Strange Doctrines

Riddle

How many legs does a bullshit artist have if you call him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced"?

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Justice As Immigration

Tim Lee (via Will Wilkinson):

I think a far more effective approach [than cost-benefit analysis] is to use what is probably the most powerful weapon in American politics: our now deeply-rooted and emotional commitment to the principle of equality before the law. Over the last 50 years, American society has undergone wrenching transformations that moved us toward equality for Catholics, blacks, Jews, women, gays and lesbian, and other traditionally disfavored groups. We achieved these reforms not by emphasizing how reform would benefit straight white men, or by building complex models of how oppression depressed GDP, but by focusing on the cruelty of the status quo and appealing to America’s founding ideals. We’ve now reached the point where opponents of equality for blacks or Jews are not only in the minority, but are among the most despised people in society.

I think the same strategy needs to be employed on behalf of immigration reform. The problem with our immigration laws is not primarily that they are economically inefficient (Jim Crow wasn’t efficient either). The problem is that they deny civil rights to millions of hard-working individuals based on a factor over which they have no control: their place of birth. I’m sure Dixon and Rimmer mean well, but their narrow focus on the costs and benefits of immigration to American households not only ignores powerful arguments about justice, it actually undercuts them by accepting the premise that we’re justified in ignoring the welfare of the millions of people who are in such deep poverty that they’re willing to risk their lives for the privilege of picking our strawberries and scrubbing our toilets.

Hear, hear.

Why Ask Why?

Sebastian Horsley explains "Why I Slept with 1300 Women."

(Via Abbas Raza.)

Simple Answermongering Blogging

A Media Matters post sports the headline "New Low: Beck and Right-Wing Media Minions Fearmongering About Kids to Attack Progressives." Eugene Volokh queries whether terms like "fearmongering" are "rhetorically over the top?" The answer is No. Next question?

Half Cocked Defense

In the matter of Polanski, Daniel Davies has this

Juxtaposition

Top two headlines on Reuters right now:

1. Anger in France and Poland after Polanski arrest

2. Poland okays forcible castration for pedophiles

Talk about mixed messages. ("mieszane wiadomości")

Update: The Polish bill apparently also "criminalises any attempt to justify paedophilia". This is all a bit awkward, isn't it?

Incidentally, the age of consent in Poland is 15.

Why I Am Seem So Smart

Arthur Krystal ponders why it is that "most writers . . . seem to be smarter in print than in person."  He conjectures that it's because there is "a rhythm to writing that catches notes that ordinarily stay out of earshot. At some point between formulating a thought and writing it down falls a nanosecond when the thought becomes a sentence that would, in all likelihood, have a different shape if we were to speak it."

Well, yes, that's true. But the nanoseconds also allow drafts of pomposity to spill in, tangents and other clutter to accumulate. Which is why it's surprising that Krystal says not a word about redrafting. Redrafting is what allows the writer to get rid of the less smart-seeming stuff. (“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit.” Hemingway.)  So if there's one thing about the process of writing that most makes you seem smart, it's the redrafting, not the writing.

For example, none of the sentences on this page is the same as it was first typed. (It's all a fraud.)

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

This Is Not a Pipe

This is a stick-up: Magritte's "Olympia" stolen at gunpoint.

(H/T Rob Sica.)

Reverse Engineering Desert

"Perhaps the only way to make an accountable robot that could deserve punishment for its misdeeds and rewards for its heroics would be to give it the dangerous capacity to renounce the values we installed in it at birth."
--Dan Dennett, reviewing David McFarland's Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs.

(Via Abbas Raza.)

Pricks

During the attempted execution of Romell Broom, one of the Death Delivery Squad pierced a hypodermic needle into Broom's arm 18 times in search of a viable vein. A federal judge temporarily enjoined a second execution attempt, giving Broom's attorneys time to argue that "the pain Broom experienced during the aborted attempt violates a constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment."

Some commentators have been disdainful of this argument. Perhaps exemplary of this view is Kent Scheidegger's post, here:

And what is this horrible torture? "Broom told his attorneys he was pricked* as many as 18 times Tuesday as prison staff tried to find a suitable vein." [Quoting the AP article.]

Poor baby! He suffered 18 pinpricks! Remember what this guy did.

I quite agree. Which is why I favor instituting capital punishment by Russian Roulette, which does not sting at all, and is obviously therefore not cruel.

*Side Note: The verb 'prick' (also a noun in some contexts) is the AP reporter's characterization. Broom's own description is quoted later in the article, and it makes it clear that 'prick' is probably not an apt description. Not that that fact matters.

Why We're Here

Apparently, it's not to make friends:

(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)

This Is The City

Looks like we'll be busy at the office.

A Modest Proposal, Public Health Care Dept.

Via Alex Tabarrok, a healthcare hypo due to Greg Mankiw:

Imagine that someone invented a pill even better than the one I take. Let’s call it the Dorian Gray pill, after the Oscar Wilde character. Every day that you take the Dorian Gray, you will not die, get sick, or even age. Absolutely guaranteed. The catch? A year’s supply costs $150,000.

Anyone who is able to afford this new treatment can live forever. Certainly, Bill Gates can afford it. Most likely, thousands of upper-income Americans would gladly shell out $150,000 a year for immortality.

Most Americans, however, would not be so lucky. Because the price of these new pills well exceeds average income, it would be impossible to provide them for everyone, even if all the economy’s resources were devoted to producing Dorian Gray tablets.

So here is the hard question: How should we, as a society, decide who gets the benefits of this medical breakthrough? Are we going to be health care egalitarians and try to prohibit Bill Gates from using his wealth to outlive Joe Sixpack? Or are we going to learn to live (and die) with vast differences in health outcomes? Is there a middle way?

Solution: Tax the poorer people to subsidize those nearer (but just under) the purchasing margin so that they are able to afford the magic pill; then, when only the more productive members of society remain, reevaluate.

Of course, a free market economist would object to this solution on moral grounds, because taxes are evil.

Solution, Take 2: It doesn't matter; in the long run, we are all immortal.

Why You Are (at Least Sometimes) Your Brain

From this review of Alva Noë's Why You Are Not Your Brain: 

Noë's chief goal in the book is to show that this highly questionable, yet unquestioned assumption, has led the consciousness research astray; in brief, the search for consciousness has focused on where it isn't.  Noë opens by challenging this assumption, and offers an alternative picture.  Instead of characterizing consciousness as an internal process (like digestion) Noë proposes a picture which takes consciousness to be an activity (like dancing).

Or...like dreaming?*

(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)

*I realize dreaming might not be an exclusively neural process. But it is obviously not "facilitating a dynamic pattern of interaction among brain, body, and world" (my emphasis), except in the trivial sense that the phenomenal content of dream experience draws on or is derived from the stored contents resulting from antecedent interactions among brain, body and world. (I'm confident that Noe deals with this objection; what surprises me is that the reviewer doesn't.)

Reality Facebook Status Update via Twitter Live Blogging

Stuart Buck keeps us abreast of his status on Facebook via Twitter, which I am live blogging below the fold:

Rilke

Vain. Self-pitying. Obsessive. Narcissistic. Snobbish. Whining. Arrogant. Childish. Demanding. Lachrymose. Neurotic. Given to tantrums and panics. Self-indulgent. Spiteful.

But enough about me. There's some discussion of new volumes about Rilke here. (One quibble: the quotation of Nietzsche is hardly his last, best-informed word on Salomé; her breasts were definitely real.)

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Ought from Naught

Moral antinaturalists claim that we cannot derive an ought from an is. And so they propose, instead, that we derive an ought from an isn't.

Taking the Right. Seriously.

Via Brad DeLong, the late, great Irving Kristol, providing more evidence that it's a pathology, not a tradition:

Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists.... This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority - so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government....

In Bed with the Prosecution

Death penalty case. State habeas petition based on the fact that judge had been sleeping with the prosecutor. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' analysis and disposition in its entirety:

We have reviewed the application and the trial court’s recommendations. We find that the allegation fails to satisfy the requirements of Article 11.071, § 5(a).* Accordingly, the application is dismissed as an abuse of the writ.

Judges. They get to screw the prosecution and the defense all at the same time.

(Via Legal Ethics Forum.)

_____________________

* The section permits the filing of a successive state writ of habeas corpus if the current claim has not been previously presented because the factual or legal basis for the claim was unavailable.

Bona Fide

Yesterday was an unusually good day, twice.

First, I was offered a permanent position with the Federal Public Defender. (So suck on that unnamed Beverly Hills entertainment law firm.)

Second, Strange Doctrines was blogrolled by the Reality Based Community. (Looks like I'll need to blog more and start earning my keep around here.)

On the other hand, the universe is expanding. So don't think that any of this has dampened my pessimism.

Comparative Parliamentary Decorum 101

Seminar here.