by Chris Bertram on December 10, 2003
The London Times now syndicates Randy Cohen’s The Ethicist columns from the NYT Magazine. I was appalled to read “today’s muddled effort”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-7-925338,00.html :
bq. IN MY CAR, the back seats by the doors have lap belts and shoulder harnesses, but the middle seat has only a lap belt. My two children, aged three and seven, ride in the car, and occasionally we pick up another child. Ethically, who should sit in the middle, less safe, seat — one of my children or the friend?
bq. You should put your own kids in the shoulder belts, if their size and the law allow (and, if they’re very young, in child safety seats in the back). While all children have a claim on your compassion and concern, your primary responsibility is to your own: particular relationships entail particular ethical obligations.
I confess that I never thought of anything beyond which kid would fit best and separating the ones most likely to fight if seated adjacently to one another myself. But Cohen’s reasoning here is entirely wrongheaded. Sure, there are times when it is right to put your own children first (such as reading bedtime stories), but when you are _in loco parentis_ for other people’s the duty is, if anything, when it comes to avoiding real harms, to take special care of theirs. And beyond that, duties of justice quite generally don’t permit us to favour those close to us over strangers (there isn’t a stronger duty to repay a debt to a close relation than to a distant one or to an non-relative).
by Chris Bertram on December 10, 2003
Norman Geras tells me that he has finally given up on blogger and moved his blog to typepad “here”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/ . Please adjust your links.
by Henry Farrell on December 10, 2003
to “Russell Arben Fox”:http://philosophenweg.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_philosophenweg_archive.html#107066373986271483 , who has a new daughter.
by Henry Farrell on December 10, 2003
In “defending”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000563.html#000563 Noam Chomsky from his detractors, Brian Leiter makes a couple of rather extraordinary claims.
bq. [D]o try to remember that Chomsky is a man of genuine intellectual accomplishment, having invented a real scholarly discipline in its modern form, and who participates at the highest level in theoretical debates in cognate fields. This might, at least, create a presumption that when he writes about subjects that make only modest intellectual demands–like foreign relations or politics–that he is unlikely to make gross mistakes, and that he may, in fact, have legitimate reasons for saying what he does.
As I read Leiter, he’s claiming that politics and foreign relations are trivia – they present no serious problems for someone like Chomsky, who has a really first rate intellect. Nor even for someone with a decent undergraduate education in a serious subject; Leiter has already “informed”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000517.html us that “a BA in philosophy apparently puts you well ahead of a PhD in political science.”
Leiter isn’t noted for his belief in civil discourse, and I’ve no desire to start a flame-war. Nor do I want to tip-toe delicately around the fact that he’s talking complete smack. In his posts, Leiter gives us the (perhaps inadvertent) impression that there’s no problem in politics so vexing that a crack squad of linguists and philosophers couldn’t sort it out. Even if this isn’t what he’s trying to say, his claim that politics presents only modest intellectual demands is stuff and nonsense. Politics is complicated and messy; there aren’t any easy answers, and as a consequence it is an intellectually demanding subject matter. Perhaps _too_ demanding; I’m the first to admit that scholars of politics haven’t provided good answers to most of the important questions. But I’m profoundly unconvinced that philosophers of Leiter’s particular bent are likely to do any better. Or linguists for that matter; Chomsky’s unwillingness to grapple with the complexities of politics is perhaps the reason why he’s a first rate linguistic theorist, a second rate polemicist, and a fifth rate political scientist. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and on the evidence to date, there ain’t much eating there.
Update: Looks like Leiter’s post has received a “lot”:http://strangedoctrines.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_strangedoctrines_archive.html#107093336802086802 of “attention”:http://www.enbanc.org/archives/000379.html in the “blogosphere”:http://www.enbanc.org/archives/000379.html. Pejman Yousefzadeh seems to “suggest”:http://www.pejmanesque.com/archives/005187.html that “he too was a member”:http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?Dict=&define=apostasy&search.x=0&search.y=0&search=Search of the Chomsky cult once upon a time. Whoda thunk it.
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by Micah on December 9, 2003
So I’m sitting in the library today when the shelves around me start to shake. And I’m thinking to myself: death by books? There must be better ways to go. “4.5”:http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/cus/ on the Richter scale. Not bad for “Virginia”:http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/cus/STORE/Xcdbf_03/ciim_display.html.
bq. UPDATE: the “Roanoke Times”:http://www.roanoke.com/roatimes/news/story159584.html reports that this “was the strongest earthquake in central Virginia since 1875 . . . Central Virginia’s strongest earthquake in the past century took place in August 1984 and was centered near Charlottesville . . . It was a magnitude 4.1.”
by Kieran Healy on December 9, 2003
According to William Saletan, Al Gore’s influence over people’s hearts and minds is so strong that his endorsement of Howard Dean threatens to undermine the entire democratic process. Because Gore has asked that Democrats fall in behind Dean, victory is assured — at the cost of voters’ rights to express themselves at the polls.
With that sort of power at his command, it’s a pity that Gore didn’t think to endorse himself during the 2000 election campaign. It would have saved him a lot of trouble.
by Ted on December 9, 2003
What does John Lott have to do to get fired from the American Enterprise Institute?
UPDATE: Just a thought- in an unimportant way, Internet sock puppetry is pretty self-defeating. If I see a commentor defending him on a thread, there’s a big part of me that will wonder, “Is that him?”
UPDATE II: Sock puppetry: 1000 flowers bloom…
Without consulting my esteemed colleague, Doctor Krauthammer, I’m unable to identify the syndrome which best describes the kind of nut who would create a fake website and then mock the fictitious author of that website and the presidential candidate supported by the make-believe author.
by Ted on December 9, 2003
Everyone knows that NBC’s Today Show is liberally biased. Which is why it’s interesting that in their segment on the manslaughter conviction of Rep. Bill Janklow, they didn’t use the word “Republican.”
Uggabugga has the audio file. I don’t think that I’ve ever watched the Today show, and I certainly wouldn’t try to use this as evidence of conservative bias. I used to have frequent arguments about the impossibility of “proving” media bias by cherry-picking examples from the hundreds of hours and thousands of pages of media produced every day. But given the intellectual integrity of the most prominent right-leaning media watchdogs, all I can say is: Live by the anecdote, die by the anecdote.
by Kieran Healy on December 9, 2003
Tyler Cowen thinks that Islam might be bad for economic growth. The relationship between religious beliefs and practices, on the one, hand and economic prosperity, on the other, is a very tricky question. It’s kept comparative sociologists busy for more than a century. Here’s one of the reasons why it’s tricky, pithily expressed.
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by Brian on December 9, 2003
by Kieran Healy on December 9, 2003
At some point in the last 24 hours or so, someone left the ten thousandth comment to have been posted in the discussion threads on Crooked Timber. We don’t keep direct links to individual comments so I don’t know who it was. But thanks to all our readers from everyone here at CT. Cheers.
by Kieran Healy on December 9, 2003
Mark Kleiman has a nomination, from ancient Greece, for “the saddest poem ever written.” There are likely a lot of contenders for this title, and even a quick survey would reveal the emotion’s many different varieties (and do wonders for our readership), so it’s probably not the right thing to start a ranking. In any event, Mark’s post caught my eye because I happened to read the following lines just yesterday evening:
bq. Andromache led the lamentation of the women, while she held in her hands the head of Hector, her great warrior: “Husband, you are gone so young from life, and leave me in your home a widow. Our child is still but a little fellow, child of ill-fated parents, you and me. How can he grow up to manhood? Before that, the city shall be overthrown. For you are gone, you who kept watch over it, and kept safe its wives and their little ones …
bq. “And you have left woe unutterable and mourning to your parents, Hector; but in my heart above all others bitter anguish shall abide. Your hands were not stretched out to me as you lay dying. You spoke to me no living word that I might have pondered as my tears fell night and day.”
That’s from an old translation by S.E. Winbolt, which doesn’t seem to be available online. The Samuel Butler translation is freely available, though.
by Brian on December 9, 2003
From the National Post.
[A]n American from San Diego is quoted saying: “What bugs me about Canadians, if I may, is that they wear that damn patch on their bags, the Canadian flag patch. That way, they differentiate themselves from us.”
by Henry Farrell on December 9, 2003
There was an “article”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41921-2003Dec6.html in the Post on Sunday that got surprisingly little attention; it talked about documentary evidence suggesting that small rockets had been modified to carry warheads with radioactive material – and had then disappeared. These rockets had last been spotted in the trans-Dniestrian Republic, a semi-independent corner of Moldova which has developed a nasty specialty in black market and grey market arms deals. As the Post describes it
bq. Transdniester is regarded by experts as a prime shopping ground for outlaw groups looking for weapons of every type. It is the embodiment of the gray zone, where failed states, porous borders and weak law enforcement allow the buying and selling of instruments of terror.
How did this unpleasant little anomaly of a statelet come into being, and why does it persist? As the Post tells the story, it comes down more or less to Russian imperialism; the Russians have 2,800 troops, which they have refused to withdraw, despite repeated requests from the Moldovan government and the international community. Whenever the Moldovans have tried to reassert control over the republic (which lies within their nominal borders), the Russians have made it clear that they’ll defend
by Brian on December 9, 2003
David Brooks, who lives in Washington, DC (and has done so for decades I’d guess), attacks Howard Dean, who has lived and worked in Vermont for decades, for describing himself as ‘rural’. Brooks, all the while, is happy to apply that term to himself (perhaps sarcastically). I think Brooks’s view (as far as one can ever read a coherent view into David Brooks) is that where one lived at age 7 is the sole determiner of the appropriateness of this kind of geographic classification. That’s a view, I guess, but not a very plausible one. I don’t have any particular fondness for Dean, but ‘attacks’ like this only make him look good.
(UPDATE: I see Josh Marshall had this one 30 minutes before I did – and with actual data to back up his claims. I should not try and compete with real journalists.)