman hide under the covers for fear of facing the world. Last hour (almost) makes the experience totally worth it, and Kurosawa certainly doesn't cut any corners in rendering the complexities of the morals involved.
FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT:
Jacob Levy in Dan Drezner's comments section:
"(though as an academic, I did appreciate how adeptly the writers skewered Ross' academic pretensions)
As I've said to Dan in person, the problem with this is that Ross' academic pretensions don't even roughly correspond to any real-world academic pretensions. Here at Chicago, the traditional pretension about titles is to make such a big deal about not caring about titles as to go by "Mister" rather than even "Professor." (This is falling by the wayside.) "Doctor," which Ross not only insists upon but wants his sexual partners to call him, is constrained to: southern academic culture and its two closely-related kin, black and military academic culture; some continental Europeans trying to recreate "Herr Doktor Professor;" and people with degrees regarded as fake by the rest of academia, especially Ed.D.s. A native-born American white Jewish professor at Columbia who went by "doctor" would be scorned by his colleagues for it.
Don't even get me started on Ross' big conference lecture..."
OxBlog takes on the always-delightful comedy of referral logs.
Joe Carter makes fun of Fred Durst and shows himself to know frighteningly much about Limp Bizkit:
"Anyway, I just wanted to point out one of the unwritten rules of blogging: never post naked pictures of your toddler on your blog. First of all, its rarther icky and will likely attract people like Pete Townsend. Also, your son has enough embarrassment to deal with over his name (Dallas Durst?) and his parentage (Fred Durst?) without having full-frontal nude shots of him floating around the Internet."
Tim Blair on the Normblog profile:
"In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > Only if there was a chance it could make a little orphan girl sad."
I described Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Carribean to friends as "the answer to the eternal question: what would Keith Richards have been like if he were gay?" Apparently, Keef's going to be doing a cameo in the sequel. As Uncle Grambo would say, so best.
Oh, and My Foreign Correspondent is generally amusing today. On rewatching Kill Bill Vol. :
"hospital warden guy: *** content not appropriate for this site ***
other guy: *** " " ***
hospital warden guy: *** " " ***
me: hmmm this is different from when i saw it the first time... "
Jacob Levy in Dan Drezner's comments section:
"(though as an academic, I did appreciate how adeptly the writers skewered Ross' academic pretensions)
As I've said to Dan in person, the problem with this is that Ross' academic pretensions don't even roughly correspond to any real-world academic pretensions. Here at Chicago, the traditional pretension about titles is to make such a big deal about not caring about titles as to go by "Mister" rather than even "Professor." (This is falling by the wayside.) "Doctor," which Ross not only insists upon but wants his sexual partners to call him, is constrained to: southern academic culture and its two closely-related kin, black and military academic culture; some continental Europeans trying to recreate "Herr Doktor Professor;" and people with degrees regarded as fake by the rest of academia, especially Ed.D.s. A native-born American white Jewish professor at Columbia who went by "doctor" would be scorned by his colleagues for it.
Don't even get me started on Ross' big conference lecture..."
OxBlog takes on the always-delightful comedy of referral logs.
Joe Carter makes fun of Fred Durst and shows himself to know frighteningly much about Limp Bizkit:
"Anyway, I just wanted to point out one of the unwritten rules of blogging: never post naked pictures of your toddler on your blog. First of all, its rarther icky and will likely attract people like Pete Townsend. Also, your son has enough embarrassment to deal with over his name (Dallas Durst?) and his parentage (Fred Durst?) without having full-frontal nude shots of him floating around the Internet."
Tim Blair on the Normblog profile:
"In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > Only if there was a chance it could make a little orphan girl sad."
I described Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Carribean to friends as "the answer to the eternal question: what would Keith Richards have been like if he were gay?" Apparently, Keef's going to be doing a cameo in the sequel. As Uncle Grambo would say, so best.
Oh, and My Foreign Correspondent is generally amusing today. On rewatching Kill Bill Vol. :
"hospital warden guy: *** content not appropriate for this site ***
other guy: *** " " ***
hospital warden guy: *** " " ***
me: hmmm this is different from when i saw it the first time... "
6.5.04
WELL: So it's summertime, really and truly, which means for the most part I'm far more interested in getting my mix cd of Northern Soul just right than anything current political going on. I should snap out of it over the weekend, I think. Until then, I'll point out for OGIW's benefit that "Everybody Wants Somebody to Love" is a Solomon Burke song (though Wilson Pickett may indeed have a version--neither is as good as the Rolling Stones' from Now!).
LINK: OGIW and I agree this is unbearably pretentious:
"The network that concocted a contestants' reunion even before "The Apprentice" ended could hardly be expected to let "Friends" go quietly. NBC's send-off has been the most overwrought and prolonged farewell since Violetta's death scene in "La Traviata.""
"The network that concocted a contestants' reunion even before "The Apprentice" ended could hardly be expected to let "Friends" go quietly. NBC's send-off has been the most overwrought and prolonged farewell since Violetta's death scene in "La Traviata.""
On a happier note, some suggestions for Nick's new Motown thing:
1. Tempations - I Wish it Would Rain
2. Ray Charlies - Night Time is the Right Time
3. Wilson Pickett - Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
4. Otis Redding - That's How Strong My Love Is
5. The Spinners - Rubberband Man
6. Wanda Jackson - Lets Have Party
7. Aretha Franklin - The Weight
More to come later, I'm sure.
-OGIW
1. Tempations - I Wish it Would Rain
2. Ray Charlies - Night Time is the Right Time
3. Wilson Pickett - Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
4. Otis Redding - That's How Strong My Love Is
5. The Spinners - Rubberband Man
6. Wanda Jackson - Lets Have Party
7. Aretha Franklin - The Weight
More to come later, I'm sure.
-OGIW
5.5.04
WELL: So after almost a whole week of dithering, I've landed on my musical theme for the summer: Motown. Okay, sure, Motown is the soundtrack for every summer (or every decent summer), so I'm casting the net a little wider: Motown/Brill Building/Tin Pan Alley/Phil Spector/Atlantic R&B/Stax/Volt/Northern Soul*. Relative obscurity, as always, is important, but not really a be-all end-all (you can be plenty hip and still like Pet Sounds). I'll suggest various good things as the summer goes along, and I have a feeling OGIW will have a thing or two to mention, as she's been chatting my ear off about Wilson Pickett and Jackie Wilson for a few months now. Provisional goodness:
"Needle in a Haystack" -The Velvelettes
"Too Many Fish in the Sea" -The Marvelettes
"Nothing But Blue Skies" -Jackie Wilson
"Tainted Love" -Gloria Jones (so much better than the cover)
*There are some grey areas that have yet to be worked out. I might be tempted to include something like "Pleasant Valley Sunday," as it was written by Carol King, but was 'performed' by The Monkees, and would on that basis be disqualified.
"Needle in a Haystack" -The Velvelettes
"Too Many Fish in the Sea" -The Marvelettes
"Nothing But Blue Skies" -Jackie Wilson
"Tainted Love" -Gloria Jones (so much better than the cover)
*There are some grey areas that have yet to be worked out. I might be tempted to include something like "Pleasant Valley Sunday," as it was written by Carol King, but was 'performed' by The Monkees, and would on that basis be disqualified.
WELL: So maybe Iraq is going to pot, maybe it isn't. I think there's probably far too much of a rush to be evaluative at the moment (for maybe totally valid reasons), but I think the best thing all involved parties could do is just chill out for a bit. Our information is incomplete, so we certainly can't make judgments as people who know. It seems much more likely to me that the current back-and-forth and indecision is worse, in the long run, than picking any particular course of action and just sticking to it (one could make an argument that this is precisely what the Bushies are doing, were one so inclined) on a simple application of Occam's Razor: do not multiply policies unneccessarily.
But maybe I should be being a bit more evaluative, given that I supported the war for pretty full-throated democracy promotion, anti-fascist reasons. So far as my motivation for supporting the war in Iraq goes, I suppose I have to believe two things to still support Bush: 1. that he's more likely than any other option to do the right thing in Iraq and 2. That his instincts are such that he'll continue to do the right thing in other situations around the world. I think both are probably still true, and I doubt Kerry on both of those, so there you go.
But maybe I should be being a bit more evaluative, given that I supported the war for pretty full-throated democracy promotion, anti-fascist reasons. So far as my motivation for supporting the war in Iraq goes, I suppose I have to believe two things to still support Bush: 1. that he's more likely than any other option to do the right thing in Iraq and 2. That his instincts are such that he'll continue to do the right thing in other situations around the world. I think both are probably still true, and I doubt Kerry on both of those, so there you go.
4.5.04
LINK: Jollyblogger has a link to a nice post on why talking about politics is intellectually shallow. It's perhaps bad for me (considering my future career) that I'm tangentally interested (at best) in what's going on in Washington. Then again, it's probably much, much better for my objectivity as a scholar that I don't really care what policies get enacted*. Me likey:
"Since graduating, I've grown convinced that there is more to life than that. The sound and fury of political debate never leads anywhere nor does it ever accomplish anything, except to produce hurt feelings and cynicism for no appreciable purpose.
Political debate, and by extension politics itself, is an intellectually shallow pursuit. It has to be.
Every day, politicians deal with new scandals, new legislation, and new constituents. To cope with their
constantly changing environment, congressmen, senators and presidents change just as rapidly. This perpetual change does not allow for the reflection necessary for deep thought...
But it's even more disheartening to consider the system's effect on individuals. Despite the intellectual shallowness of politics, smart people flock to Washington by the hundreds of thousands. Yet even though Washington is one of the best-educated cities in the world, the capital produces no great poems or works of art, and true intellectuals either leave in disgust or let the bureaucracy assimilate them. Just because something is shallow doesn't mean it's not dangerous. After all, you can drown in water six inches deep."
*One of the better consolations of realist theories of democracy is that it essentially says politics in America is a giant Markov chain: you get essentially the same result no matter which set of people you're talking about, so the marginal difference between your caring about everything that happens and your only caring about a few things is virtually nonexistent (in fact, the system functions better when you only care about a few things).
"Since graduating, I've grown convinced that there is more to life than that. The sound and fury of political debate never leads anywhere nor does it ever accomplish anything, except to produce hurt feelings and cynicism for no appreciable purpose.
Political debate, and by extension politics itself, is an intellectually shallow pursuit. It has to be.
Every day, politicians deal with new scandals, new legislation, and new constituents. To cope with their
constantly changing environment, congressmen, senators and presidents change just as rapidly. This perpetual change does not allow for the reflection necessary for deep thought...
But it's even more disheartening to consider the system's effect on individuals. Despite the intellectual shallowness of politics, smart people flock to Washington by the hundreds of thousands. Yet even though Washington is one of the best-educated cities in the world, the capital produces no great poems or works of art, and true intellectuals either leave in disgust or let the bureaucracy assimilate them. Just because something is shallow doesn't mean it's not dangerous. After all, you can drown in water six inches deep."
*One of the better consolations of realist theories of democracy is that it essentially says politics in America is a giant Markov chain: you get essentially the same result no matter which set of people you're talking about, so the marginal difference between your caring about everything that happens and your only caring about a few things is virtually nonexistent (in fact, the system functions better when you only care about a few things).
LINK: this reminds me of one of my friends, who enjoys chasing (and talking to) squirrels whenever she sees them.
LINK: As a longtime fan of Tina Fey, I was amused by this, especially as it pretty accurately captures the whole what-me-a-sex-symbol? thing she's got going on.
QUOTE: I disagree with a large portion of this (though maybe less than you think), but I found this bit to be rather spot-on:
"We can't change the shitty things our country has done in the past, and we're probably not going to stop the shitty things it's going to do in the future, but we can realize that Mr. Bush does not put us in gas chambers and murder us by the thousands, but rather sends dedicated men and women overseas to kill people that do, which they deserve, and if you don't agree with that, then you need to climb a mountain and contemplate what is good and what is evil for awhile."
"We can't change the shitty things our country has done in the past, and we're probably not going to stop the shitty things it's going to do in the future, but we can realize that Mr. Bush does not put us in gas chambers and murder us by the thousands, but rather sends dedicated men and women overseas to kill people that do, which they deserve, and if you don't agree with that, then you need to climb a mountain and contemplate what is good and what is evil for awhile."
THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY:
"Haughtiness and the high hand of disdain
Tempt and outrage God's holy law;
And any mortal who dares hold
No immortal power in awe
Will be caught up in a net of pain:
The price for which his levity is sold...
Though fools will honor impious men,
In their cities no tragic poet sings."
-Oedipus Rex
"Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction."
-Isaiah 48:10
"Haughtiness and the high hand of disdain
Tempt and outrage God's holy law;
And any mortal who dares hold
No immortal power in awe
Will be caught up in a net of pain:
The price for which his levity is sold...
Though fools will honor impious men,
In their cities no tragic poet sings."
-Oedipus Rex
"Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction."
-Isaiah 48:10
3.5.04
WELL: One last set of thoughts (provisionally) on my brush with authoritarianism:
You can't, it seems, offer up utility-based objections to laws that would indirectly restrict certain outside-the-bounds forms of speech, because none of them can survive the counterfactual other world in which everyone is in agreement on the particular issue. That is to say, if you believe that restricting some speech acts would cause, e.g., people who have the beliefs being targeted to simply move their activities (potentially dangerously) further off the radar and make them harder to convert, so to speak, you can't use that objection in the world I'm imagining where no one has racist beliefs, etc: there's simply no one on whom the negative effects can do anything.
But maybe you let that objection pass, because you think the counterfactual world I'm imagining doesn't look anything like our world. But it's not clear, if you follow Mill, that our world gets around the utility-based objection Bill Wallo raised, even if the government never takes any action. You might think that as the number of people who have repudiated a view through normal means increases, the people who continue to hold it will do so with both increasing intensity and increasing invisibility. If that's the case, there's always going to be a remnant of people who refuse to be converted in their beliefs, regardless of who it is who's doing the acting. So you might, maybe, very narrowly be able to argue that all governmental action might do in such cases is limit the spread of such beliefs beyond the people who have them at any given time. Of course, there are still massive problems that would prevent any positive legislative program going forth (such as how you can limit speech without limiting speech as such), but I'm not sure the authoritarian argument comes off any worse than the non-authoritarian one.
Oh, and at least I haven't gotten this far yet.
You can't, it seems, offer up utility-based objections to laws that would indirectly restrict certain outside-the-bounds forms of speech, because none of them can survive the counterfactual other world in which everyone is in agreement on the particular issue. That is to say, if you believe that restricting some speech acts would cause, e.g., people who have the beliefs being targeted to simply move their activities (potentially dangerously) further off the radar and make them harder to convert, so to speak, you can't use that objection in the world I'm imagining where no one has racist beliefs, etc: there's simply no one on whom the negative effects can do anything.
But maybe you let that objection pass, because you think the counterfactual world I'm imagining doesn't look anything like our world. But it's not clear, if you follow Mill, that our world gets around the utility-based objection Bill Wallo raised, even if the government never takes any action. You might think that as the number of people who have repudiated a view through normal means increases, the people who continue to hold it will do so with both increasing intensity and increasing invisibility. If that's the case, there's always going to be a remnant of people who refuse to be converted in their beliefs, regardless of who it is who's doing the acting. So you might, maybe, very narrowly be able to argue that all governmental action might do in such cases is limit the spread of such beliefs beyond the people who have them at any given time. Of course, there are still massive problems that would prevent any positive legislative program going forth (such as how you can limit speech without limiting speech as such), but I'm not sure the authoritarian argument comes off any worse than the non-authoritarian one.
Oh, and at least I haven't gotten this far yet.
LINK: I think the really interesting thing about this anecdote is that no one thought to ask the professor to clarify. Maybe they aren't so smart at Yale after all.
LINK: My reading of this post went precisely like this:
"As the last remaining non-ironic fans of the The Smiths,"
Hey! What about me?
"this article on ”The Pop Star Who Hated Sex” may be of interest to no one other than me and Nick Troester."
The article is rather good, and quite interesting. If you ever have an afternoon you wish to kill and be moderately entertained in doing so, you could do far worse than reading Morrissey interviews at The Smiths Presumably Forever Ill
"As the last remaining non-ironic fans of the The Smiths,"
Hey! What about me?
"this article on ”The Pop Star Who Hated Sex” may be of interest to no one other than me and Nick Troester."
The article is rather good, and quite interesting. If you ever have an afternoon you wish to kill and be moderately entertained in doing so, you could do far worse than reading Morrissey interviews at The Smiths Presumably Forever Ill
2.5.04
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