In my intro class I’m teaching Garrett Hardin’s famous 1974 article, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” I hadn’t appreciated quite how horrible it is. It’s not (just) that I disagree with his conclusions – I teach material I disagree with all the time. It’s the incredibly weak arguments and the snide innuendos.
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Jon Mandle
I’m back from my trip to Pasadena for the mini-conference on “Global Justice.” (It was great.) My title, however, refers not to philosophy but to the L.A. Philharmonic. I’ll post something about the conference if I find the time and can think of anything interesting to write, but I want to say something about my visit to the new Frank Gehry-designed Disney Theater.
As you no doubt know, on Friday, Feb.27, the mayor of the village of New Paltz, New York, conducted marriage ceremonies for 21 gay couples in front of a cheering crowd. (Click here and then click again to enlarge the glorious picture.) He was quoted as saying, “Absolutely, I’ll be doing this again.” (For more on the mayor, look here – tip to Kevin Drum.)
So, today (Saturday, Feb.28), my wife and I packed up our 3-1/2 year old to drive the hour south, hoping to be part of the celebration. We were going to have our daughter pass out flowers. Alas, the village offices were quiet. Still, we had a pleasant day – the town seemed to be buzzing, and we overheard bits of several conversations along the lines of: “Wasn’t it great how everybody turned out together in support.”
The legality of the marriages is not obvious – the New York State Consolidated Laws on Domestic Relations are surprisingly unclear on the issue of gender. I found what I would consider to be an implicit assumption that marriages are between a man and a woman in several places, such as article 4, section 50: “Property, real or personal … owned by a woman at the time of her marriage … shall not be subject to her husband’s control or disposal nor liable for his debts.” I’m no lawyer, but this hardly seems definitive.
Stonewall was over 30 years ago. I don’t know how these particular cases will eventually be decided, but here’s hoping that in 30 more years, we’ll look back at these past few weeks as another turning point.
Harvey Mansfield, class of 1953 and Professor of Government at Harvard, reflects [pdf – scroll down] on changes to sexual relations since the time he was an undergraduate. He finds
Much improvement since my day. Undergraduate men and women see one another every day; they study together and eat together. Everyone now gets to meet many more people of the opposite sex. In these meetings there is less pressure, less artificiality. You can be yourself. I remember weekend dates brought into the dining hall to stand in line for dinner, running a gauntlet of leering envy or contempt.
But on the other hand: “What is not so good is the loss of romance. Less formality means less romance – less courting, less tension, less excitement…. There is more consummation and less yearning.”
I rather doubt this is right, but at least I think I understand his point. Soon he loses me, however:
Men are less spirited than they were in my day, when we lived in relative isolation from women. Men today are always in the presence of women, hence always in fear of making fools of themselves before women. College men have become premature husbands.
So much for the ability to “be yourself” of the previous paragraph – now men are “always in fear of making fools of themselves”. But “less spirited”? “premature husbands”? I really have no idea what he is trying to get at. But he needs something to balance the manifest increase in social justice of allowing women to control their own sexuality.
In his final sentence, he gets to his point, as the loss of “spirit” is transformed into the loss of “love” and “happiness”:
Altogether, in comparison with the time of my youth, I think I see more equality now and less love and spirit; or more justice and less happiness.
Somehow, I don’t think he has in mind the women “brought in” to run “the gauntlet of leering envy or contempt.” How spirited and romantic it all must have been!
Chris reminded us that the other day was the 200-year anniversary of Kant’s death. I didn’t get this done in time, but here is a brief overview of Kant’s ethics – what I, at least, think is valuable and distinctive about his approach. I don’t claim that my account is particularly original, although do I think it differs from the way Kant is usually presented. Nor do I say that there are no good objections to his view, but at least I hope to show that it isn’t as mysterious as it sometimes appears. Here goes….
The New York Times reports that “The Justice Department is demanding that at least six hospitals … turn over hundreds of patient medical records on certain abortions performed there.” This is necessary, they claim, in order to defend the new prohibition on “partial birth” abortions. This is bad enough, since as David Seldin, a spokesman for Naral Pro-Choice America, puts it: “This notion of John Ashcroft poring over medical records in a fairly unprecedented type of fishing expedition is exactly the type of privacy invasion that worries people.”
But the real news comes in paragraph 15, where we learn that the Justice Department argued that in light of “modern medical practice” and the growth of third party insurers, “individuals no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential.”
Thanks to Calpundit for linking to this Reuters interview with David Kay.
Q: What happened to the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that everyone expected to be there?
A: “I don’t think they existed.
“I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War and those were a combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them. I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production, and that’s what we’re really talking about, is large stockpiles, not the small. Large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the period after ’95.”
…
Q: You came away from the hunt that you have done believing that they did not have any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the country?
A: “That is correct.”
…
Q: Do you think they destroyed it?
A: “No, I don’t think they existed.”
The interviewer, it seems, had some difficulty believing that Kay was being so straight, and wanted him to say these words twice.
Here’s the lead of a Washington Post story by Guy Gugliotta and Eric Pianin on Bush’s “Climate Leaders” program to recruit companies to voluntarily reduce greenhouse emissions –
Two years after President Bush declared he could combat global warming without mandatory controls, the administration has launched a broad array of initiatives and research, yet it has had little success in recruiting companies to voluntarily curb their greenhouse gas emissions, according to official documents, reports and interviews.
Not a big deal, you say, that someone hacked their way into a corporate network? According to the CEO, the intruder took advantage of a network security hole “that we were a patch behind on.” Happens all the time, except that this company is VoteHere, which is “developing encryption-based software for secure electronic voting.” I admit I’d feel a little better if they were one patch ahead. Yes, encrypted voting results were stored on the network, but according to the CEO, “there is no evidence that any election was compromised.” Most reassuringly of all, it turns out that the system had only been tested on some “British local elections and nongovernmental tallies such as the Country Music Awards.”
Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom have a new book called No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. I haven’t read it, but their article in the Boston Globe summarizes their arguments. Here’s their concern:
On the first try, 82 percent of white 10th-graders passed [the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System – MCAS], and the figure for Asians was almost as high (77 percent). But the success rate for Hispanics was 42 percent and for blacks 47 percent. Across the nation, the glaring racial gap is between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other.
This gap is an American tragedy and a national emergency for which there are no good excuses. It is the main source of ongoing racial inequality, and racial inequality is America’s great unfinished business, the wound that remains unhealed. Our failure to provide first-class education for black and Hispanic students is both an educational catastrophe and the central civil rights issue of our time.
In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes:
Unfortunately, there are few Democrats to press my worries on the administration. Most Democrats either opposed the war (a perfectly legitimate position) or supported it and are now trying to disown it. That means the only serious opposition can come from Republicans…
I’ve been puzzling over how a “perfectly legitimate” opposition to the war is not a “serious” opposition. The best I can do is this: he didn’t oppose the war; he’s not now trying to disown it; but he has some worries he wants someone to press on the administration. Anything but Friedman’s own position, although perhaps legitimate, just isn’t serious.
Andrew O’Hagan has an article in The New York Review of Books about Marshall Mathers (aka Eminem). He quotes extensively, unflinchingly from some of his more notorious lyrics, and points out that some people “might even imagine they have no place in The New York Review of Books.” They do, and his comments make an interesting read.
The winners of the 2003 Ig Nobel Prizes were announced a few days ago. They are brought to you by the fine folks at the Annals of Improbable Research and they honor people whose achievements “cannot or should not be reproduced.” This year’s winners include: the inventors (discoverers?) of Murphy’s Law; the authors of a paper entitled “An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces”; the authors of a paper entitled
“Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans”; and the biologist who documented “the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck” (complete with link to photos!). You can watch the webcast of the awards ceremony here.
A blog calling itself “the unofficial Bush-Cheney campaign blog” has followed much of the right-wing media (like here and here) in reporting some comments Bruce Springsteen recently made at a concert in Washington. Under the heading “More Signs the Left Is Just Losing It” is the following: “At his Fed-Ex Field concert last weekend, Bruce Springsteen said Bush “ought to be impeached and started chanting, ‘Impeach, impeach.’ But the call was not picked up by the multitude, some of whom even began to boo.”
The obvious comeback is: they weren’t saying “boo” they were saying “Bruce”.
But whatever they were saying (most reports didn’t hear anything), and whether or not the comments reflected Bruce’s true views, they were obviously a joke. He was laughing when he said it!
For over two decades, Bruce has introduced his sax player Clarence Clemons as (among other things) “the next President of the United States”. He even did this at a concert in 1999, with Al Gore in the audience. I wasn’t in Washington, but here’s a report of Bruce’s introduction of Clarence (taken from a usenet group):
Bruce said, “It’s time, it’s time to impeach the president and get someone in there who knows what the f*ck they’re doing! – Clarence ‘Big Man’ Clemons!” After the applause, Bruce continued joking, “impeach him! Throw him out! Dick Cheney too!” as Clarence and Bruce were making the baseball ‘you’re out!’ hand gestures.
Often, Bruce has serious points to make in concert. For example, when introducing “Born in the U.S.A.” over the past year, he often used a variation of this line, which he said on March 6, 2003: “I wrote this song back in the early 80s about the Vietnam War. I hope I don’t have to write it again. I’m gonna send it out tonight as a prayer for peace, for the safety of our sons and daughters and the innocent Iraqi civilians.” That was no joke.
And they say liberals have no sense of humor.
Forbes magazine has published their list of the 400 richest people in America. Together, their net worth is up 10% from last year, to $995 billion. The accompanying article begins: “Up from the ashes. After two years of declining values, the rich finally got richer.”
Finally.