QUOTE: Sara Butler has interesting thoughts on trying to change the meaning of marriage:

"Okay, as refreshing as that is, I'm not sure it's entirely right. Sure, there are a lot of things about marriage that can be good for you, being allowed to "drop pretense and seductions, expose your weaknesses, be yourself," whatever. But fundamentally, I think marriage is about submitting yourself to something larger than yourself, something to which you will remain committed even when it doesn't seem to do anything for you, just because it's the right thing to do. Oh well, I suppose it's a better strategy to tell people that they should stay with their husband or wife because they'll benefit from it than they should stay with their husband or wife because they promised to on their wedding day (of course, with the proliferation of "for as long as love lasts" vows, they may not even have done that).

But these are the two different possible approaches to strengthening marriage present in this article. One is that you leave people's already existing values and ethical frameworks in place and you just try to change the location in which they act out those values. So, for example, it's not wrong of you to expect to get something from marriage, you're just expecting the wrong things - a soulmate rather than someone to whom you can "expose your weaknesses" or emotional fulfillment rather than economic benefit or whatever. The other is to try to change the way people think about marriage, so that they think of it as union to which they submit rather than a temporary and conditional partnership which they contract into for the purpose of getting certain things out of it. You can guess which strategy I prefer. But of course, I also tend to think that, say, keeping promises is both the good thing to do and good for you, so there's going to be some overlap there."

LINK: Kevin Yaroch points me to a Juan Cole post on Iraq offering compensation and right of return to Iraqi Jews. I think this is a fantastic idea, especially because it nicely highlights the notion that there doesn't have to be total enmity between Arabs and Jews.

I think Juan Cole probably goes a bridge too far in suggesting that this should be coupled with a Palestinian right of return to Israel. It should be coupled with a Palestinian right of return to Jordan.

A GOVERNMENT PROGRAM WE ALL CAN SUPPORT:

Apparently, the British Government has been paying Peter Green a stipend just to be himself. Brilliant musicians funded by the government? I'd be happy to chip in my hard-earned tax dollars to something like that in the U.S. (a fund to let David Johansen keep doing that weird stuff he does, or a stipend to R.E.M. to quit putting out albums already).

LINK: I thought The Girl Next Door might not have been a horrible movie (even The Weekly Standard wrote approvingly of it) until I saw those commercials where people coming out of the theater say what a great movie it is. This pretty much equals "we couldn't even buy anybody off to say good things about the movie."

WOOT WOOT: Michigan wins something in the postseason. Novel concept.

Jew

here for an explanation

LINK: this is good news for me:

"In a move shocking to all,
Duke University, of Durham, North Carolina, purchased the entirety of the public domain late last evening for a fee of 2.2 trillion dollars. Sources familiar with the negotiation report that Duke's reclamation of the public domain is unprecedented. As a result of the purchase, Duke University is the sole rights-holder to a huge collection of materials, including the Bible, the works of Shakespeare and Dante, and Francis Scott Key's The Star Spangled Banner."

Sadly, it's an April Fool's joke. If only...

QUOTE:

"After all, not everyone wants to be reminded that it is salutary to think and have fun at the same time."

-Robert Christgau, on why the Stones will never be as big as the Beatles

WELL: I somehow managed to get through my entire undergraduate career without taking a single math class (I took a not-counting intro physics class, many methods classes in polisci, and symbolic logic, which I hate even more than the others because it's actually proven to be useful in the course of my academic life), but I'm not going to get that lucky in grad school, especially with the possibility of doing theory and formal modeling.

So here's my bleg: if anyone can recommend a good from-scratch calculus book (I had in high school, so it doesn't have to be that basic) and something similar in microecon (one with numbers is key; I think I have the big concepts down already), that would go a long way toward making the undergrad-grad jump a little less onerous.

LINK: evangelical outpost has a great link explaining one of my favorite philosophical arguments of all time, Plantinga's attack against naturalistic evolution. There's nothing I love quite so much as an argument that looks like it can't be turned (unless that argument is van Inwagen's argument for incompatibilism, then I hate it with every fiber of my being).

Hmm. That non-sequitir might just be a segue. Joe, if you're reading, you're obviously well schooled in your philosophy, but I don't recall an at-length treatment of compatibilism/libertarianism/determinism, which seems particularly important if you want to, say, preserve moral judgments within a Christian framework. I have some thoughts which might appear sometime soon.

LINK: Walloworld has a nice post up on an attempt in Canada to outlaw certain sections of the Bible. This is why Christians are often skeptical of the idea of a separation of church and state--it's too easy to cross the line from endorsing no particular religion to persecuting particular religions.

LINK: hehe. OGIW should particularly like.

LINK: I actually broke down last night and watched about five minutes of American Idol, and this piece pretty much gets to the heart of why I don't like it (we don't need someone else whose vocal abilities are limited by oversouling):

"Simon's odd belief that he's a wit isn't the only fascinating bit of cognitive dissonance on display on American Idol. Another is that, on a show in which three judges purport to be tastemakers, nobody—neither singers nor judges—has any taste. It's not just that the judges are playing at being profit-conscious record execs, suppressing their own quirky predilections for the sake of the bottom line. Neither Randy nor Paula nor Simon even seems capable of a real aesthetic misgiving. Just once I'd like to hear a judge say, "You know, your singing was pretty good there, but that song, 'I Believe I Can Fly,' I hate that song. Points off for choosing an insipid song." When the biggest hits from the last year were OutKast's "Hey Ya" and Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love," it's bizarre to pretend that pop success has everything to do with competent singing and nothing to do with the quality of the songs. On Idol, the fixation on singing is itself so reductive it verges on, if not mechanics, then athletics. The judges occasionally feign an interest in style, but when it comes down to it, they want belters—contestants adept at loud, clear, identifiably melodic yelling, with vibrato if possible."

QUOTE: In the spirit of this post, I'd like to offer the following highlights of class today:

"...and that's an example that's irrelevant... but let's move onto real-world examples that are equally bad"

-Prof. Page working through examples of complex systems

"If your atheism is based on the principle of contradiction [e.g. can God make a boulder so heavy he can't lift it], you better start praying... if you're at the Pearly Gates and you offer that excuse... burn."

-My epistemology professor

BLOGROLL ADDITIONS: As you'll note on the left, and many long overdue. Particularly of note:

whatevs.org: a delightful froth of pop culture and University of Michigan fandom. Hottness, as the kids say.

Walloworld: I don't just have him on because he dislikes libertarianism with a fierce passion (although that never hurts): he generally writes pithily on politics and religion, and (unfortunately) has one of the highest time read-to-links given ratios, though I'll be trying to remedy that in the future.

My Foreign Correspondent: I notice her blogroll has been getting bigger in the last week... you have to be impressed by the intellectual diversity of anyone who has both ScrappleFace and Matthew Yglesias linked. I know I sure am. And no mention of my dear friends with new-ish blogs would be complete without mentioning Claire's... hopefully the link will make your sitemeter even more interesting.

WELL: I knew there was something I wanted to add to this on Palestinian suicide bombing. Here goes:

There seem to be two main approaches to this problem: the leftist one emphasizes 'root causes' of poverty and oppression, and suggests that the individual and the collective are acting out of a sense of desperation and rage against their oppressors. Their behavior can be changed, then, only by changing the root causes. The rightist view is approximately that certain subsets of this population have accepted an ideology along the lines of 'you love life, we love death.' Consequently, there is no room for dealing with them.

But it seems like there might be a third way. Assume that potential Palestinian terrorists are grouped together for non-trivial reasons*, and that these groups have hierarchical structures where the leaders of said groups have strong incentives to make acceptable deals that pop up**. You'd expect, rationally, that the success of suicide bombings in garnering political concessions would lead to the long-term decrease in suicide bombing as a method (because if the other side is willing to sit down with you at a table and talk about terms, the marginal benefit of another bombing versus another meeting looks less appealing); you'd also expect, maybe more unexpectedly, that the failure of suicide bombing to generate concessions would lead to a decrease in future bombings (because there's no point, after it's been established that the method doesn't work, to continue it, as it has unusually high costs as a method).

The only case in which you'd expect to see bombings continue is when it's not really clear what the response is. If you're getting mixed signals from the other guy, you want to continue to bomb (just in case that's what's producing the moments of concession), but you don't want to bomb too much (in case the bombing is what is making them pull back from offering concessions). This seems to be approximately the case with the Palestinians-Israelis--where they are on 'peace' at any moment is hard to tell unless you closely follow the Jerusalem Post, and even then it's quite easy to become confused. It also strikes me that if this explanation is correct, you'd expect to see it in other situations with terrorist groups which make political claims (northern Ireland leaps to mind as a possible confirming case, but I haven't worked through it yet).

*That is to say, I'm assuming at least the leaders of various Palestinian terrorist groups to be rational and have at least some political aims, however vaguely defined. If these are true, I think it follows that you have to be at least in theory open to treating them as rational actors.

**same general assumption as above

COMPARISON OF THE WEEK: Ann Arbor is Overrated:

"The new Trader Joe's on Stadium prominently features an illustration of Ann "Arbour" Allen near the checkout. But where's the love for fellow city namesake Mary Ann Rumsey, seemingly always destined to play Charlotte Caffey to Allen's Belinda Carlisle?"

QUOTE: The Hitch on Saddam-terrorist connections:

"The Benjamin-Simon book contains a long account of the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and also a stern defense of Clinton's decision in August 1998 to hit the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan with cruise missiles. What is interesting is the strong Iraqi footprint that is to be found in both episodes. Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the makers of the bomb that exploded at the World Trade Center, was picked up by the FBI, questioned, and incredibly enough released pending further interrogation as a "cooperative witness." He went straight to Amman and thence to Baghdad, where he remained under Saddam Hussein's protection until last year. As Clarke told the Sept. 11 commission last week: "The Iraqi government didn't cooperate in turning him over and gave him sanctuary, as it did give sanctuary to other terrorists." That's putting it mildly, when you recall that Abu Nidal's organization was a wing of the Baath Party, and that the late Abu Abbas of Klinghoffer fame was traveling on an Iraqi diplomatic passport. But, hold on a moment?doesn't every smart person know that there's no connection between Saddam Hussein and the world of terror?

Ah, we meant to say no connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. Well, in that case, how do you explain the conviction, shared by Clarke and Benjamin and Simon, that Iraq was behind Bin Laden's deadly operation in Sudan? The Age of Sacred Terror justifies the Clinton strike on Khartoum on the grounds that "Iraqi weapons-scientists" were linked to Bin Laden's factory and that the suggestive chemical EMPTA, detected at the site, was used only by Iraq to make VX nerve gas. At the time, Clarke defended the bombing in almost the same words, telling the press that he was "sure" that "intelligence existed linking bin Laden to Al Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan." The U.N. arms inspector upon whom all three relied at the time, for corroborating evidence implicating Saddam, was a man who has since become famous: David Kay."

PHILOSOPHERS ARE WEIRD: from my epistemology reading:

"Given the demon's intentions, no matter what the prior arrangement of the molecules, they will end up in a state that lawfully evolves into a state in which I levitate. We might ask why the demon had this intention, but it is not so hard to find a possible purpose behind it. If I were a Laplacian demon I would probably do things like this for kicks."

LINK: Nice interview with Wonkette:

"I must be doing something wrong because I don't get a lot of angry emails. But the angry emails always come from the most surprising things. I'll think something is going to piss someone off, but it doesn't. Yet I got letters when I made an offhand remark about Princeton. I got like half a dozen emails from people who said, "Are you just jealous of Princeton?" I make fun of Harvard, and no one from Harvard writes."