I’ve been selected to serve on a federal grand jury. It meets every other Wednesday for an entire year. I thought it would make for some interesting blogging, until we got to the part about swearing to keep the proceedings secret. Federal prosecutors bring cases to the 23 of us, and we decide whether to issue indictments. Basically, they can’t prosecute any serious crime without our saying so (and most federal crimes count as serious). The impression I get is that they will be mostly drug distribution cases (and related), immigration cases, and the occasional white-collar crime. Unfortunately, as I say, I won’t be able to tell you whether this impression turns out to be right. Right now it seems like it will be interesting – especially since we have so much power, including the ability to question witnesses ourselves – but I have the feeling come next summer, I’m going to be counting down the scheduled meetings.
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Jon Mandle
In my neighborhood, power was out for less than an hour. A few blocks away, it didn’t go out at all. In parts of New York City, it’s still not back. This morning, New York governor George Pataki said: “If you have power now, in addition to looking out for your neighbors, making sure everyone is OK, conserve energy. Don’t turn on the dishwasher, don’t use the air conditioner unless it’s absolutely essential.”
Now I’m all in favor of conserving energy, and pitching in to do one’s share is certainly a good thing, especially during a crisis. But I can’t help feeling some resentment, here. After all, we’ve decided to rely on market mechanisms and profit-making corporations to supply electricity. I’m not necessarily opposed to deregulation – frankly, I don’t know enough to say either way. But once that decision has been made, I do resent being told that my civic duty requires certain market behavior. After all, in this case, it’s the power companies that are not living up to their end of the bargain, not the consumers. It’s not that they are now making a windfall profit from the blackout – they’ve already done that by sticking with an “old and antiquated” infrastructure and not investing in the necessary upgrades that would have prevented this in the first place.
Instead of admonishing consumers to modify their behavior, why not force the power companies to adopt a market-based solution? When the power companies are unable to meet demand, force them to offer consumers an incentive to conserve – say, a voucher for each kilowatt hour they use below their average that can be redeemed for free power when the crisis is over. Otherwise, appeals to one’s civic duty smack of being just another marketing ploy.
The Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, subscription required) asked Stanley Hauerwas and two other people to comment on the “Brights“. Hauerwas was withering:
Quite frankly, I find the kinds of things that Dennett is saying to be remarkably stupid for such a smart man. He says that what we [sic] brights represent is the denial of all supernatural explanations — well, when did he get the idea that Christianity and Judaism are about supernaturalism? That has very little to do with classical Christian convictions… The brights just don’t know dip about classical Christian theology…. It never occurs to them that we are looking at a 2,000-year-old tradition, and it takes a hell of a lot of study to even begin to think you know what you’re talking about, and yet they think that they can sound off because they’re pretty sure it’s about supernaturalism. Give me a break.
That sounded somewhat reasonable to me, since I certainly don’t know dip about classical Christian theology. But I began to have my doubts when I saw the notable Christian theologian Karol Wojtyla’s solution to the European heat wave: “I exhort all to raise to the Lord fervent entreaties so that He may grant the relief of rain to the thirsty Earth.”
There has been much commentary in the blogosphere on the California recall election, but Crooked Timber has been surprisingly immune. Let me change that by making one brief note. Slate has an Explainer on the election and a link to a useful article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Maybe this is perfectly obvious to everyone, but to me, the most glaring anomaly in the election is that a scenario like this seems entirely plausible: Davis loses the recall election, 70%-30%. Arnold Schwarzenegger receives more votes than any of the other 350+ candidates with, say, 25% of the vote – see this New Republic article. Schwarzenegger becomes governor despite the fact that more people voted for Davis to remain. Of course, I seem to remember another election in which a candidate was declared the winner, despite not receiving a plurality of votes.
Like Chris, I spent the morning puzzling over Cohen’s recent article in Philosophy and Public Affairs. Although I don’t necessarily disagree with his conclusion, I don’t think the argument is strong. But I don’t want to discuss the substance of his argument – for helpful discussions, see Chris here and here, Brian here, Larry Solum here, and Matt Yglesias here. Instead, I want to argue that his stalking horse throughout the essay, John Rawls, simply does not hold the view that he criticizes. Cohen is wrong when he says that (among the several examples he mentions) “Rawls alone clearly affirms what I deny.”
I’ve been planning to write about John Rawls’s theory of international justice – what he calls “the law of peoples” – when I have a little more time. But Eric Alterman has posted a letter from “David” in Baltimore that touches on the subject, and this seems like a good excuse to say something. Here, I only want to try to clarify Rawls’s position, rather than to evaluate it.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports (subscription required) that “several Republican state legislators and incoming students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill” are upset by the book chosen for the university’s summer reading program. This is the same program for first-year and transfer students that caused controversy last year when it selected a book on Islam.
This time it’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. It was selected, says the university’s interim vice chancellor Dean L. Bresciani, with the idea that it “would be a relatively tame selection.” Alas,
bq. “I am offended because I am a Christian and she [Ms. Ehrenreich] is an atheist,” said [State Senator] Mr. Allran, who has not read the entire book but disagrees with what he has read. “I don’t like the disparaging remarks made about Jesus. If I was there, I would sue the school for religious discrimination, and, in fact, I think someone needs to.”
Just to be clear: he doesn’t like the disparaging remarks made about Jesus, but he is offended because Ehrenreich is an atheist. And exactly who is guilty of religious discrimination?
Alex Ross attended something called the “Pop Conference” in Seattle and has an interesting piece on pop music and academia in the latest issue of the New Yorker. He’s pretty funny about some of the academic jargon on display:
bq. Some of the presentations, a few too many for comfort, lapsed into the familiar contortions of modern pedagogy. Likewise, in the many pop-music books now in circulation, post-structuralist, post-Marxist, post-colonialist, and post-grammatical buzzwords crop up on page after page. There is a whole lot of problematizing, interrogating, and appropriating goin’ on…. At the Pop Conference, I made it a rule to move to a different room the minute I heard someone use the word “interrogate” in a non-detective context or cite any of the theorists of the Frankfurt School.
My sense is that academic philosophers (like me) lapse into this kind of jargon less than members of certain other disciplines, often confused with philosophy. But this may be because we don’t get out as much as others. This is one of the things I like about blogs. I’m new to the blogosphere – new to this side of it, anyway. Here’s hoping I can follow the lead of my colleagues here and combine accessibility with a bit of insight.