I find this odd. Rosario Dawson has been taking heat for even mentioning the name "Monica Lewinsky" in the course of making a case for voting for Bernie Sanders. Jeez, do these Clintonistas have a thin skin, or what? On Saturday, April 23, Rosario said, "We are literally under attack for not just supporting the other candidate. Now I'm with Monica Lewinsky with this: bullying is bad. She's actually dedicated her life now to talking about that." She said that bullying is still bullying when it is a "campaign strategy." First, obvious, point. One doesn't need to invoke Monica Lewinsky's name to make the point that bullying (however actually defined) is bad. In American politics, in a campaign with someone named Clinton in it, there is a natural suspicion that the name has been introduced for other purposes -- to remind us of a once-juicy sex scandal. Second point: so what? One's impression is that politicians used to be made of...
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A member of the board of the Bundesbank in Germany said recently that the European Central Bank should crack down on a political practice engaged in by many of the member states, that of keeping private banks that are effectively insolvent artificially alive on whatever is their available means of life support. The issue has become known in Europe as that of "zombie banks." I say "Europe" but sense at once that I am guilty of presentism. The term "zombie bank" got its start in the United States in the late 1980s. Remember the days of the "Savings and Loan" scandal? Ah, they seem innocent now. Or ... not. But recently the zombie's are a specter haunting Europe. (Gee, somebody once said that about communism, did he not?) If a bank has a negative asset value, then depositors will have reason to fear frozen accounts and even notwithstanding national insurance systems the banks may well empty out. If they are still kept alive d...
Assuming you have respectably good balance, you can stand on just one foot long enough to say this: Regard ideas as candidates for your belief and distrust them unless they have clear practical consequences. Then once you have come to understand beliefs by their consequences, believe what is in the line of your needs. That'll do it. Of course, the implication is that pragmatism isn't so much a belief as a meta-belief. Which is accurate. Recall James' comments about the corridor. James always saw pragmatism as the corridor itself, not as consisting of any of the rooms one might reach by that means.
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.' I like that. But simply allowing my train of association to chug along its own tracks, this thought about science brings me to the issue of cosmogony, and the issue of the apparent demise of the old steady state theory of the cosmos. The great motivating factor of the theory was the immensity of infinity, the infinite expanse that opened in the past and presumably too in the future. The contrary Big Bang theory, with its definite moment of beginning and its threat of a heat death of the whole-she-bang, cuts one off from that lovely prospect. Also, relatedly, the Big Bang is sometimes defended as a way in which something might have come out of nothing, and THAT is a strongly counte...
I'll treat you today, dear reader, to another blog post inspired by shenanigans over at Yahoo!Answers. Someone asked, "Can anyone philosophically justify the existence of private property?" Some further explanation indicated that he had titles to land especially in mind. For the record, my answer was what regular readers of this blog would likely expect. The pragmatic answer is surely best: those social institutions are right which work, over time and on the whole. Private title to land is justified, if at all, only on that basis. Whether it IS justified by practical consequences is a fascinating empirical question. Consider Richard Pipes' book on this question, for example. That is much more interesting than trying to parse the differences between Locke and Rousseau on some primordial appropriation. But I'm bring this into Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed today because of another commenter. He ignored the specific matter of land and gave us a little lect...
The two contending forces resolved their dispute arising out of the San Bernardino terrorist attack. It turns out the FBI didn't need Apple. The US government can hire hackers who can get into the phone. That was bad news for Apple's brand (unhackability is part of the mystique), but good news for what remains of the fourth amendment. It is an awful business having courts order private companies to help the government open doors to their products, especially when those products have an intimate character for so many of their buyers. Yet the FBI doesn't want that much to remain of the fourth amendment. So it, and the D of J, have re-started the fight, this time over another phone. The Justice Department said on April 8th that it is going to seek a court order to force Apple to help it unlock an iPhone that was seized as part of a New York drug-traffic investigation. This was a front page story in the weekend Wall Street Journal. Still, it faded from public attention q...
The Supreme Court, earlier this term extended the time that would normally have been slated for arguments on the immigration case this term, US v. Texas. This Monday, it heard those arguments. Some background: the Obama administration has sought to implement a program it calls Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), effectively allowing people in the US illegally to remain here, work lawfully, and receive other benefits that would otherwise be withheld from them by law. One of the arguments against DAPA is that it violates APA. Also, that's the only argument that employs rhyming acronyms, so it is presumably the important one. APA is the Administrative Procedure Act, and it created notice and comment procedures for new administrative rules. Opponents of the Obama policy contend that DAPA is a new rule within the scope of APA, yet it was initiated without the proper notice-and-comment period, thus it is invalid. Apparently it is the Secretary of Homeland Securi...
I recently watched (for the first time) the movie Contact , which may seem odd since it's almost 20 years old, and not the sort of movie that anyone describes as a classic. Still, it has its moments. I did read the book back in the day. And this is one of those instances -- hardly unique -- in which my strongest impression coming away from the movie is about how much of the book they jettisoned. There will be something of a spoiler in what follows as I explain this, by the way. Consider the whole childhood backstory. In the novel, the protagonist had found memories of her father and a terrible memory of his death when she was nine. So far so good, that's in the movie, too. But in the novel, the character's mother then married another man, and her teenage years were filled with tensions with the step-Dad. Here's the threatened spoiler: Near the end of the novel, the step-Dad turns out to be her biological Dad. Mom conceived with him, then they split for a reaso...
To continue with the thoughts I was discussing last week under this heading: Under the view I'm discussing, a variety of prescriptive legal theories have "worked themselves impure" in the words of Kessler and Pozen. These theories have begun as a purist account of how the law ought to work given one central idea. But they then have encountered difficult facts, contending interpretations, etc. and have gradually incorporated impurities, until it becomes clear that they weren't the revolution or New Paradigm they were first sold as. An example, cost-benefit analysis. In the incarnation that concerns the authors of this life-cycle view, CBA got a bold start in the early 1980s, but encountered difficulties before the end of that decade, in part because of an atmosphere of scandal that came to surround some of the administrative offices that had to take the point on this march. Also, on the academic front, CBA came under criticism for being a mere pretext for a po...
JFK authorized the Attorney General, his brother, to cut the deal that the US for years thereafter would deny it had ever made, the deal agreeing that the US missiles in Turkey would be dismantled in return for a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. Robert Kennedy wrote the following of the moment of the crucial contact, with Dobrynin. "We have to have a commitment by at least tomorrow that those bases [in Cuba] would be moved. This was not an ultimatum, I said, but just a statement of fact. He should understand that if they did not remove those basis, then we would remove them. His country might take retaliatory action, but he should understand that before this was over, while there might be dead Americans, there would also be dead Russians. He then asked me about Khrushchev's other proposal dealing with removal of the missiles from Turkey. I replied that there could be no quid pro quo --- not deal of this kind could be made ... If some time elapsed --- and ... I me...
Funny Story. SLATE recently ran an interview with Peggy Orenstein, the author of GIRLS AND SEX, a meditation on the messages young women, especially educated young women from at least relatively affluent backgrounds, receive from popular culture today. At one point in the interview, Orenstein is commenting on how mainstream Hollywood movies -- not porn, not even necessarily R rated movies -- treat sex. There's a standard scene in many romcoms where the male and female protagonists rip half of each other's clothes off, then they have (under covers) simulated sex for a few seconds, then the point has been made and the movie moves on. Orenstein then says, "maybe 30, 40 years ago, that shorthand would have been seen less often. Probably, actually, you wouldn’t have seen it at all. You would have seen kissing, and then you get the Hays Code or whatever." Or at least that's what she tried to say. Here's the funny bit. In the first transcription ...
Sort of a meta-theory of law. I like those. Jeremy K Kessler and David Pozen, both of Columbia Law School, have posted Working Themselves Impure: A Life-Cycle Theory of Legal Theorie s, which will soon be published in the University of Chicago Law Review. I learned about it in the Legal History Blog, which I believe I've mentioned here before, and which once in awhile references my work in The Federal Lawyer. The life-cycle theory is this: "Prescriptive legal theories have a tendency to cannibalize themselves. As they develop into schools of thought, they become not only increasingly complicated but also increasingly compromised, by their own normative lights. Maturation breeds adulteration. The theories work themselves impure." That's the abstract. Here's a quote from the article, about why they limit that statement to prescriptive legal theories: "All that we have said so far concerns prescriptive legal theories; what of their descriptive cou...
Humans love cats in large part because of their innate grace, because from the time they are kittens they already seem to know how to move, how to make the best use of the space around them. Humans also love dogs, in large part I submit because of their acquired grace, because when they are puppies we can often see that they are clumsy, that they charmingly bumble about in space. Note the troubles of the fellow shown here. We love dogs because we can see them learning to be graceful as they grow. Humans become "cat people" or "dog people" depending on which sort of grace we find most appealing, the innate or the acquired.
I've heard it said that utilitarianism has this pragmatic benefit: it could constitute a plausible ethical consensus (even if we're all only pretending to believe it?) that could lessen the intensity of moral conflicts. In other words, it is better to argue over non-fundamental things than over fundamental things, because we're more likely to go to war over the latter than the former. Thinking this through: reaping this benefit would require us, I suppose, to give our consent to the simplest possible form of utilitarianism, because only that one can promise to turn serious substantive moral conflicts into mere mechanical computations. In the spirit of Jeremy Bentham, portrayed above, then, let us suppose that pleasure could be measured in, say "positive hedons." Pain could be treated as negative hedons. Consider whether the govt should require a vaccine. Add up all the positive hedons the policy will create (discounting for uncertainties), subt...