WELL: Quoth Norman Geras in response to my answer to his poll question:

"That didn't take long!"

Well, no, not so much. Then again, I've spent some time thinking about this.

LINK: Crooked Timber has an interesting post on the consequences of Condorcet- or IRV-style voting systems. I always took it to be a sufficiently good argument against them that they presume, to be effective, that everyone has more than one possibility that they like. Should someone only have, say, a #1 option, while everyone else has three options they like enough to rank, you've just deprived the first person of an equal vote to all the others. This doesn't, of course, happen under plurality-rule voting.

LINK: If you haven't been following TruePravda's "Books That Haunt" series, be sure to check out the most recent entry, on my favorite book of all time: The Brothers Karamazov. My only regret is that he spends so much effort trying not to say too much that he doesn't end up saying enough!

One quibble, though:

"The novel focuses on the murder of Fyodor Karamazov, and the intrigue surrounding the case involving his sons, each of whom represent different worldviews; Alyosha—a theistic worldview, Dmitry—a romantic worldview, Ivan—an existentialist worldview, and the illegitimate Smerdyakov, who appears as the evil outcast.

The most famous chapter of the book, "The Grand Inquisitor," has been hailed by one critic as one of the most compelling arguments for Christianity and at the same time one of the most damning arguments against it. In my view it's a stunning look from a Russian Orthodox writer about the need for reformation. It is here that the existentialist Ivan makes the pronouncement, "If God is dead, then all things are permissible." I've alway thought it odd that Dostoevsky is so casually labeled as an existentialist, seeing how the character Ivan ends up."

Actually, I always took it that Dmitry was meant to be the beastly, Ivan the intellectual, and Alyosha the emotive one (if you read it this way, they map on nicely to Svidrigailov, Raskolnikov and Sonia/Dunya in Crime and Punishment). But, of course, what does Alyosha realize in the book, if not that it is not sufficient for him to spend his life with his head in the clouds, that he must go into the world, filled with all the miserable things it is, and find a way to emerge happy and sane? That seems to be quintessentially existentialist to me.

LINK: Ann Arbor is Overrated has a nice link on the ongoing discussions about turning Michigan into a private school. I'm all for doing it, of course, for reasons that have nothing to do with, say, not believing in the value of public education, but rather in the Rosemary Nagle game-esque realities of funding for public universities. And because I'm very close to becoming an alumnus, and I want to see the cache of my degree become greater over time.

LINK: normblog asks you to send in your favorite songs Dylan has written. My list:

1. "Positively 4th Street" (1966 single)
2. "I Want You" -Blonde on Blonde
3. "Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" -Blonde on Blonde
4. "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" -Highway 61 Revisited
5. "The Wicked Messenger" -John Wesley Harding

thoughts?

WELL: I just got the following e-mail from my Philosophy seminar professor, about her returning our papers to us, with comments:

"There are a couple of you who will need to rewrite almost from the ground up, even though you got good grades, because your arguments, despite their ingenuity, all fail to work. Don't despair. Philosophers come up with ingenious-sounding arguments that fail to work all the time. that's why journals have referees."

On one hand, I find this extremely refreshing, because it means that papers can't be sabotaged because there's some powerful objection floating around the philosophical literature on free will that we failed to account for. On the other hand, it is a philosophy paper, and if you're not being judged on the quality of your arguments, what are you being judged on?

LINK: If you haven't seen this curmudgeonly clerk post in response to people who try and quote silly Old Testament laws to prove that we should ignore everything in the Old Testament (or whatever it is that the particular interlocutor thinks should be ignored, in this case, prohibitions against homosexuality), you absolutely must. It's brilliant:

"Secondly, the comparative proposition being put forward is argumentatively flawed. The basic premise of the argument is that if one accepts the Old Testament's condemnation of homosexuality, then one must endorse all other moral teachings located in the Old Testament as well, or else be guilty of cafeteria Christianity. But, of course, if a Christian were to cite Deuteronomy 5:17 in support of the proposition that murder is morally wrong, no one would derisively countercite Leviticus 11:9-12 and think it a sensible let alone clever refutation. In short, we all readily accept some principles from the Old Testament while discarding others and seldom if ever think twice about it."

LINK: You know I'm a liberal because I see no problems with this argument

LINK: Diotima totally beats out Matthew Yglesias on this one. Says Matt:

"Here's what bothers me about "abstinence-only" sex ed. It assumes that sex is this terrible thing that people only do because they fail to "control themselves" and that leads only to disease and emotional distress."

Except that, of course, I'm an advocate of abstinence-only sex ed, and I don't actually share any of those assumptions about what sex is like: in the right conditions, there's nothing not to like about it, but I think you have to be realistic about the logical capacities of 16-year olds (or, God forbid, those younger*) to recognize the right conditions. If they learned that not giving into their throbbing biological urges whenever the mood strikes is not the end of the world (and this seems to be an odd entailment of Matt's views), that would certainly be a good thing, right?

LINK: Sara Butler has some well-put considerations on the undergrad hook-up culture, including a critique of me, though I think we're in agreement about the issues involved (though, quite probably, I dropped about seven hidden premises and assumed them to be in there).

"And this is why I'm not a huge fan of the Wendy Shalit types who argue that it's women's responsibility to keep men virtuous, sexually and otherwise, 'cause men are just pleasure-seeking predators, but women are different, women feel stuff beyond sexual pleasure. Rather than depressing young women like myself with this impossible task, wouldn't it make more sense to encourage everyone, men and women, to think about sex a little differently. I think men might be more receptive to this message than we seem to assume."

LINK: evangelical outpost makes an interesting point on same-sex marriage. While prefacing what follows with the statement that I think I agree with Joe on this one, I do find the following bit of argumentation a little confusing:

"But civil marriage is more of a political issue than a moral one. While my moral beliefs inform my position, ultimately the decision is a political one and subject to political compromise."

The reason this seems odd to me is that it doesn't seem clear to me how this argument works for same-sex marriage and not, for example, for abortion, where the moral argument seems to be the genesis for the political one. As a matter of fact, I was arguing with a friend last week that I might be inclined to take entirely the opposite position: I can separate my moral view on abortion from my political view on it, because the two don't seem to encroach on each other overmuch, but it seems that I can't really do that with same-sex marriage, because while churches do not perform abortions, they certainly do perform marriages, and it'd be foolish to believe what happens out in the wider culture won't eventually work its way back into the church.

It may well be the case that the two aren't the same for a reason I'm not seeing right now, or that there's some sort of intervening argument I'm missing--in either event, I'm more than open to changing my mind on this one.

QUOTE: Matthew Yglesias makes a good point about class stratification in higher education:

"The deeper reality is, however, that there's relatively little an institution like Harvard can do at this point to eliminate the intense class stratification in higher education. Making it easier for students from low-income backgrounds to pay the bills is worth doing, of course, but the number of people who were truly unable to pay under the old system (which offers a lot of aid, along with subsidized loans, and easy access to employment) is simply way too small to account for the fact that 74 percent of students come from households making over $80,000. The culprit is that, as John Edwards could tell you, we have two (it might be more accurate to say three or four, but that would make for a worse speech) primary and secondary education systems in this country, and even the richest university can't undo this on the back-end."

LINK: kristin madpony had apparently not been to the library in her almost four years at college. This seems inconceivable to me, but maybe that's just because last term I was there three times a week or so to pick up more books.

WELL: Back from the weekend of craziness. Did we find ourselves one evening drinking beer and going over the Rothenberg Report's predictions on Senate races? Yes. Other observations:

1. There's one place on 495 where it splits itself in three different directions. This is insane.
2. It's amazing that I've been to Washington maybe 20 times in my life, and been to, say, The National Gallery a dozen or so times (heck, I've been to the National Archives multiple times), and yet I'd never once made it to, say, the White House or the Lincoln Memorial. Both have now been taken care of.
3. I almost, almost bought myself an FDR paperweight for my desk. If only it hadn't been $35...
4. There was a huge exhibit in the American History Smithsonian on The Beatles. As I commented to OGIW, it seems to me like the Beatles are, at best, tangentally connected to, you know, American History--and are probably less important than some of the things they could've covered.

WELL: I'm off tomorrow morning on the 10-hour drive I can do in my sleep, to go visit OGIW in Washington. Insanity will take place, no doubt, as well as many, many debates about politics (which were off-limits when she visited here a couple of weeks ago). Should be fun. Needless to say, posting will be limited to not-existent until (probably) Monday night (when I'm done with my classes).

LINK: I think I want to start a new category called "Weird Link of the Day": something that I find the in course of my normal blog browsing that just seems... weird. Today: Will Baude discusses the etiquette behind telling a woman her draws is showing, yo.

Nevertheless, this is pretty funny.

LINK: Sara Butler discusses Amy Lamboley's take on people who have children versus people who don't. Having a job which allows me to witness hundreds if not thousands of parent-and-children interactions per weekend, I think there's a little bit of truth in both their positions: Ms. Lamboley is right that anyone who observed lots of parents with children might conclude that while bad parenting might be an explanation for a fair bit of the scenes that occur, there might just be something in the fact of having children that causes otherwise rational people to lose it totally, and this might cause said observer to conclude having children is entirely not worth it.

That being said, of course, Ms. Butler is right "that having kids is taking on the ultimate duty," (not unlike marriage in some respects, I think) and that people willing to devote themselves totally to it will avoid many (though, goodness knows, not all) of the "problems" a casual observer notices.

QUOTE: This Diotima post made me laugh out loud.

LINK: things like this always warm my heart. Two thoughts: 1. looks like eggs of freedom Bush sowed in the Middle East are beginning to bear fruit, 2. was anyone else as surprised as I was that there are 700 liberal intellectuals in Syria. More power to them.

LINK: Interesting NYT story on a guy working to dispel myths about Protocols of the Elders of Zion, such as the notion that it has any basis in reality. I'm sort of interested in that book imagining a conversation between Montesquieu and Machiavelli, though I'll have to learn French to read it (then again, I have to learn French anyway).