I have from time to tie opined here about the philosophy of humor. What does it mean for something (say, a brief story with an unexpected reversal at the end) to be funny? Today I'll simply offer a test case for your consideration. Can we agree that this is funny, then worry about why? The Simpsons a few years back did a Halloween episode set in the 1930s. The town of Springfield was ripped apart by panicked mobs after a radio program put together by a young Orson Welles that presented fake news reports of a Martian invasion. The next morning, Orson Welles is on his way out of town. He is met by the police chief who has just been surveying the damage done by the riots. This dialog ensures: Chief Wiggum: Why shouldn't I punch you in the nose, bud?! Orson Wells: (muttering to himself), Nose bud? Hmmmm. Is that funny?
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It appears that I have been kicked off of twitter. If you try to look me up there using what was long my twitter handle, you will encounter a notice that says, "Caution: This account is temporarily restricted." I was bounced off in the act of writing a tweet to Mike Huckabee. You, devoted readers, probably all know who he is. For those who don't: he is a former governor of Arkansas . He won the 2008 Iowa Republican caucus in the cycle for the Presidential nomination on the Republican side but faded in the subsequent jockeying that year, the year in which it eventually went to John McCain. He is also the father of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Anyway, I have long been ticked off by Huckabee's combination of sanctimony and ignorance. I was in the act of informing him of how that combination strikes me that I was "temporarily restricted." Just putting it out here. By the way, I have a new twitter handle and account. Feel free to visit @Christo75591126. ...
I recently had an opportunity to read the unpublished concurring opinion of Justice Robert H. Jackson in the BROWN v BOARD decision. The BROWN decision came down in May of '54, and Jackson died in October of that year, so his participation in this decision was in a sense his swan song. The decision to strike down de jure racial segregation in public education was unanimous, 9-0. Justice Earl Warren's opinion was the only opinion, a fact of some historic significance since it meant there were no dissenting (or even distinct) judicial words around which the sizeable resistance to the implementation of this decision could rally. It appears to have been precisely for that reason that Jackson was persuaded NOT to publish the concurring decision, NOT to grant resisters an inch. Jackson's concurrence was different from Warren's opinion in important respects and, yes, one can see why Warren urged him to drop it. Consider this passage: The white South harbors in hi...
This is poignant stuff. I recognize when I'm outclassed. I can think of no improving commentary on what follows. So I'll simply steal it from The Irish Times where it first appeared. An Irish philosopher is writing about her infatuation with the long dead Dutchman. However, I realised in that moment that all of the serious relationships I had had in my early 20s were with long-dead philosophers and were conducted entirely inside my own head. Fortunately for me, that didn’t constitute any diagnosable mental-health condition that there was an existing medication to cure. It’s simply the case that no young man I had ever encountered was sufficient competition to threaten my devotion to Baruch Spinoza. Of all the gin joints he could have sauntered into, he had to choose mine. That certainly isn’t to imply that he physically did anything much at all. Dying in 1677 will limit you that way. However, with liquid brown eyes that implied his parents were a giraf...
Is it a thing? https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2019/01/athens-review-of-books-under-threat-from-politically-motivated-legal-action-1.html#more You will gather from that source that Greek courts don't seem to have an equivalent of the TIMES v. SULLIVAN rule in the US. They are open to the use of civil defamation lawsuits by butt-hurt politicians as a way of stifling free speech. The first signatory of the letter of protest is Bruce Ackerman, a professor of both law and political science at Yale University -- and someone who knows the SULLIVAN rule quite well. It is worthwhile watching as this one unfolds.
I once had the stereotypical sort of law office. The sort where a stranger comes through the door, speaks to a receptionist/secretary/gatekeeper, and in due course gets further, into the inner sanctum, my office proper. It has been a long time since I had or needed that sort of office, but I will relay here a random memory about cigarettes. A woman comes into my office. She had called ahead for an appointment, so I was ready for her. She comes in and asks rather diffidently whether she can smoke. I had an ashtray sitting on the client side of my desk just for such occasions, so the diffidence wasn't necessary. I said she should help herself. Thence the following dialog: "Really? Almost nobody lets me light up in the office these days." "Well, I grew up with two parents who were both chimneys. I'm quite used to second hand smoke...." "That's not the point. This is YOUR office, you should be able to say no smoking here!" "When ...
Oxford University Press has a book out entitled Plato's Moral Psychology , written by Rachana Kamtekar, who is affiliated with Cornell University. The book came out in 2017 but seems still to be kicking up excitement in the relevant quarters of academe. It dd succeed in making a new splash out of its very old subject matter. She identifies a common understanding, among students of Plato, that there was a shift in Plato's views on moral psychology between the earlier dialogues and th e Republic . The early dialogs take an intellectualist view of motivation, so that bad actions are the consequence of error or ignorance, and virtue is teachable. But by the time he wrote the Republic (says the standard view) Plato had abandoned that intellectualism. Kamtekar believes this account mistaken. She holds instead, that for Socrates, at least as Plato retrospectively understood his views, that the good is the natural object of desire. This is not as simple as claim is that virtue ...
President Trump used his State of the Union address this year for all the usual purposes -- such as pointing to some heroic individuals he had invited to take seats in the balcony, and warming himself in the sun of their reflected wonderfulness. That was boringly traditional. But what struck me was the badness of the speech, the prepared text, as a piece of writing. Example: as POTUS headed toward his conclusion, he went into this bit of ... something-or-other. "Here tonight, we have legislators from across this magnificent republic. You have come from the rocky shores of Maine and the volcanic peaks of Hawaii, from the snowy woods of Wisconsin and the red deserts of Arizona, from the green farms of Kentucky and the golden beaches of California. Together, we represent the most extraordinary nation in all of history. What will we do with this moment? How will we be remembered?" Presumably "we" will be remembered as the people who had to listen to this str...
I only recently learned how to pronounce this fellow's name! The "s" is silent, and the name rhymes with "Lone." That's one of the minor revelations of a fascinating Bloomberg feature about how and why Carlos Ghosn, the grim faced fellow portrayed here, was taken down when he was. To review: In November, authorities in Japan arrested Ghosn on complicated charges of financial fraud and less complicated charges of tax cheating. This is huge in the world auto industry. Ghosn was the chairman of the board at both Nissan and of Renault, and the central figure in the historic alliance between the two. That alliance had recently (2016) added Mitsubishi to the fold. So: what does Bloomberg have to tell us, aside from the useful pronunciation reference? It is perhaps unsurprising that someone of Ghosn's prominence and wealth had rivals and, one may plainly say, enemies. Among them, apparently, was his own second-in-command at one of the three allied c...
The ontological argument for the existence of God was long thought to have been discredited. Theists as well as atheists thought so in, say, 1958. But not only has the argument made a comeback, it has a new name that indicates a new focus: Perfect Being Theology. The name indicates that the ontological argument isn't 'only' used to show that God exists, but to prop up some very controversial ideas about His nature and the character of our worship of him.https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-greatest-possible-being/ I'm not an admirer of the ontological argument, and am pretty sure I'll always have something better to do than to set aside time for books such as the one pictured here. I'll be more explicit about my reactions to the ontological argument than I usually am, though. My take is that the word "perfect" has no fixed meaning, and that if through some pragmatic arbitration we could fix one it would not have anything akin to the content that...
Let me put this together to see if I understand. On February 1, 2019, the Virginian Pilot brought to light a yearbook photo from the Eastern Virginia Medical School class of which Virginia's Governor Ralph Northam (D) is an alumnus. The photo, on his yearbook page, showed two young men, one in minstrel show style blackface and the other wearing a KKK hood. Northam's immediate response was to admit that he was one of the two young men pictured. It was not immediately clear which one, but he was clear that he was one of them. "I am deeply sorry for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo," he said. That wording doesn't leave a lot of room for misconstrual. There were only two persons who appeared in that photo. Thus only two people made the relevant "decision," and Northam was saying he was one of them. He doesn't say which one, but that mattered little given how offensive either of them was. In the hours that followed, a numb...
Robert Caro, the famous biographer (of Robert Moses, and more recently, continuingly, of Lyndon Johnson) recently published a memory of his own, about his early days in journalism, fresh out of college. I'll paraphrase his article, with some direct quotes along the way. Caro went to work for Newsday on Long Island, in 1959. The managing editor was Alan Hathway, an old-school fellow who didn't like the Ivy League. Caro, a Princetonian, had been hired despite Hathway not by him. At that time, Newsday didn't have any Sunday issue. Which meant there was almost nobody in the office on Saturday, since such offices are always working on the next day's paper. What if something important happened on a Saturday? The low man on the office hierarchy would be there, would take the call and put the information in a memo, those higher up on the totem pole could act on it Sunday. Aa the '50s ended and the '60s revved up, the future of Mitchel Field (an air force bas...
There is little to be said about this year's Super Bowl. But I'll say the following anyway, simply to achieve a sense of closure. Congrats to the Patriots. Congrats, too, to the Rams for an amazing season. They'll almost certainly be back to the post-season, and perhaps back to flying with the Superb Owl, next year. CBS' opening bit, where we witness what purports to be a boardroom debate about how the CBS coverage of the Super Bowl ought to begin, was clever, but everything seems to have gone downhill from there. Lackluster game, boring halftime show, sub-par commercials. Props to Gladys Knight.
Nathan Glazer died on the 19th of last month. He is best known as the author of BEYOND THE MELTING POT (1963) and of WE ARE ALL MULTICULTURALISTS NOW (1997) These are both books that, as the titles indicate, discussed in a scholarly way the vexed issue of ethnic and cultural identities in the United States within the context of two very different political eras. There was much else to Glazer's life and career, but I will focus here on those two books, BTMP and WAAMN. BTMP as a book formally co-authored with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then executive assistant to the Secretary of Labor. But it is generally recognized as consisting mostly of Glazer's work. It made the then-unusual argument that ethnicities don't melt. Focusing especially on New York City, the authors contended that the children and even grandchildren of waves of immigration to NYC, from Puerto Rico, Italy, Ireland, or by Jews from much of the continent of Europe [Glazer's parents were Jews from Polan...