My recent reading includes Value Theory (2015) by a young philosopher, Francesco Orsi. Orsi has a three word formulation of his thesis: value is normative. By this he means that to say that anything is valuable -- morally, aesthetically, instrumentally, or in any way -- is to say something about what are fitting or unfitting attitudes, what are fitting or unfitting actions. That doesn't sound too revolutionary. Indeed, like John Rawls's phrase "justice as fairness" it at most leaves one wondering how it is going to be unpacked. Here's a more-or-less random quote: "[A] particular fur coat might be regarded as valuable for its own sake, as an outstanding piece of handicraft yet so only assuming an appropriate evaluative background. If fur coats were not in general instrumentally valuable for the protection against the cold they provide, this particular coat could not have any value...." I take it this means that there is a complicated relation...
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The flotsam of the contemporary news cycles moves by us so quickly and is soon forgotten. Our Orange Dynast is a child whose attention flits quickly from one subject to another, more-or-less effectively dragging the news cycle with him. Hey! It would be cool to buy Greenland. Look! There are protestors at my rally! Wow! That one is fat! We need more background checks. Oooh, something shiny! We have lots of background checks. I'm the Chosen One. That was a joke. Isn't it time for another infrastructure week? Anyway, about buying Greenland ... the thought that occurs to me is that Trump must have figured Greenland is HUUUUGE because he probably doesn't understand Mercator projection, and the fact that areas near the poles aren't as large as they seem to be on a standard map. Portrayed as above, it is still impressive but not quite so HUUU... Also, Trump probably has heard that Jefferson bought a large territory from Napoleon, that Andrew Johnson bought A...
Not long ago, the President of the United States, talking to a scrum of reporters, defending his (insane) policy with regard to US/China trade relations, and in that context said "I am the chosen one," and looked briefly to the sky before resuming his discourse. It was an intense moment. It is worth marking the intensity as the world skids out of control and even crazier news pushes that bit aside. I'm doing the POTUS an undeserved favor in the paragraph above by using all lower case letters for the phrase "chosen one," although he said it as if he mean, "the Chosen One." In a country where a majority of the citizens are Christians the phrase has a pretty specific meaning, and the look at the skies rather confirms it. This remark makes Donald Trump our first President of whom we can say that his self-image isn't just dynastic. It is metaphysical. After a bit of blowback, a couple of days later, Trump was asked to expand on what he meant by ...
Emily's husband, Paul, used to emit lengthy sentences, even whole conversations, in his sleep. "I want to go to THAT room and fuck you while Emily's away," Paul once said, to someone, in his dream. Emily -- fully awake, and yet more so after hearing this -- had the presence of mind then to whisper, "What's my name?" Paul then uttered in sweet tones the name of a friend and neighbor of the couple. And the rest you can imagine. They were divorced in due course. Linda, a friend of Emily, heard the story, but she reflected that, should her man ever be unfaithful, he would not disclose it to her at all as neatly. Ned too did talk in his sleep, but he would utter disconnected snippets, as if he was moving about quickly amongst several distinct dream worlds, and she never got the context of any of them. Ned said once, "that goes over there." Linda, "what does?" Ned snored a bit, then said, "the damned moon." Lind...
One day before the sudden death of Jeff Epstein (I refuse to call it a suicide before evidence to that effect is made public), one heard of the unsealing of a lot of the records that led to Epstein's imprisonment and so, likely, through one causal link or another, to his death. THAT material, unsealed, showed that the late Marvin Minsky, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was one of the clients to whom Epstein allegedly trafficked underaged girls. Minsky can no longer be hurt by this disclosure. He has been dead for three years. It is worth saying here too what I said in connection with John Searle not long ago, although the two are on opposite sides of at least one philosophically important debate: No wrong Minsky may have committed diminishes the value of his contributions to cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and related fields. Minsky was on the faculty at MIT from 1958 until his death, which is a heck of a time to stay at one job. He was a pionee...
I'm sorry that Mike Gravel is now gone from the Presidential campaign. I'm also sorry that he never got to stand on a debate stage with the other Democratic candidates. He would have added something distinctive. But of course he is getting on in years, and many people understandably think the Dem party needs a younger candidate this year. Tulsi Gabbard agrees with him on some of his distinctive positions, and is a good deal younger.
Liquidity, in law, is the ease with which an asset can be converted to cash. Real estate is considered an illiquid asset; it can take months to sell a plot of land. An interest in a privately owned company may be liquid or may not -- the question is very context specific. But a stock in a publicly owned and exchange traded company is very liquid -- it can be turned into cash by a call to one's broker. This is distinct from, although, closely related to, the sense that the word "liquidity" has among economists or in the world of finance. In those worlds it is a market not an asset as such that has liquidity, And the liquidity is in essence the volume of activity. It is a good thing that markets are liquid (in the finance sense), because it renders the assets involved liquid (in the lawyers' sense) and, all other things equal, one would rather have a liquid asset than an illiquid one. In discussions of corporate management and accounting, "liquidity" h...
"The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that [Emile] Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of 'Active shooters', 'Safe corners', and 'Shelter in place' is its liturgy. 'Run, Hide, Fight' is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion." - Kieran Healey, August 3, 2019. I will only add to Healey's evocative comments that I did ...
These mass shootings are clustering together. A garlic festival, a mall in El Paso, a bar in Dayton .... one has to imagine a news director asking whether it even still can qualify as "news"? One novel feature: the shooters all seem nowadays to have posted some drivel on the internet, which gets deemed each new one's respective "manifesto." These guys aren't the Unabomber. Those of us who are old enough to remember, think of a murderer's manifesto as the product of a rare sort of murderer, one with a Ph.D. in mathematics, and who walked away from an academic career to live in a cabin in Montana and eat antelope he killed himself (I'm not sure about that last bit -- but the song says antelope "roam" out there). Ted K. produced a manifesto that looked like an academic article written for peer review. Ted K. was the real world's closest yet approximation to the comic book notion of an evil genius in a secret lair cackling mani...
"Suppose some of the people in your neighborhood (there are 364 other adults) have found a public address system and decide to institute a system of public entertainment. They post a list of names, one for each day, yours among them. On his assigned day. . .a person is to run the public address system, play records over it, give news bulletins, tell amusing stories he has heard, and so on. After 138 days on which each person has done his part, your day arrives. Are you obligated to take your turn? You have benefited from it, occasionally opening your window to listen, enjoying some music or chuckling at someone’s funny story. The other people have put themselves out. But must you answer the call when it is your turn to do so? As it stands surely not.” This is important, and a response to the "muh roads" arguments of statists. Yes I benefit from the existence of roads created by government edict. Yes, I plan to continue using the roads while arguing for anarch...
My recent reading includes a novel by James Patterson and Marshall Karp, RED ALERT (2018). James Patterson (portrayed here) is a great Master, and Karp is his protege, in the art of the police procedural, a subgenre of crime fiction in which the emphasis is NOT on the whodunnit guessing game, or on the brilliant ratiocination of the protagonist. The emphasis is on the setting and the particulars of how the catch is made -- a work in this genre can delve into forensic science, the particulars of search warrants, interrogations, etc. The plot exists as a convenient device for getting the reader (presumed to be of the laity) into that world, so that the act of submersion is the end in itself. RED ALERT involves two NYC police detectives, Zach Jordan and Kylie MacDonald. Zach is the first person narrator, Kylie is his partner. The following passage shows us how the genre or subgenre works: "There are two ways to search a suspect's apartment: get a warrant, which would ...
I suspect I've mentioned Steven Pinker in this blog before, although I'm too lazy to look it up right now. I've got a Big Thought about Pinker, but I have to get to it in stages. First: who is he? Second: what is the Context of the Big Thought. Third: the Big Thought. Who Is He? The lengthy wikipedia article attached to his name will tell you. But in case you're lazy: Pinker teaches psychology at Harvard. He got his Ph.D. in the field with a thesis on "The Representation of 3D Space in Mental Images," which suggests that cognitive psychology is his especial concern. Aside from his scholarly works -- to which I will return in a bit -- he is the author of several books aimed at broad audiences, including THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE (2011) and ENLIGHTENMENT NOW (2018). He is generally considered a conservative intellectual, but since "conservative" still often means counter-Enlightenment, and Pinker is an Enlightenment enthusiast, that may...
In 1823, the five great powers of the continent of Europe were scheming to reverse an outbreak of revolutions in South America. There powers were: France, Spain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. This was the situation that created the Monroe Doctrine. Great Britain's elite was unhappy about the counter-revolutionary scheming: not because it was sentimental about the national sovereignty of the new powers an ocean away, but chiefly because Great Britain's interests as a hegemon were threatened by any cause that promoted unity among those older powers on a continent so close its best swimmers could get there without mechanical help. The Prime Minister of Britain was George Canning (pictured above). He proposed to Monroe's administration that it join with Britain in a warning to those five continental powers about the errors of their colonialism-reasserting ways. Much of Monroe's cabinet thought this was a good idea. It was Secretary of State John Quincy Adams who arg...
Measles cases in the United States passed 1,000 in early June. I don't know what the number is now, two months later, but passing that 1K threshold is a rare event, doing so less than half way through the year is even more remarkable. Unfortunately, one all-too-common response to this is "there's too damned much freedom!" Every state in the United States requires that children receive certain immunizations before they may be enrolled in public schools. Most states allow a religion-based exemption, and several states allow exemption on the basis of conscientious objections that may not be religious in character. The whole subject is in flux. The 2019 measles outbreak has seen a press for narrowing the range of exemptions. The issue of childhood vaccinations reached the bully pulpit of the presidential campaign when Democratic primary candidate Marianne Williamson described mandatory vaccination as "Orwellian." She compared a push to close the conscien...