A 6-3 Split on SCOTUS (but not the one you're thinking of)

Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Dunn said that he did not want to be vaccinated against Covid-19

for religious reasons. He did not identify a specific religion whose belief system leads him to this. But let us suppose it is Dunnism, and he is the Pope of it. He naturally doesn't want to be forced to excommunicate himself.

Six Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court said, "tough luck, soldier, you're in a chain of command." the other three -- Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch -- said that Dunn should NOT be relieved of his command for this reason. His religious rights should trump the chain of command.

(And yes, I know I'm using the word 'trump' there as a verb and that one could interpret that punningly as a reference to the guy who appointed Gorsuch. Grow up, folks. I use "trumpet" for such purposes. And you can spell it if you like with a silent "s" in front.)

What I would like to point out, though, is that in 2022 when one hears of a 6-3 vote on SCOTUS one automatically thinks of another split, one with the above-named three joined by Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, with the two Obama nominees and the one remaining Clinton nominee (Breyer, departing at the end of this term). THAT split didn't happen here.

What does this mean? Well, none of the Justices issues written opinions on this matter so there are limits to what we can infer. .

Yet I persist. Gorsuch/Kavanaugh have been erratic. My impression is that each of them is still rather dazed by the path that has brought him to where he is. They seem to take turns in their departures from Trumpet predictability, so that when it is Gorsuch who sides with Alito/Thomas, it is Kavanaugh who strays, and vice versa. But it is very often the cae that one of them will stray. For pure and dependable Trumpetism, one has to stick with those two Bush family picks, Thomas and Alito.

Anyway: get the shot or take the demotion, Lt. Col. Dunn.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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