by Belle Waring on June 16, 2017
The NYT today has an article about how the Dutch, with their long experience of holding back the sea, plan to advise other nations about utilizing children’s pudgy fingers to avert devastating floods. At least, I assume that’s what it’s about; I didn’t RTWT yet. More interesting and pertinent to me was this article from some weeks ago about how Singapore is constructing new land, both to increase the city state’s area on general principles and to deal with rising sea levels. Singapore is in a difficult position as a low-lying polis with no higher ground or inetrior countryside to relocate to. In addition, it is forested with high-rise apartment blocks that can hardly be moved. Bukit Timah hill, which I can see from my window, is only about 400 ft above sea level and is the highest point on the island. Singapore imports tons of sand from neighboring countries and uses it to create new islands offshore or infill and extend the current island.
The area where the Marina Bay Sands hotel and casino is located is on infill. It’s the one that looks like a cruise ship plonked on top of three curving towers. Next to it are these fabulous tree-like structures filled with plants and a stylized lotus building, and the huge ferris wheel, currently the biggest in the world, is nearby. With this and the durian-shaped Esplanade theatre Singapore has methodically achieved its goal of having a recognizable skyline. It is just like the government to plan the whole thing out like in this way after, one assumes, envious comparisons to the spontaneous towers of Hong Kong, and build it up in a slow plodding way–but then have it actually work!
From what I have seen in staying here so long, after the sand is put in, the ground is usually firmed up by being planted with trees for a while, though apparently they also build concrete honeycombs to support it from beneath. Both Indonesia and Malaysia have become irritated by the expansion and have begun to withhold exports of sand, so that Singapore has to look further afield. Myanmar has no compunction about selling something that’s worthless to them. Singapore has created something I didn’t know about, namely a strategic sand reserve in Bedok. This is also the most Singapore thing ever. Looking ahead! 10-year plans for new public housing and new MRT lines to service them! It is a curious place. I recommend you do read the whole article though it is long. The stories of a man who has viewed all the changes from the water are very interesting for a different perspective than the one I see. It is a fascinating look at what a truly endangered nation will do when it takes the Anthropocene seriously.
by John Holbo on July 24, 2015
I got a new iMac. Awesome! Until last week I was using my old iMac, from 2009. I buy a good one so it will last. It’s amazing how one day in front of the retina display makes me think ‘yuck!’ looking at my tired old, burnt out 2009 display. But onward, to the future! [click to continue…]
by Belle Waring on January 13, 2014
ETA: It has occurred to me only just now that this post would have better had it been titled “America: rRuck Yeah!”
You have probably already read about the horrible chemical spill in West Virginia last Thursday, which the New York Times has a stunner headline: Critics Say Chemical Spill Highlights Lax West Virginia Regulations. Oh, really? (You can read lots of good posts on this and previous environmental and labor disputes at Lawyers, Guns and Money–you can start looking at Erik Loomis’ posts as he also has great series along the lines of ‘this day in labor history’.)
300,000 were left with poisoned drinking water (coming out of the tap!) after specialty chemical-producer Freedom Industries spilled some 5,000 gallons of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol into the Kanawha Valley’s water treatment intake near Charleston. The water remains clear although poisonous, but smells helpfully like licorice. Also, boiling it doesn’t help.
Obviously this logo is but a minor blot on the company’s record vs. its actual malfeasance but uh…it’s a crime against good design, since my daughters looked at it and asked, “what’s rReedom Industries?” Also really looks as if it should have the smoking twin towers photoshopped into the background, and perhaps a big glistening tear into the eagle’s eye, and it would be a good blog header for Pamela Geller. Hey, remember her? (She doesn’t follow good trigger safety at all, I totally just learned this. But she’s a teetotaler also, so.)
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by John Holbo on September 14, 2013
Or tea, as the case may be.
Really, it couldn’t be happening to a nicer guy. Also, this.
‘The revolution will eat its children’. But it’s interesting to think why autosarcophagarchy – that is, rule by self-cannibals – should be such a typical form of revolutionary decline. (Do you like my new word? I think I’ll teach it to my daughter.)
There’s shouldn’t be a problem in principle with being an idealist – i.e. having some vision of what an ideal state would be like that is radically at odds with actually existing reality. Whether it be True Communism or True Conservatism or what have you. Practicing revolutionaries should be able to talk the 1st best talk while walking the 2nd best walk. But there is, I suppose, something inherently maddening about that position, both to the one who assumes it and for spectators. The distance between real and ideal is so great that the practical negotiation of it can never look like an expression of what you have been talking about it, hence can’t look like prudent trimming. So it can’t help looking like rank hypocrisy to enemies and vile betrayal to friends.
This is accentuated by the rhetoric of naturalness that goes with utopianism. ‘Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.’ Or in Obamacare, as the case may be. If the desirable state of affairs is so natural, and the actual state of affairs so horrible, it really seems the rickety structure ought to fall over if you push it. So therefore you ought to do so.
Of course, the case is a bit more complicated when the Robespierres in question were only ever recreational Robespierres to begin with. Napoleons of Notting Hill, not Napoleons. But the dynamic is much the same. (But you are bored with me quoting G. K. Chesterton, so I’ll cut it out.)
by John Holbo on August 29, 2013
In a recent post I remarked that MLK is a figure well worth stealing. And NR obliges me with the first sentence of their anniversary editorial. “The civil-rights revolution, like the American revolution, was in a crucial sense conservative.” They do admit a few paragraphs on that, “Too many conservatives and libertarians, including the editors of this magazine, missed all of this at the time.” And then manage to wreck it all again with the next sentence: “They worried about the effects of the civil-rights movement on federalism and limited government. Those principles weren’t wrong, exactly; they were tragically misapplied, given the moral and historical context.” No look into the question of how such a misapplication transpired, since that would not produce gratifying results. After all, if we are talking about what actually worried people, then plainly federalism and limited government were more pretext than motive. The tragedy is that so many people wanted to do the wrong thing, for bad reasons. But they couldn’t say ‘Boo justice!’ So they said stuff about … federalism. There is obviously no point to conservative’s revisiting how they got things wrong without bothering to consider how they got things wrong. But let’s be positive about it. “It is a mark of the success of King’s movement that almost all Americans can now see its necessity.” Yay justice!
I’m sitting down to read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen
[amazon]. I’m planning to agree with it, but the framing is odd. [click to continue…]
by John Holbo on February 7, 2012
I’m teaching Plato – again! But I like it that way! Also, I don’t see why Belle should be the only one posting YouTube videos. So here’s a really really nice Magnetic Fields song, allowing me to combine my interest in Platonic themes with my interest in linking to YouTube.
by John Holbo on January 20, 2012
Why aren’t citizens allowed to sell their votes to the highest bidder? (Bear with me for a minute.) You may at first be inclined to say that it’s like the stricture against selling yourself into slavery: we don’t let citizens strip themselves of the most basic political rights and liberties. But I’m not talking about disenfranchising yourself permanently. Let’s focus just on the case in which you sell one vote in one particular election, or on a particular measure. It’ll grow back. You can vote next time. It’s like working for pay, rather than selling yourself into slavery. A short-term surrender of rights and liberties for the sake of something you want: namely, cash. It’s hard to see that giving up the right to vote in one election – which you honestly may not care much about – would be permanently crippling to someone’s status as a free citizen. (We let people not vote. Why not let them not vote for an even better reason?) [click to continue…]
by John Holbo on August 7, 2011
This one goes with the others. (Having posted two, it would be more strange not to post a third.)
In other news, I notice that Erick Erickson has some difficulty with the is/ought distinction. He reasons that, since Republicans in fact will not raise taxes under any circumstances, it follows that one can’t fault Republicans for not raising taxes. That would be like blaming the rain for raining. Or something. A nice illustration of the advantages and disadvantages of extreme intransigence for political life, perhaps.
by Michael Bérubé on January 17, 2011
Well, things have been quiet around my house lately, except of course for the whole-house water filter that exploded two weeks ago while Janet and I were at the movies, drenching the basement with four inches of water (750 gallons, we learned from the nice young man whose powerful machines drained our house). The water had just gotten within reach of the bottom of the spines of the books in one bookcase (does a book have a coccyx?), leaving a row of thinkers from Marshall Berman to Harold Bloom shrieking for help and drawing their knees up to their chests. And of course Jamie lost a lot of stuff — Beatles books, art books, crayons, writing pads, pretty much anything that was on the floor (and there were many things on the floor). But at least it was clean water, not like <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/06/slow-parade/”>last time</a>. So there’s that.
And now that I’ve spent the weekend putting together new shelving and storage devices and tidying up in general, it’s time to pick a fight! This time I’m over at the National Humanities Center blog, <a href=”http://onthehuman.org/2011/01/humans-disabilities-humanities/”>On the Human</a>, complaining about bioethicists. For example (from a discussion of Jonathan Glover’s book Choosing Children: Genes, Disability, and Design):
This then is yet another version of the classic “trolley problem,” in which we are asked to decide whether it is better that people with X disability not be born at all (because the prospective mothers wait two months and have different children altogether) while some people with X disability go “uncured” in utero, or better that people with X disability be “cured” in utero while others are born with the disability because their mothers went untreated.I suppose this is the stuff of which bioethical debates are made, but may I be so rude as to point out that there is no such trolley? This thought experiment may be all well and good if the object is to ask people about the moral difference between foregoing a pregnancy that will result in a fetus with disabilities and treating a disabled fetus in utero (and miraculously “curing” it!). But it does not correspond to any imaginable scenario in the world we inhabit. (And there’s more: because, perhaps, “a disability is harder to bear if you know that people could have prevented it but chose not to do so,” [Derek] Parfit adds that “we assume that those born with the disability do not know they could have been spared it” [48]. Why not assume instead that those born with the disability are given a pony on their fifth birthday?) There simply are no known genetic conditions that present prospective parents with this kind of decision….
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by John Holbo on August 2, 2010
An interesting Planet Money podcast (link goes to the associated post) about how much a pelican is worth. That is, how much should BP have to pay, per pelican, for wrongfully killing pelicans? How do you estimate dollar damages in cases where there aren’t markets that could give you a reasonable ‘market valuation’ of some degraded environmental condition, and in which laypeople are sort of torn between ‘infinitely valuable’ and ‘I’d pay a dollar’ responses to a survey question? It turns out that the answer is ‘a pelican for a pelican’, at least according to the federal agency responsible for solving this problem. If BP killed 500 pelicans, they have to pay whatever it costs to save 500 other pelicans, or pay for a pelican nursery that will raise 500 pelicans, or something of the sort.
I have a somewhat more than passing interest in the history of lex talionis, so I’m struck by this reversion to what is generally regarded as an intolerably primitive, retributivist formula. An eye for an eye, a pelican for a pelican. Of course, the first thing to note about it is that here it isn’t functioning in a retributivist spirit at all. Quite the contrary, it’s a utilitarian kludge for handling a case in which calculating a util seems too fraught.
Note the oddity of the fact that at no point in the podcast does anyone ask how much a pelican is worth to a pelican [to the pelican that happens to be that pelican]. Suppose someone proposed that it is impossible to value human life in a wrongful death suit, say, because we’ve outlawed slavery (just as we’ve outlawed traffic in migratory birds). That would be a funny sort of argument. But it does show up how our intuitions about environmental value are an odd mix of absolutism (nature is infinitely valuable) and instrumentalism (nature is valuable for us).
Maybe that means we are just monstrously inconsiderate of [better: conflicted about] animal rights in our typical thinking about environmental damage. I actually kinda think so [most days], but I don’t think there’s much chance of a serious paradigm shift that would go deep enough to alter that. So, setting aside that possibility, and moving back down the scale to more practical questions, it seems to me that there might be a way to tweak the ‘pelican for a pelican’ lex talionis principle, to make it more flexible – to make the currency of pelicans more fluidly exchangeable and money-like, in a way that the average American might find intuitive and, if not satisfying, then at least as not-unsatisfying as any formula is likely to be. [click to continue…]
