One never expects the hangover, despite all the evidence

The blogospheric dynamic often resembles that of a particularly raucous frat party.  Someone gets the idea in their head to dance on a table.  Suddenly dancing on tables with a bottle in hand is  the best idea to occur to anyone, not dancing on tables is a sign of depravity, and the drunken boys surrounding the table chanting “Chug! Chug! Chug!” reinforce the dancer’s dubious choice.  Hours later the dancer comes to, facedown in a lampshade, and, at this particular party, wondering what on earth he could have done in his stupor to earn the plastic green beads roped around his neck.

Do not mistake my silence on Iran for a lack of interest.  Like everyone else, I’m reading the blogs and the tweets. I find the regime’s violence abhorrent.   I sympathize with the protesters.  They look like the nearby counterparts of my friends and students.  I am impressed by their courage, and I suspect that there is no force fiercer than an Iranian mother.

I’m conscious, however, of how little I know about Iran or Iranian politics, and discretion being the better part of amateur punditry, I didn’t have much to say.  Here’s the thing: neither does anyone else  know what is going on.  We have a narrative that says, truthfully, oppressive regimes that fake election results and beat up their citizens are bad, and non-violent protesters of those results are good.  The problem is with the further embellishment:  that “bad” and “good” map onto domestic American politics concerns, attitudes, and goals; that the favored protesters would, if they won, be recognized by the U.S. political establishment and chattering classes as allies; that Iranian politics is as familiar to us our own so that we can feel confident in the comparisons.

Would we trust a pundit who thought that Barack Obama was a Republican, or that in the United States, Presidents were elected by a simple majority vote?

Daniel Larison noted last week that with a slightly different spin or simply some more information, Mousavi would not look as favorable to the West.  Will Wilkinson’s latest posts on  the “vanity dressed up as elevated moral consciousness” of  Twitter avatars strike me as extremely perceptive.   Exiled Iranian filmmaker Lila Ghobady has a much harsher view of both the current regime and Mousavi as a reformer:

Let us not forget that Mousavi was Prime Minister of Iran in the 1980s when more than ten thousand political prisoners were executed after three-minute sham trials. He has been a part of the Iranian dictatorship system for the past 30 years. If he had not been, he would not be allowed to be a candidate in the first place. In fact in a free democratic state someone like Mousavi should have gone on trial before becoming a presidential candidate for his crimes against thousands of freedom-loving political prisoners who were killed during the time he was Iran’s Prime Minister.

Read her whole column.  At the very least, it shows how little we should be confident of understanding the situation or of the morality of breathlessly cheering it on.  I am not arguing that there is no reason for the protesters to take to the streets.   Nor am I arguing that Mousavi would be worse, or that the Iranian leadership is a force for good.

I am, however, counseling sobriety.

It is easy to get swept up in a romantic narrative of someone else’s passionate struggle from behind the safety of one’s keyboard.   Revolutions are exciting from far away, and the illusion of participation in something greater than oneself by…. making your Twitter avatar green… by bloviating about it on the Internet….changing your Facebook status… being anti-green Muppets…. protesting the irresponsible consumption of ice cream…is seductive.

It’s unclear right now what will happen.  The very real risk on our end is no matter how the Iranian political dispute is resolved, this incident will become grist for a future ill-conceived war.  The same groups rending their garments over the murder of Neda will be calling for the bombing of her relatives.

So, I think the intellectually and morally responsible thing to do is to hope quietly and read voraciously.

You weren’t excluded. You lost.

There’s a newly prominent argument on the right that holds that if only we overturned Roe, happy Americans free of insidious judicial activism would ensure that women had reasonable access to abortion, like in Europe.  Since this isn’t the case, the poor anti-abortion Americans, barred from the political process, have no choice but to murder doctors (though everyone condemns it, tsk tsk tsk.)  Scott Lemieux has an excellent takedown that everyone should read, as does hilzoy.  I have but two things to add:

1) It is intellectually dishonest to pretend that anti-abortion groups and pro-choice groups are on the same page, and merely disagree over the  method of implementation, legislative or judicial.  There are states with trigger laws.  This is not a proposal being offered as a compromise, even were it not offered at gunpoint.

2) Once again, I point out that there have been several abortion-related cases since Roe, notably Planned Parenthood vs. Casey.   (And to get rid of the underlying problem you’d probably have to go back to Griswold.)  Many, many marginal restrictions are permitted, as are some major regulations.  To take the claim seriously that anti-abortion activists have been excluded from the political process and therefore must resort to terrorism, you have to ignore in the past 36 years since Roe and the seventeen since Casey, not only have there been a few Republican administrations and Republican-controlled Congresses, but Court appointments, too.  The ban on intact D&E was upheld in 2007, thanks to two conservative court appointments made in the 2000s.  What’s happened in the past year and a half that has disenfranchised these poor souls?

I think the onus should be on anti-abortion advocates to lay what they want, specifically, in detail, to ban or to permit, that they can’t accomplish now.  What is it?  No rosy talk of Europe, which contains all the things you want to…emulate.*  What is it that you want that you haven’t been able to get?  Why do you want it?  Specifics. Around 91% of all abortions are already in the first trimester.  What is it about remaining 9% that bothers you?  

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*I can imagine many ways that women’s reproductive freedom could be sufficiently protected even if abortion was outlawed after the first trimester.   But I see that as somewhat beside the point.  We’re not starting the U.S. from scratch, and any reversal of abortion rights would occur in our current context.  Likewise, I know of many nations that do not have a Constitution with anything like our Bill of Rights that supports freedom of speech, but that wouldn’t mean I’d be sanguine if Obama suddenly headed up a campaign to get rid of the first Amendment.

Ave Caesar, rescripturi te salutant!

I do not know whether Fronto should be known as the first nitpicker of language, but as tutor to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, he has a good case for the most tenacious (p.129):

To my lord.

Have pity on me, and remove one word from your speech;  I entreat you never to use the word dictio (utterance) when you mean oration.

Farewell, my lord, my immortal glory.  Please give my greetings to your lady mother.

The moral of the story:  one can never escape one’s teachers.  I’m sure Fronto had a red pen.  Stylus.  Thingy.

Unless, perhaps one is Emperor.

To my master.

I shall tomorrow offer my defence of that word, if you remind me.

What’s the Latin for “pwned”?

Four months, three weeks, and two days of poor arguments.

I have little to say on the murder of Dr. Tiller than hasn’t been covered adequately elsewhere (e.g.).  But two persistent points have been getting on my nerves regarding late-term abortion in which Dr. Tiller had specialized.   So let’s have some data.

Demons vs. definitions.

(After the Sullivanche of the past two days, I now do my best to drive away the traffic armed only with the PSR.  Part 1 of 2.)

The American Association of Philosophy Teachers recently sent around an e-mail inviting papers on how to teach early modern philosophy and suggested the following question:

Can one include Spinoza’s “Ethics” without creating the impression that his “Ethics” is mere metaphysics?

The AAPT wants experienced professors of many years to present so that younger professors may learn.  That rules me out from presenting,  but I still have an answer to that question, and, hmm, is this a blog I see before me?

The short answer:  Yes, but it takes a little bit of work.  Today I’ll describe the problem; later (probably next Monday) I’ll give my steps towards a solution.

i am… [utterly baffled]

Newest mental toy:

1. Go to Google.
2. Type in the beginning of a common phrase (e.g., “how do I..”, “where are…”, “is barack…”)
3. Look at the drop-down list of suggested searches.
4. If appropriate, laugh riotously.
5. e.g.,

..and I'm reasonably sure Google's suggestions are based on the frequency of the search terms being used...

(Also interesting, but less amusing, the number of times the suggestion for $foo is “…pregnant.”)

Post your finds in comments!

With all the rights and responsibilities thereto.

As I am not a scholar of the law, I do not have much to add to the conversation concerning Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court.  Kevin Drum is almost assuredly correct about the end result following the mandatory political theater; Kieran Healy provides us with the program notes.

So in lieu of analysis, I have for you a mental toy inspired in part by the end of the spring semester and joyful graduation ceremonies everywhere and the rise once again, dissected here, of the zombie affirmative action meme.  (It says “GRAAADESSSS! GRAAAAADES!”)

Imagine you’re a political pundit.   Your little girl has just graduated from Yale Law School, where she distinguished herself at the Yale Law Journal.  Four years earlier you had wept with joy as your little girl, first in her family to go to college, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton.  You feel as if you would burst with pride at all she has accomplished.  You wish your father had lived to see this day….

…and as you hug her, you whisper in her ear your respica te, hominem te memento, that really, Princeton is nothing, Yale is nothing, and she’s must be an affirmative action student who never really accomplished anything at all.  You haven’t bragged to your friends.  You haven’t mentioned it.  Why would you?

What’s been amusing me in the past few days is the contrast between the hypothetical parent who would be thrilled to tears to have a child with half of those accomplishments, the hypothetical response of the friends and community of those parents, and the rush to paint Sotomayor as someone who isn’t very bright, rather common really, a dime a dozen, part of the new detestable affirmative action policy for the Supreme Court. Whatever the reasons to oppose Sotomayor legitimately, one of them is not that she isn’t qualified.

I swear you could get pundits to declare that salt is sweet if they thought there was an advantage in it.

DOOOOOOM.

One may question the pedagogical value of final exams, especially when one is in the midst of grading them, but the plain truth is that in-class exams afford a somewhat unique opportunity for feverishly scrawled… artwork (reproduced via Paint here):

The problem of induction, illustrated.

Happy grading, everyone.

At least it wasn’t hummus.

Our loyal readers who also surf political blogs have probably noticed the flap over Dijongate, wherein reality descends madly into satire as the blogsphere ponders the political meaning of Obama’s decision to order Dijon mustard on a hamburger (and whether the media hushed it up to make him seem like a regular Joe!)  Anxious to do our part, we at EoTAW have discovered the real reason Obama ordered spicy Dijon rather than regular yellow mustard:

EXEUNT ALL. Including HERO AGENT.

I haven’t posted at all regarding the torture memos because I’ve been far too angry to write much more than expletives or “seriously?”  But here is something poorly reasoned from the chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit*: that we need to be able to torture because one day, we might catch Osama, he might tell us that he knows where all of the bombs are, and Obama won’t let us beat him up in order to save American lives….

A response,one that contains no ventings of spleens, after the jump.

Philosophical relevance, irrelevantly.

Leiter asks, considering this Kristof piece:

Why do members of the educated public think that it is an objection to philosophical inquiry that it is unintelligible to them (or that it does not have immediate application to the quality of life of pigs, say), whereas no one would think to put such objections against esoteric work in the natural sciences?  Are other humanities subjected to this same expectation of “practical relevance and intelligibility”?

From discussions with other colleagues in the humanities, they are subject to the same expectation, one as old as the hills, or at least the Gorgias: how is that going to make money and benefit society?   (I think philosophers get more questions about pot.) Yet I think there’s an explanation specific to philosophy in the answer to the first question.

She must choose to write the essays in this sort of style, after all.

The excellent Hilzoy has a post on why women stay with their abusers that is worth everyone’s time.  What she doesn’t do is give a direct response to Linda Hirshman*, who is here making a claim in her usual manner: say something indefensible wrapped up in a misty old-school feminism that is just near enough to a defensible position to give plausible cover.**  Here the claim is that unlike those other feminists who say “don’t ask an abused woman why she didn’t leave”, Hirshman knows that one must ask why she didn’t choose to leave, in order to respect women’s agency.

Sounds sensible, until you understand exactly what she means.  From the post describing the book:

The somewhat fictionalized memoir (Steiner says she changed some identifying details and combined some characters) follows earlier essays in which she chronicled her anorexia and financial dependence. In this latest episode of bad choices, her future husband gave her clear warning.

It seems that anorexia is being counted as a bad choice.   This is a particularly telling turn of phrase, and one that should strike us as odd; someone who said “I think we need to ask that anorexic girl right there why she just doesn’t eat, to respect her agency” or “This is just her choice not to eat” would at best be someone who profoundly misunderstood anorexia nervosa, at worst someone who is callously cruel.

And a similar problem arises for Hirshman’s position.  She’s not the first to consider this question (not at all), so she can’t be taken as calling for study of a neglected phenomenon, and the research has been done has said that it’s hard for someone to leave an abusive relationship because of any number of psychological and cultural factors.  And — it doesn’t require a full-blown battered woman syndrome.  The abuser is nice and completely normal the rest of the time.  The abuse happened in the middle of a nasty fight; he must have been pushed to it.  The abuser is nice and completely normal to everyone else.  He might actually need help.  It’s hard to admit to oneself that one is that woman.  (And that’s leaving aside financial or other reasons, like past abuse.)

And in both anorexia and abuse, there’s a sense in which the solution is simple, and in which the solution isn’t.  Start eating again! Leave the abuser!  But one would have to be exceedingly poorly informed or unbearably smug to think that that’s all that has to happen.

*Because Hilzoy is always even-tempered.

**I suppose the charitable explanation is that she doesn’t know how to manipulate tone.  But there’s a clear pattern, whether she’s pointing out that the abused woman’s husband left her (so she didn’t even leave), or calling upper-class stay-at-home-moms low-caste.

Dingledingledingledingle.

Tone matrix. (Sound; NSFW.)

This is your brain on caffeine.

I remember as a teenager feeling completely betrayed when I realized that the Just Say No Just-So Story that everyone who tried pot ended up friendless and alone and with Bs on their homework was false!  Some even went to Harvard! The war on drugs would clearly be the dumbest policy we’d come up as a society with if only it didn’t have so much competition.

That said, I don’t think much of this kind of anecdote argument.  Not that I don’t agree with the conclusions.  But I suspect that the productivity of Wilkinson and others like him has less to do with the fact that pot isn’t dangerous and more to do with the fact that if one is well-educated and well-off one has to really screw up before anything affects one’s expected life outcomes.  They have a safety net made of money.   Upper middle class kids enjoy heroin and cocaine, too, but I wouldn’t take their general success as a reason to legalize either of those.  Even if the kids go to Harvard!

Still, if I imagine a world where coffee, alcohol, and marijuana had been discovered and analyzed chemically yesterday, I have a hard time imagining that anyone in that world would be all that worried about marijuana.

Also, it would make grades more… final, if profs were packin’.

Dear Texas Legislature,

I am given to understand that you are considering making it legal for students over the age of 21 to carry concealed weapons on campus.   The thought is that doing so would prevent mass murders like the one that happened at Virginia Tech.

It’s a pleasant daydream for these Walther Mittys.  One can imagine any number of ways, all out of bad action movies.  The tall young professor with the twinkling blue eyes, his class interrupted by a gunman, athletically rolls under the desk, brings up his weapon, and fires two shots into the torso of the assailant… the alternachick literature prof who had been a pacifist until she learned the error of her ways in Guatemala, pulls her weapon from her organic hemp rucksack, and wounds the gunman in the leg…. the elderly don with the tweed blazer and bowtie, calmly firing his antique revolver, ejaculating “You shall not interrupt my lecture on Charlemagne, you cur!”

(”It says, ‘Puppies bark for it’, on the box.”)

Watching Watchmen.

Hurm. I feel as though I’m stepping on SEK’s subject here.   But I saw Watchmen last night, and.. it left me rather unaffected.  This came as something of a surprise to me, as I am usually fairly easy to satisfy when it comes to action films.  Flip a truck, jump Galactica into atmosphere, fight Agent Smith and say “there is no spoon”, double-bladed lightsaber, fly around in a cheesy red suit, and I’m usually on board with thinking it was an enjoyable popcorn flick.  Watchmen didn’t grab me, and after the jump I will explain why with spoilers.

Why, oh, why can’t we….shoot the press corps?

Pity the poor debt collector, who must needs collect on the debt of one who has departed this vale of tears with no estate to settle his earthly obligation.  Observe her stress, her yoga mat.   Ponder the careful control of her emotions and voice, the sympathy with which she calls the family of the deceased.  How hard she works to convince them that this is the final rose to lay upon the grave….

…. ignore the fact that one of the risks of being a credit card company is that your customers may die without the assets to repay you, and the business has insurance  to protect them against such eventualities.  Ignore the fact that paying the debt is not merely a nice gesture, but transfers responsibility for the debt to a family that may be struggling.  Ignore the fact that the collectors are not required to state that family of the deceased is under no obligation to pay debts.

Because reportering is hard.

Maybe the inmates are in charge of the asylum.

This keeps getting better and better.

First, the American Philosophical Association moves its Central Division meeting from April to February.  The Central often serves as a location for interviews for visiting appointments for the following fall, which have usually been advertised in the February “Jobs for Philosophers”, an advertising service run (I use the term loosely) by the APA.

Dates of Central Division Meeting: Feb 18-21.

Dates of publication of the JFP:  Feb. 20.*

FAIL.

But everyone’s known about this for weeks!  What’s new from the recently published JFP?

This gem of an ad:

FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY – FAU, BOCA RATON, FL. ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, COUNSELING CENTER, Florida Atlantic University. The Assistant Director provides psychological services for Florida Atlantic University students and provides administrative and supervisory leadership of the Counseling Center and its staff during periods of the Director’s absence. In addition, the Counseling Center is seeking a clinical psychologist to coordinate the substance abuse program, supervise the main substance abuse treatment counselor and provide some assessment and treatment services.[...]

Yes, that’s right.  An ad for a clinical psychologist.

Presumably, the HR department at FAU was told to place an ad in the APA and picked the wrong P.

I am not certain why our governing organization didn’t notice.

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*Leading to ads that end like this: … “Review of applications will begin February 13, 2009. Receipt at XXXX no later than March 7, 2009 to be considered for an interview at the Central APA. posted 2/20/09.”

Fish Filet.

In the comments to this post on last week’s Fish column, Jesse asks:

I read Fish often, but only from an uninformed perspective. I’m not an academic, so reading his pieces (and moreso the comments they elicit) provides a rare point of access into discussions on topics that otherwise I don’t get to discuss, quite frankly. But the comments reflect a consensus of Fish-crit. Can anyone offer a few bullet point criticisms of Fish or his most recurrent views? Is it mostly his pathos, or his actual positions? I may be begging “how” to read Fish, but only in the sense of a “how” among other “how’s”. Thanks!

Happy to oblige.   And since Fish has yet another poorly-argued barrel of drivel up today, timely, too!

The shortest way to express my annoyance with Fish is to say simply that he doesn’t answer Jesse’s fundamental question: what’s the academy like?   He has a rare opportunity and platform to explain the academy to laypeople, and he does it poorly.   The way I am going to describe this today: Fish consistently conflates tenure, academic freedom, and institutional culture.

One out of two and heal the wound of human nature.

What better way to commemorate Valentine’s Day (um…again) by reading Plato’s dialogue concerning erotic love, Symposium? As an undergraduate in my very first philosophy class, I read the Symposium and the professor explained that not only did “symposium” mean something like “drinking party”, but that he had discovered in graduate school that the progression of speeches in praise of Love made more sense if accompanied by a bottle of wine or several.

Socrates and his interlocutors are celebrating the poet Agathon’s first victorious production with plans to get very drunk.   Hindering these plans are the fact that half the crowd is quite hungover, and so they decide instead to give speeches in praise of love.

The brilliance of this dialogue, to me, is in the wonderful characterization of all of the party guests.  Phaedrus, young and with an affect I’d describe as ‘airheaded’, begins with a rather simplistic praise of Love, as it makes everyone noble and brave and self-sacrificing and kind and virtuous!   (Ponycorns!) Older Pausanius distinguishes between common vulgar love and Heavenly Love.  The first is about sex; the second is about responsible sex where a man cares for his youthful intelligent beloved, does not take advantage of him, acts honorably, and acceptance of this Love is the sign of an enlightened society.

It is surely notable that Pausanius is Agathon’s lover.   (Come on, baby, I’m not like those other men…)

The physician Eryximachus delivers a very dry lecture that treats Love medically.  Hot, and cold, wet and dry.    Agathon composes a beautiful prose peroration on the spot.  And Socrates tells of what he learned of the form of Beauty from a wiser older woman, Mrs. Robinson, Diotima.    Then Alcibiades stumbles in drunk and hits on Socrates.

But on Valentine’s Day, I present to you the jewel (as far as I’m concerned) of the dialogue, Aristophanes’ speech, part just-so story, part a story of bumbling gods.  (Quotes below drawn from what I affectionately call Boy’s Own Monster Book of Plato, e.g., the giant Cooper anthology suitable both for the study of Plato and as a 1800 paged bludgeoning weapon.)

How were things back in the day, Aristophanes?