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.
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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.
Posted by Michael Drake on January 31, 2009 in Law, Politics | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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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."
Posted by Michael Drake on January 28, 2009 in The Present Classification | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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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.]
Continue reading "Ross Douthat's Universal Counteranalogizer" »
Posted by Michael Drake on January 28, 2009 in Atheism, Funny, Philosophy, Religion | Permalink | Comments (43) | TrackBack (0)
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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.
Posted by Michael Drake on January 26, 2009 in Law | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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Rules of civil procedure, as construed by Stalin:
(Maybe someone should have introduced Stalin to Danny Lerner.)
Posted by Michael Drake on January 26, 2009 in Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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...it would probably have to be director Danny Lerner's mystery-action-thriller Sharks in Venice (Spoiler Alert ahead!)*:
*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.
Posted by Michael Drake on January 26, 2009 in Arts & Culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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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:
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.
Posted by Michael Drake on January 25, 2009 in Arts & Culture, Music | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
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Posted by Michael Drake on January 24, 2009 in Funny | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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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:
Posted by Michael Drake on January 24, 2009 in Recursion | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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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):
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):
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.
Posted by Michael Drake on January 23, 2009 in Funny, Law | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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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.
Posted by Michael Drake on January 20, 2009 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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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.)
Posted by Michael Drake on January 19, 2009 in Arts & Culture, Music, Recursion | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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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":
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.
Posted by Michael Drake on January 18, 2009 in Atheism, Philosophy, Religion | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)
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Posted by Michael Drake on January 18, 2009 in Funny | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
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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:
Now let's apply this to a sample text. Take this one, due to Joseph Ratzinger (made topical by Ross Douthat):
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.
Posted by Michael Drake on January 17, 2009 in Atheism, Philosophy, Religion | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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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.
Posted by Michael Drake on January 16, 2009 in Law | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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From Thomas Hurka, "Nietzsche: Perfectionist," in Leiter-Sinhababu's Nietzsche and Morality (at 19):
And from the associated footnote:
Enough that it is a single taste!
Posted by Michael Drake on January 14, 2009 in Nietzsche, Philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Here's something really weird about the Federal Bank Robbery Statute. Section (a) states (in pertinent part):
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.
Posted by Michael Drake on January 12, 2009 in Law | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
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Ross Douthat argues that Richard John Neuhaus' illiberal views "have deep roots in Anglo-American political history":
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?
Posted by Michael Drake on January 09, 2009 in Politics, Religion | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)
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Apropos of this WSJ piece on the best jobs in the US (philosophers placed twelfth), Brandon Look (via Brian Leiter) writes:
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.)
Posted by Michael Drake on January 06, 2009 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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