Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 I've only recently discovered what the "S" in BDS means: sanction. Until quite recently, I thought the phrase was "boycott, divest, sell."  "Sell" would be redundant. That is what one is doing when one divests, of course.  Anyway: now I know better.  This is some scary stuff, though:  BDS movement disavows Boston project mapping Jewish groups | The Times of Israel

Saudi Arabia and Turkey seem intent upon the full normalization of relations. If they proceed with this (despite the fact that a journalist was murdered not TOO long ago in a Saudi embassy on Turkish soil -- which is the sort of thing that might be thought de-normalizing) the fact may significantly impact the balance of power in western Asia.  Looking at the big picture: Turkey was born in a secularist moment The Ottoman Empire was at last dead, killed by the First World War, and it was replaced with a republic that defined itself as NOT being an Islamic power. That meant defining itself as a secularist power, because in western Asia it has always been secularism that serves as the supercessionist threat to Islam. A century later, though, Erdogan seems intent on removing that threat. He has steered Turkey not just toward Islam (it has long been predominantly Islamic) but toward the politics of Islamism, almost back to the ideas of the Ottomans. So he and the bone-saw monarchy ...

At some time next month I will offer you my usual annual reflections on this Supreme Court term.  I make this note in advance, about a case SCOTUS has decided NOT to hear.  On June 21, the Supreme Court declined to take up the case of MONSANTO v. HARDEMAN.   In this matter a Californian man named Edwin Hardeman alleged RoundUp, a Monsanto product, had caused his cancer.  Hardeman received an award from a federal district court, applying California state law, of $25 million after a jury trial. But Monsanto has appealed, claiming that the matter is preempted by federal law, and the US EPA has concluded that the herbicide does not pose "any reasonable risk to man or the environment." Monsanto appealed, and the 9th Circuit held for plaintiff.  The US, under Trump, sought to intervene and take Monsanto's side before SCOTUS. The government, under Biden, has indicated that it takes Hardeman's view and wants the award to stand.  SCOTUS has decided not to hear ...

 In mid-April I wrote a post on Facebook explaining why I believe the Democrats will control the Senate, likely by a somewhat larger margin than now, in 2023. I won't repeat most of that discussion here, except to say that I took a bottom-up view, going through the most contentious seats race by race. In what follows, I reproduce here what I said about the contested Georgia seat in particular. I think in light of subsequent developments it stands up pretty well. (I'll delete some now irrelevant bits, though.) ----------------------------------   Georgia -- incumbent Raphael Warnock (D) has the Dem field to himself while the Republicans engage in a fratricidal primary. Warnock is using the time to fill his war chest for the fall. He is also the beneficiary of serious disunity on the Republican side. Trump is supporting Herschel Walker, former star player with the Georgia Bulldogs.... Not coincidentally, Trump owned the New Jersey Generals, a team in the brief-lived USFL years ...

Year by year an average of about 2,500 tons of gold comes out of the bowels of the earth and into the world's gold supply. About half of this goes into the manufacture of jewelry. India is the Big Player there -- half of the demand for gold jewelry is Indian. About 40% of the newly mined gold is turned itno coins and bullion bought as investments.  Industrial uses account for the remainder. Gold's industrial uses may be due for an increase. Gold is highly conductive. Furthermore, it doesn't tarnish. These facts are important if you're designing high-quality circuitry.  Gold's use in industry isn't a sink into which the metal falls never to return. Indeed, there is a large (and expanding) industry that recycles old computers and trow-away cellphones and takes out the gold, which of course then becomes available for one of the other uses just mentioned.  I'm not going anywhere with this, just thinking some matters through. 

  The great positive point for utilitarianism is … it is consequentialist. I do not see how any ethic can be rational if it is not consequentialist. In Star Wars Yoda understands this. It is precisely why he says that there is, for a jedi, no “try.” Either a consequence comes about, or it does not. But the great negative point for utilitarianism is … it has a monistic view of the way consequences are to be evaluated. And this is true quite generally. Whether your preferred form of util is hedonistic, or based on a more abstract notion of satisfaction, whether you evaluate an act or a rule … utilitarianism posits some quality of the consequences of an action-or-rule, X, and says that more of X is always better than less of X. But there is no X. Valuation is pluralistic. In the end we can’t say anything about those things that are good in themselves except that they are good in themselves. Friendship, and more intimate relations, and bonding moments that make them or flow from them, ...

Fortunately, I never get very stressed when watching news that features the Proud Boys,  In my mind, that name is a portmanteau of the CCR song title "Proud Mary" and the "lost boys" in Neverland.  The phrase fills my mind, accordingly, with images both of John Fogarty and of Captain Hook. Sometimes when the train of association starts chugging down its tracks, it is best to let it go.   (By the way, due respect to Tina Turner, but her spoken interlude in her famous cover of the song was mistaken. CCR rocked it.) 

  The housing industry is headed for a downturn. Some will be hurt. Yes, some people are hurt by the ups and downs of any given industry.  But please let us resolve (or "highly resolve" if you like Lincolnian echoes) NOT to support any sort of bail-out this time.  Demand is failing. Mortgage applications are down. This will lead to a collapse in housing prices. That could lead to a fall -- perhaps not just in inflation-adjusted terms but in nominal terms as well -- of rents and a range of other costs of living.  Combined with a resolute monetary policy THAT could be the beginning if a return to health for a feverish economy.  Let's not screw it up by short-circuiting the healing.

 Welcome back to 1973, the year of the Yom Kippur War, an oil shock, inflation, and a very consequential Congressional hearing on a power grab from the White House.  The United States had no "boots on the ground" but was very much aligned with one of the sides in this war. The OTHER side had lots of petroleum for export.  The result? An oil shock in the U.S., bad both for motorists and for the broader economy.  Meanwhile, Senator Sam Ervin was chairing hearings of the "Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices."   Clearly, those were strange times. 

I've received a review copy of RETAIL GANGSTER, the new Gary Weiss book about the rise and fall of Eddie Antar, aka Crazy Eddie, famous NY based retailer of electronics in the '70s and '80s. By the way, if when I say this you think immediately of the guy who used to shout at us on television about how his prices were IN-SAAAAANE, you are not alone. That was an actor, Jerry Carroll, doing a fine job. Weiss reminds us early on that, memorable though it was, Carroll's act -- which became a company calling card and was quoted in the 1984 fantasy romance SPLASH, was not especially original. I'll quote Weiss directly here: "By the 1970s, the 'crazy merchant' shtick was a well-worn cliche in retail advertising....In 1962 the sitcom  Car 54 Where Are You -- set in the Bronx -- featured a men's shop with a loudspeaker screaming, 'Get a new suit for practically nothing! I'm having a mental lapse! Come in and take advantage of me!....'."   Th...

 I made the case in a post here on May 31 that reality wasn't cooperating with our very human desire for nice story lines.  As part of the evidence, I referenced the May 24 Republican primary in Pennsylvania, for the nomination for the US Senate, in which Kathy Barnette, the underdog surprise candidate (THAT is always a nice storyline), faded into relative insignificance at almost the moment the actual counting of ballots began.  Right around the time I wrote that post, the issue has narrowed down to this: would undated signed mail-in ballots be counted? There was nothing fraudulent in the wind: some voters simply forgot to fill out the date line on the outside envelope.  Had those votes been counted, it seems, McCormick might have won. Without those ballots, Oz had his win/  But let's back up. In the final stretch of the campaign, Mehmet Oz remained a favorite almost entirely on the strength of Trump's endorsement. THAT suggested a storyline (Trump still has gr...

 It is amazing, after so many years of providing online content, that I just learned what "H3" means. I seldom have to work on the level of the HTML code.  But it is good to know.  Anyway, here is a link where they make it easy for you. And for me: Web tools: Callout boxes - UC Santa Cruz (ucsc.github.io)

  All that sentimentalism about the boys in blue, how much "blue lives matter.," how there is only a thin line between chaos and civilization, and it is a blue line...what does all the mawkishness come to? It amounts to this: at some point a madman with a gun may be coming for someone you love, and a police officer may be the only one who can stop the bad guy in time. If so, he will of course DO SO, even at the expense of his own life. In preparation for that day, we should show him not just respect, but admiration. Wasn't the Uvalde shooting on May 24 a stunning refutation of such nonsense? For the parents of students at Uvalde, THAT MOMENT CAME. And the lads in blue were nowhere around. The lies and walkings-back are intriguing here. The first story was the rather incoherent one that the school resources officer had confronted the madman outside the school building. But, the story continued, the madman somehow got past him. Without having to kill him. People immediate...

  The Supreme Court of the United States has vacated a stay by the 5th Circuit in the NETCHOICE case.  This is important, but understanding its importance requires some explanation. So bear with me.  Netchoice is a trade association that represents major social media platforms. It filed an action against a law that prohibits social media platforms from censoring their users. Suppose Hans tweets out, "There was no Holocaust -- Hitler was a great leader and the world needs more like him." The law means Twitter can not take that down.  At some point in the life of this blog I have probably mentioned the shopping-mall cases of the early 1970s. The gist of them is that the Supreme Court does not recognize private corporations, even when they operate public spaces, as state actors. Hans has no right to hand out Nazi leaflets in the food court of a mall. Indeed, the mall's corporate owners (corporations are people) have their own free speech rights which entail the right to...