Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic

I’ve been following the French presidential elections at second hand; as “Philip Stevens”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/dc241e40-b261-11db-a79f-0000779e2340.html says in the _FT_, they seem to herald some interesting political changes, no matter who wins.

As one shrewd observer puts it, Mr Sarkozy is a social outsider but a political insider. Ms Royal is a social insider who has reinvented herself as a political outsider. No matter. Neither pays homage to the ancien régime. Talk to those who grace Paris’s political salons and the first thing they will say is that Mr Sarkozy is not an énarque – a graduate of the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration. The second, that he is not an intellectual. The third – by now the scorn crackles in the air – that, until recently, he has not even sought the counsel of intellectuals. … Ms Royal similarly seems an unlikely king. … The daughter of an army officer, she is an énarque. It was as a student at ENA that she met her partner, François Hollande, the Socialist party leader. Something, though, went awry. To snatch the candidacy, she scorned the party chiefs. She made herself the choice instead of public opinion – a brutal affront to the authority of the old guard as well as to the presidential ambitions of her partner.

Sarkozy in particular is fascinating. While journalists usually compare him with Margaret Thatcher, he seems to me to to have a lot more in common with Richard Nixon (I’ve recently read a draft of Rick Perlstein’s _Nixonland_, so this analogy is on my mind). Sarkozy isn’t a true believer; what marks him is less his commitment to a cause than his extraordinary ideological suppleness. He’s been quite happy to abandon his pro-US stance, and to moderate his opinions on free markets to boost his chances of winning (Nixon went through similar ideological contortions on his way to power). But where the Nixon comparison really seems apt is in the source of his appeal and the psychological factors driving him. The first is a combination of law-and-order, barely concealed appeals to racism, and capitalization on widespread and not unjustified resentment of the dominance of political elites. His anti-intellectualism isn’t a bug; it’s part of what makes him attractive to many voters. The second is that like Nixon, he wasn’t a member of aforementioned elite, nor did he have a happy upbringing, and both continue to rankle. According to an interview quoted in a 2002 _Le Monde_ article (“behind a paywall”:http://www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/acheter.cgi?offre=ARCHIVES&type_item=ART_ARCH_30J&objet_id=775337) Sarkozy claims that “what made me is the sum of my childhood humiliations.” As best as I’m aware, Sarkozy, despite his fine gift for political opportunism, hasn’t done anything that begins to resemble Nixon’s assemblage of dirty tricks – insofar as I understand the Clearstream affair (which isn’t very far), he’s more sinned against than sinning. So the analogy isn’t perfect. Nonetheless, he surely deserves to someday have his very own Garry Wills.

Via “Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/ come “Lore Sjöberg’s views on Wikipedia.”:http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70670-0.html He says in part:

Wikipedia is a new paradigm in human discourse. It’s a place where anyone with a browser can go, pick a subject that interests them, and without even logging in, start an argument. … The Wikipedia philosophy can be summed up thusly: “Experts are scum.” For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War — and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge — get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment.

This reminds me of my friend “Dave Chalmers”:http://consc.net/ and his abortive efforts to suggest some clean up of the Wikipedia entry on “consciousness”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness, especially the bits relating to his own well-known book _The Conscious Mind_. He registered a username and — politely — made a suggestion. “The results”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Consciousness/Archive01 were not encouraging:

As can be seen above, most of your criticisms are not supported. Please demonstrate your familiarity with the field by supporting your critique with reasoned arguments rather than pejorative comments. *loxley* 08:50, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Marshall McLuhan here. *Philos* is right about each of the points above. The philosophy section would be much improved if it reverted to the “philosopher’s” edit of a few days ago. *DavidChalmers* 23:51, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

How is he right about the points above? The points are clearly detailed and you could easily explain your criticism. Please could you also explain how cutting the historical, empirical descriptions of conscious experience and supervenience would improve the article. Why do you have the ID “DavidChalmers” yet use the name Marshall McLuhan? The only famous philosopher called Marshall McLuhan died in 1980. Are you taking the piss or are you philos with a duplicate ID? *loxley* 11:13, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

The user with ID DavidChalmers who claims to be the deceased and famous Canadian philosopher Marshal McLuhan should note that using the name of a living, prominent person as a USERID is against Wikipedia guidelines. *loxley* 11:19, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

My userID is my own name (I presume that’s allowed). “Marshall McLuhan” was an _Annie Hall_ reference. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to get into a long argument involving an entry where I am discussed. But since you’ve invoked my name twice (here and on the history page) in support of your claims, I thought I should register my judgment here. I appreciate all that you and others have done to build up this entry. But your discussion in the article and above shows fairly basic misunderstandings of supervenience (the Derrida quote has no bearing on supervenience), direct realism (it’s not true that direct realists see the explanatory gap in terms of access consciousness), functionalism (it’s not true that “experience of” is a functionalist or eliminativist locution), and so on. I’m sorry! And I’ll bow out now. *DavidChalmers* 23:36, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Dear Prof. Chalmers, Thank you for your comments. I respect your willingness to bow out of decisions where conflicts of interest emerge, but I would like to stress that your informed opinion and guidance is most valuable here. This page has great potential to teach many curious readers about our current understanding of consciousness in an accurate and approachable way. I believe that all here would agree that this subject is a difficult one to get right and teach well, and thus your contributions here are most certainly a welcome public service. Many thanks for your past (and hopefully future) contributions. Cheers, *sallison* 01:47, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Sallison: yuk. Chalmers, if that is your name, your criticisms are not in the spirit of Wikipedia. Don’t wave your hand with a pompous air of authority, get them dirty by actually contributing. I have given details of the assertions in the philosophy section that you can rebut in the section below. *loxley* 10:56, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

I’m not sure how things stand these days with that entry. Hopefully it improved.

One of my quirkier philosophical views is that the most pressing question in metaphysics, and perhaps all of philosophy, is how to distinguish between disjunctive and non-disjunctive predicates in the special sciences. This might look like a relatively technical problem of no interest to anyone. But I suspect that the question is important to all sorts of issues, as well as being one of those unhappy problems that no one seems to even have a beginning of a solution to. One of the issues that it’s important to was raised by “Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/01/the_meddling_id.html yesterday. He was wondering why John Campbell might accept the following two claims.

* There is an important and unbridgeable gulf between our notions of physical causation and our notions of psychological causation.
* Martian physicists–intelligences vast, cool, and unsympathetic with no notions of human psychology or psychological causation–could not understand why, could not put their finger on physical variables and factors explaining why, the fifty or so of us assemble in the Seaborg Room Monday at lunch time during the spring semester.

I don’t know why Campbell accepts these claims. And I certainly don’t want to accept them. But I do know of one good reason to accept them, one that worries me no end some days. The short version involves the conjunction of the following two claims.

* Understanding a phenomenon involves being able to explain it in relatively broad, but non-disjunctive, terms.
* Just what terms are non-disjunctive might not be knowable to someone who only knows what the Martian physicists know, namely the microphysics of the universe.

The long version is below the fold.
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Homecoming is, for me, always an invitation to unnatural acts – specifically, reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page. (Hey. Dad’s a subscriber.) For example, this Bret Stephens piece (Dec. 12), “Honor Killing” [maybe a web link, but I’m not seeing it]:

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that in America morals count for a lot while honor counts for relatively little. Reading the lamentable report of the Iraq Study Group, it shows.

The operative word in the ISG report is “should,” which is what grammarians call a defective verb. The report easily contains more than a 100 shoulds, varying tonally from hectoring to plaintive to nitpicking …

By contrast the word “honor” appears just once: “We also honour the many Iraqis who have sacrificed on behalf of their country,” writes ISG co-chairman James Baker and Lee Hamilton, who also put in a kind word for our Coalition allies.

But honor isn’t simply a sentimental verb. It is a decisive principle of action in all foreign policy, never more so than in the honor-obsessed Middle East. It is not about good intentions, wisdom or virtue, but about appearances and perception. “Honor acts solely for the public eye,” wrote Tocqueville. In practice, it means standing by one’s friends and defying one’s enemies, whatever the price. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War Richard Nixon ordered the military resupply of Israel in its hour of need not because he was sympathetic to Jews – he wasn’t – but because he understood that the U.S. could not be seen to let a client down. Nine months later, he was accorded a ticker-tape parade through the streets of Cairo.

Then Stephens accuses the authors of the report of failing ‘the test of honor’ by conceding, with their first sentence, that “the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.” Then it actually gets worse. (And, obviously, we could back up and point out that there are problems with reducing honor to ‘help your friends, hurt your enemies’. This confusion, I’ll wager, has more than a little to do with the man’s bizarre allergy to ‘should’, in a document that is supposed to recommend a course of action.) But let’s go back to the Tocqueville quote. It’s actually interesting to read how the quoted passage continues: [click to continue…]

On my stack of yet-unread 2006 politics books – Thomas Edsall’s Building Red America [amazon]. I cannot help but think events have somewhat overtaken it, though I still plan to read it. (I took particular satisfaction in that NY Times graphic – with the blue and the babyblue and the pink and the red. Red for anywhere that got painted red. And, of course, there was no need to open that can of paint. So it sat there, lonely in the legend.) What politics books do you say will survive the season, in terms of relevance?

I have a semi-scholarly interest in this question because I’m trying – I’ve been trying – to write about the relationship between liberalism, as it gets discussed in political philosophy; and liberalism, in the Democratic party sense. Obviously it is anything but a simple relationship, and I just indicated it in the most approximate fashion, but who has discussed it well? Who has written well about the point where the rubber of liberal political theory meets the road of liberal politics (if indeed there is such a point.) One problem with political philosophy is, of course, the perennial suspicion that its abstractions make it be … well, not about anything. (I don’t really mean it. You know what I mean.) On the other hand, the books about partisan politics – typically journalistic – don’t have a long shelf-life. What books do a good job of splitting the difference in a happy way? Relevant, and they stay that way.

Our own Looking For A Fight – Is There A Republican War On Science? [amazon] is a prime example. Will it still matter in a year? Well, I’ll take this opportunity to report that we have so far sold a grand total of, like, 16 copies. And there were about 110 downloads of the free book. That’s sort of an interesting result. Not wonderful, not terrible. It’s a good sign that paper sales are more than 10% of total distribution, even with free PDF. It means people do value the paper. (More titles coming soon!) One rather curious thing that making the book has caused me to notice: on the Amazon page there are presently 14 new and used copies for sale from third party sellers, including some marked up to $26.79 (from someplace called Best Dictionaries). Amazon is selling it for $11. I’m used to sort of seeing that stuff down the page on any given Amazon page, but in this case I am reasonably certain those copies don’t actually exist. A few could be author copies or sold copies that were promptly resold. But presumably for the most part these sellers have just generated these offers in some automated fashion and marked up the price more than %100. If someone orders it, then they’ll buy a copy from Parlor and simply resell it. It’s like the old Calvin & Hobbes strip where Calvin is sitting at his lemonade stand, suspended between grim and glum. The sign says: lemonade $20. And there are little unsold cups, waiting. “I’ve just got to sell one.” An interesting business model. Of course, in a sense it’s perfectly rational. Find the idiot who doesn’t comparison shop. (Is there a person who always buys from Best Dictionaries?)

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration has blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported Tuesday.
…

The report drew a prompt response from Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg D-N.J., who charged that “the administration has effectively declared war on science and truth to advance its anti-environment agenda … the Bush administration continues to censor scientists who have documented the current impacts of global warming.”

via C&L

Hey, someone should write a book about this sort of thing. Maybe give away a companion to the book for good measure. (Admittedly, this report may be premature – the report about the report, that is. The actual Nature article title ends with a question mark, “Is the US hurricane report being quashed?”)

I didn’t mention this in my previous post: Mooney’s book [amazon] is now out in paperback – and cheap! (And it’s got search inside. So if you want to research various figures’ involvement in the debate, you can do so efficiently online.)

Which famous philosopher was accused of being all of the following (answer under the fold):

lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fibre.

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I’m late to the party, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed it. Chris "Day by Day" Muir has been mocked round the blogs on account of an incandescently ignorant pair of strips he perpetrated about ‘Kantian nihilism’. Muir made it worse with an egregious, homophobic follow-up. (Honestly, you’d think someone who had just been so roundly spanked could come up with a better a posteriori proof joke.) Then, bless him, he tried to figure out some way to mock Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings. I think: "Way to miss the entire point, cretin," was his most devastating jab. People started to feel a bit sorry for him.

Ouch.  This is getting to be like watching a cat toying with a still-living mouse. – Gromit

No, it’s like watching a still-living mouse pretend to be a cat and kill itself. – Hilzoy

Back to ‘Kantian nihilism’. A few commenters – starting at Yglesias’ site, I think – have scrupulously noted that ‘nihilism’ was a charge first lodged against Kant by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. There’s quite an extensive entry on the man at the Stanford Encyclopedia. I happen to have just read Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory [amazon]. I’ll quote a few bits about Jacobi, because who doesn’t love a bit of esoteric piquancy with their transcendent absurdity?
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The comment thread to my Schmitt post is perking along nicely. (Good poems about taxes, too.) I’m going to take the liberty of elevating some bits of that thread for discussion in this here fresh post. John Quiggin writes:

So, let me start with the observation that war is inherently a negative-sum activity and the empirical fact that, in practice, aggressive war is almost invariably a negative-return activity for the inhabitants of countries that undertake it, Germany in the first half of C20 being a striking example. Schmitt and similar thinkers manage to construct logical frameworks that insulate them from crucial facts like this.

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I vaguely recall an anecdote about Reagan (?) meeting with Brezhnev/Gorbachev (?) and amiably suggesting that the US and USSR would easily set aside their differences, fighting shoulder to shoulder if aliens invaded the earth. Can anyone give me a cite? I’m writing something about Carl Schmitt, friend/enemy, you understand.

The LA Times reports on the Philadelphia cheesesteak place that refuses to serve customers who don’t order in English. The message to customers is This is America. When Ordering “Speak English”. Just a few observations.

1. I’m not sure what rule of English requires, or even permits, quote marks around the last two words in that sentence. I’m no prescriptivist, so I’m happy to be shown that this falls under some generally followed pattern, but it’s no pattern I’m familiar with.
2. I’m very pleased that no place had a similar sign when I was trying to get fed in Paris using what could, charitably, be described as schoolboy French, as long as the schoolboy in question spent every class watching football rather than, say, studying French. And that pleasure is not just because if I had seen such a sign I’d have been like, Holy Cow, the Americans have captured Paris.
3. This being the LA Times, they have to describe what a cheesesteak is: “a cholesterol-delivery device consisting of grilled strips of beef, melted cheese, onions and peppers on an Italian roll.” They also misquote the sign by removing the errant quote marks and adding a ‘please’. Those polite Southern Californians!

It seems to me that 50 SF films for $16.47 is a good deal [Amazon]. Anyone care to comment on the various titles? It’s got classics like “Teenagers From Outer Space” and “Destroy All Planets” and “Phantom Planet” and “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”. Everything. (Nothing good, of course.) It’s got John Agar and Basil Rathbone and Steve Reeves. How well do I remember the Young Fresh Fellows singing “The New John Agar”! Well, sort of well. It was long ago. Discuss! (Someone should start a roll-your-own MST3K mp3 commentary track project.)

This collection of 100 cartoons seems likely to be good as well. How can a badly made cartoon from the 30’s entitled “Professor Ya Ya’s Memories” be bad?

I know it seems terrible that I’m always flogging stuff from Amazon. But is it?

UPDATE: As is pointed out in comments, there is in fact a a whole series of 50-packs: mystery, horror, comedy, musical, drive-in, martial arts, historical, dark crimes, pastoral-comical, tragical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral, robot monsteral-pastoral, santal clausal-tragical, teenageral-historical and so forth. Also, some intrepid/damned soul has reviewed every single item in the SF 50-pack!

Surprising news:

The Objectivist Academic Centre of the Ayn Rand Institute now offers accredited courses for which college credits can be granted.

Very very surprising news:

The financial support arrangements and tuition waivers are rather generous.

If any CT readers want to apply for a grant from the Ayn Rand Institute the form is here. Although I suppose this may be a trick; if you apply for a grant you thereby prove yourself to be unworthy of one.

(PS: If any other editors change the category of this post away from “Philosophy” I will throw a hissy fit of epic and heroic, life-affirming proportions.)

Fellow Timberteer Maria is visiting Singapore on her way to some important meeting. She and Belle ran off to Little India today. I had to work. It is left to me to memorialize their shopping trip, based on its products. What can I say?

My work is done. You, our readers, shall now compose the screenplay/libretto of a Bollywood musical, based on Donnie Darko. (Click for larger image.) Since I am an incorrigible Amazon whore I cannot refrain from noting that the director’s cut is marked down 50%. If you don’t go for that, this Hank Thompson collection is only $4.97. (You’re saving $1.01!!) For some reason, when I was a kid, I had a record with “Whoa Sailor” on it. I played it over and over but turned out straight. The man who is tired of Donnie Darko and Hank Thompson is tired of life. (Don’t miss the slideshow.)