Strange Doctrines

Oaths and the Execution of Laws

Mark Kleiman argues that AG-to-be [1] Eric Holder is (or I should say will be) duty-bound to enforce the Convention Against Torture, notwithstanding Eric Posner's observation that the Convention is not a "self-executing" treaty.

Arcaned Memory

It's pretty weird, but every time -- every time -- I try to think of Cat Stevens' name, I can only come up with "Yusuf Islam."

Ross Douthat's Universal Counteranalogizer

Shorter Ross Douthat: Comparing belief in God to belief in the Celestial Teapot is absurd, because it's like comparing a belief only some people know is absurd to a belief everyone knows is absurd.

(Imagine the justificative possibilities. [omg! did I just make another analogy?!])

[UPDATES below the fold.]

Fidelity to an Adverb

Steve Calabresi:

I...think that President Obama became President by operation of the 20th Amendment at noon even before the first oath-taking was botched. I do think President Obama's first obligation as president was that he "shall" i.e. "must" take the correctly worded oath before entering on the execution of his office. The President failed to live up to that obligation until he retook the oath correctly the next day. He thus technically failed to live up to one of his core obligations as President (through no fault of his own) and could in theory, technically, be impeached for that dereliction of duty. It goes without saying that it would be a gross abuse of the House of Representative's prosecutorial discretion to impeach Obama in this context.

Obama "became President" by operation of the clock, but could not "enter into the execution of his office" until taking the oath. Hmmm.

I had to reread this post to make sure it wasn't a joke (Calabresi is in part responding to Jack Balkin's satirical post here.) But no -- he's...serious.

Okay, so here's a simple question: Just what would it mean to "be President" without having the power to "execute the office"?

[Here's another: Just who has executive power in the interim?]

Whatever the answer, I'm certainly happy Calabresi is so willing to repose in the House the prosecutorial discretion to impeach Obama on the basis of an immaterially misplaced adverb. 'Cause if there's one thing we can all count on, it's the sound discretion of the House of Representatives.

UPDATE: On reflection, Calabresi's post may be the stupidest fucking thing I've ever seen written by a law professor blogger, ever. And I'm including Steve Calabresi.

If I Had 'Em, I'd Be Commissar

Rules of civil procedure, as construed by Stalin:

For all the sins, past and present, hang Bryukhanov by the testicles. If the testicles hold out, consider him acquitted by trial. If they do not hold, drown him in the river.

(Maybe someone should have introduced Stalin to Danny Lerner.)

If You See One Movie In Your Lifetime...

...it would probably have to be director Danny Lerner's mystery-action-thriller Sharks in Venice (Spoiler Alert ahead!)*:

While in Venice to investigate the disappearance of his father, diver and archaeologist David (Stephen Baldwin) stumbles upon a lost Medici treasure. But when the mob learns of David's discovery, they kidnap his girlfriend and demand that he recover the fortune. There's only one small, flesh-eating problem: A killer shark has found its way into the city's canal system, and David could be its dinner if he's not careful.

*Courtesy warning, just in case you wanted either the shark element of the plot or Stephen Baldwin's dramatic participation in the film to remain a surprise.

More Alt than Thou

I don't listen to Billy Joel. In fact, I don't [much] listen to pop music generally. Not even the Beatles. I'm not a snob about it - I enjoy some pop music if it happens to be playing. I just don't seek it out, and happen to think there are richer areas for mining elsewhere.

But by any objective criteria, Billy Joel is a competent pop singer, piano player, lyricist and songwriter. So this business of trying to argue Billy Joel is the "Worst Pop Singer Ever," or worst anything ever, is simply preposterous.

But then "arguing" isn't really the right verb, is it, since nothing resembling an argument appears anywhere in Ron Rosenbaum's article. The only thing approaching "argument" is this attack on Joel's originality:

"She's Always a Woman": First, has there ever been a more blatant—or blatantly inept—case of attempted artistic theft than "She's Always a Woman"? It's such a lame imitation of Bob Dylan's "Just Like a Woman." (B.J.'s woman "hides like a child" where Dylan's "breaks just like a little girl.")

Yes, Joel uses 'hide' and 'child' - direct lifts of Dylan's 'break' and 'girl'. (You probably didn't know that not only individual words but their most distant synonyms are copyrighted. Writer beware!) And of course both songs have the phrase 'a woman' in common -- a phrase that's never appeared in any other song lyric, ever.

So yeah, other than the fact that the two songs are in different keys, have different metrical structures, employ different song forms and melodic material, and have absolutely no distinctive lyrical content in common, you really couldn't tell the two apart.

Oh, and Rosenbaum is not a posturing imbecile.

But he's hip. There's no point in denying that.

Can Stalled Acquaintance Feed from Lots

And never be bovine?

*pause*

Tough room.

By the Highway Home

Not three months after we lost Toby, and we've just had to put our Mia down.

. . .

Mia had a regal sensibility, and was a resistant photographic subject. Which is just as well, since cameras never seemed to capture a quantum of her majesty. But, here:

Adverbial Justice

Steven Pinker has a cute theory about why Justice Roberts bungled in administering the presidential oath to Obama on Tuesday:

How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling.

In short, Pinker suggests, Roberts was trying to avoid "splitting verbs."

To test this theory, I went to the Roberts Opinion Depot, opened up the first opinion, and looked for the first adverbially modified verb phrase, presuming this would suffice as a rough and ready statistical representative. Here is the sentence that contains it (my emphasis):

They nevertheless contend that the lethal injection protocol is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment ’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments,” because of the risk that the protocol’s terms might not be properly followed....

Of course the main problem here isn't that Pinker wrong. It's that Roberts splits verb phrases!

(H/T Rob Sica.)

ADDENDUM: Okay, it's not the same kind of "split" Pinker is referring to. But still.

ADDENDUM II: At the risk of taking this all too seriously (though haven't we passed that station?), I employed the same procedure, but narrowing the search to the first adverbially modified verb phrase incorporating an infinitive or auxiliary form (the criteria Pinker outlines for "split verbs"). And the same opinion, we find (emphasis mine):

[T]he proffered alternatives must effectively address a “substantial risk of serious harm.”

UPDATE: Ed Whelan (via Randy Barnett) was on this at least a day before I caught wind of it, and he's got more examples. Whelan's diligence here almost makes up for his insipidity elsewhere.

Back Talk

Someone probably should have helped Dick with the man-sized safe.

UPDATE: Well now saw Jon Stewart make the same joke. Dammit. I knew I should have gone with the at-least-he-didn't-get-shot-in-the-face line. No one's gonna go with that.

Ain't Whistlin' "Dixie"

In a review for Dennis Dutton's The Art Instinct, John Derbyshire chalks Anton Webern's "predict[ion] that mailmen on their rounds would one day whistle his atonal non-melodies" up to "wishful thinking" grounded in "Blank Slate" type reasoning.

Derbyshire underestimates human malleability on this score (pun intended). I am entirely apt to hum the eerie-beautiful theme from Bartok's Music for Strings, say, or the 12-tone head of Wynton Maralis' "Down with Homey," even though I was 18 before I heard my first atonal music.

Now if I can just score a job at the post office...

(Via -- who else? -- Dennis Dutton.)

Corollaries

I'm a little way behind the curve on this one, but it seems my friend the erstwhile "Raving Atheist" has been transmogrified into The Raving Theist.

There seems to be some controversy about whether TRT's conversion is some kind of hoax, but I reject that out of hand (mostly for the reasons TRT himself adverts to here at numbered paragraph 1). I find this case endlessly fascinating, and in fact a knock-down refutation of my (duly-discarded) view that a mature, reflective atheist is immune (absent some kind of overwhelming emotional crisis) to this kind of intellectual infection. [1]

But what will concern me for the remaining eight or so lines of this post are TRT's revised "Basic Assumptions":

Basic Assumptions

First, there is a God.

Figure the rest out by yourself.

Well, let's see. One corollary would be that God has an inordinate fondness for starvation ("about 25,000 people die daily from hunger") and spontaneous abortions.

Other suggestions welcome.
_________________
NOTES
1. No, I do not count Antony Flew's much-touted-by-Christians "conversion" as a case.

A Flickr of Hopelessness

I wanna party with these people:

(Via Süddeutsche Zeitung.)

What Does the Test Oracle Say?

Before passing a particular bit of theology on to us nontheists for purposes of persuasion, theists would do well to run it through a rudimentary test suite, just to see how the argument holds up in more...neutral contexts.

So, wherever the prospective argument contains the term 'God' or its equivalent, simply substitute one or more of the following:

Zeus
Ashur
Baldr
Ra
Fūjin
Unicorns
The Celestial Teapot

Now let's apply this to a sample text. Take this one, due to Joseph Ratzinger (made topical by Ross Douthat):

No one can lay [the Celestial Teapot] on the table before another man.... But however strongly unbelief [in the existence of the Celestial Teapot] may feel itself thereby justified it cannot forget the eerie feeling induced by the words "Yet perhaps it is true." That perhaps is the unavoidable temptation which it cannot elude, the temptation in which it, too, in the very act of rejection, has to experience the unrejectability of belief.

Thus, to the extent Ratzinger's argument entails the "unrejectability" of belief in God, it entails the unrejectability of belief in (inter alia) the Celestial Teapot. Convinced?

Of course, this doesn't prove anything about gods, cryptofauna or satellite cookware. But it will (if you are a theist) give you critical insight into how ridiculous your argument sounds to us.

Just thought you might like to know.

Red Herring

Mark's wrong. [Correction: Mark is right on the larger point, but wrong on the small Herring bone I'm going to pick.] In Herring, cop checks Herring's record in two counties for outstanding warrants, after Herring had arrived at the county sheriff's department to retrieve something from his impounded truck. Neighboring county (erroneously) confirms there is an active arrest warrant out on Herring. Cop arrests, searches Herring's vehicle incident to arrest, finds drugs and gun.

Cops can do as many warrant checks as they want, on anyone they want, for any reason or no reason at all. So the problem here isn't "personal animus" (even if there was personal animus). The simple reason Roberts et al. get it wrong is that, quite obviously, there is every "reason to believe that application of the exclusionary rule here would deter the occurrence of any future mistakes." How long do you think it would take the neighboring county to get its act together after this f***-up led to a reversal of a criminal conviction? Not very. Easy questions like this aren't supposed to make bad law.

Philosophy Isn't Pretty

From Thomas Hurka, "Nietzsche: Perfectionist," in Leiter-Sinhababu's Nietzsche and Morality (at 19):

I would have thought that if Nietzsche uses [the German] Exemplar to refer to ordinary blades of grass he is not using it to refer only to Kantian creative geniuses, but perhaps [James] Conant thinks that in interpreting Nietzsche's use of a word it is less important to look at Nietzsche's own repeated use of that word a half-page earlier than at its use by another philosopher in another book published eighty years before.

And from the associated footnote:

Conant has the good taste to associate antiegalitarian interpreters of Nietzsche with Hitler. His own interpretation reduces Nietzsche to a writer of banal self-help books, a kind of Deepak Chopra of the nineteenth century.

Enough that it is a single taste!

From the "Statutes That Could Use Some Redrafting" Files

Here's something really weird about the Federal Bank Robbery Statute. Section (a) states (in pertinent part):

Whoever, by force and violence, or by intimidation, takes...from the person or presence of another [any money in the care of any bank]; or

Whoever enters or attempts to enter any bank...with intent to commit in such bank...any felony affecting such bank...in violation of any statute of the United States, or any larceny—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

First paragraph, fine.

But look at the second: any felony; any statute. On its face, this language would allow a prosecutor to shoehorn any federal crime perpetrated in a bank into the bank robbery statute, as long as the felony in some way "affects" the bank.

So, for example, I could deposit a counterfeit nickel in a bank ATM and be liable for federal bank robbery. [1] [2]

I guess the big take-away message here is never, ever deposit counterfeit change in a bank ATM.

___________

NOTES
1. Less exotically, other sections of the robbery statute itself could be transmogrified through the same alchemy. For example, the second paragraph of section (b) makes stealing less than $1,000 from a bank punishable by a one-year max. But then since section (b) is a "statute of the United States," the felony it defines becomes (via paragraph two of section (a)) a "bank robbery" and subject to a twenty-year max.

2. No, this has never happened, and no U.S. Attorney is ever going to pull this kind of maneuver. (Though what with the way the DOJ has expanded the application of the mail and wire fraud statutes, I suppose you never know.) Still, interesting that this apparent statutory absurdity hasn't been noted anywhere.

Roots

Ross Douthat argues that Richard John Neuhaus' illiberal views "have deep roots in Anglo-American political history":

[T]he notion that liberalism's basic premises depend in some sense upon religion, in particular, is as old as Hobbes and Locke - and as such they properly belong within the big tent of the American liberal tradition, rather than outside it."

I'm not sure I understand what the underlying principle here is supposed to be. Because it can't be that once it is shown a certain view has "deep roots" within a nominal tradition, the tradition is thereby estopped from excluding the view from its tent. Can it?

Comparative Jobology

Apropos of this WSJ piece on the best jobs in the US (philosophers placed twelfth), Brandon Look (via Brian Leiter) writes:

I will grant that being either a mathematician (#1) or an historian (#7) would be OK, too; but that actuary (#2) and accountant (#10) come out higher is a clear slap in the face to anyone devoted to the life of the mind.  Still, the point is, we've got it good.  And given the current job market, we can only hope that our PhDs don't end up as nuclear [decontamination] techs (#186), roustabouts (#193), or lumber jacks (#200).

Quoth the lumberjack, however, "I'm a lumberjack, and I'm okay."

(NB: This was an impulse post, and for reasons aforementioned, I've not done the usual due diligence; I therefore disclaim any responsibility should this be the n billionth time someone has made a reference to Monty Python's Lumberjack Song in the context of this study.)