SCOTUS Puts Its Finger on the scales in the Pensylvania Senate Race

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 great control over the GOP!) but this didn't really work since he and David McCormick were effectively tied as of the next morning and several days thereafter.

Now we have at last a decent storyline for the case. It was Bush v. Gore redux, a campaign in which the U.S. Supreme Court put its fat fingers on the scale and determined the result.

It was the Court that decided, in effect, that undated ballot would not be counted. So the Court gave this case to Oz.

The trial court judge who first heard the case, the Hon. Renee Cohn Jubelirer, did not have an opportunity to issue an opinion, but at oral argument she had favored the McCormick attorney's arguments.

Have you ever made a mistake when you put a date on something?” she asked lawyers for Oz. “I know I have. … Should that defeat a person’s ability to vote?”

Back in the days when I still used paper checks, signed them with ink and sent them to people to whom I owed money, THOSE ancient days, I mistakenly dated a few with a date like "January 3, 1993" when it was in fact the 3d day of 1994. Most of us old enough to remember ancient times did that now and then. Jubelirer was suggesting that nothing worse than THAT had happened here. And, usually, ... those checks cleared.

Commonsense overturned by SCOTUS. How odd!

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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