I sympathize with the commenters who affected shock, but I really am quite convinced that Eugene Volokh is a nice, intelligent person whom, if I met him in real life, I would like. This may be based on class solidarity. He is a smarty-pants law professor, and I like smarty-pants law professors. I happen to know two other former Supreme Court clerks living in Southern California who are nominal Republicans (these people also know Prof. Volokh and vouch for his character). Despite being Republicans, they are both nice people, and not just in the “he always seemed like such a nice boy” fashion of the opinion of the serial killer’s elderly neighbor, but the real-life type of nice person. [click to continue…]

I’ve just had a chance to see ‘Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room’, (previously reviewed on CT by Ted here), having also just finished reading Frank Partnoy’s ‘Infectious Greed’, a fascinating history of large-scale larceny in the financial markets over the last quarter-century in which, unsurprisingly, Enron figures fairly prominently.

‘The Smartest Guys in the Room’ gives some explanation of how Enron’s central scams worked, but it mainly tells a modern-day horror story about the doings of the the repellently amoral, dishonest people at the top of the company: CEO Jeff Skilling comes over as an especially nasty piece of work, and it seems clear that he did his best to build a corporate culture in which his own arrogance and brutality would be writ large; Andy Fastow, the CFO whose creative accounting kept the shell-game going long enough to take tens of millions of dollars out of the company for himself, is pretty clearly a psychopath; and Chairman Ken Lay, who of course to this day denies any wrongdoing, seems to alternate between buffoonery, cynicism and utter delusion.

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Now, I post this with a heavy heart, because the truth is, that despite any previous complaints about puppies, I actually regard Eugene Volokh as an intelligent, thoughtful person with whom I would love to have a beer or two. (In fact, we have friends in common.) So, I was basically floored by this:
The premise of this post is that laws which prohibit unwanted sexual touching are based on the fear of involuntary sexual arousal on the part of the victim. And I’m sorry to say, that’s just crazy talk.

Say, on the other hand [vs physical contact ordinarily regarded as non-sexual, but which may be unwanted, such as shoulder-patting], that someone intentionally touches your genitals, or intentionally caresses your breasts (if you’re a woman). In many circumstances, this would be considered a crime. Why the difference? I think that here too there is a connection with sexual arousal — either the possibility that you might be involuntarily sexually aroused, or the likelihood that the other person is deriving some sort of sexual arousal from touching you.

Now, the premise here is that unwanted sexual arousal forms the basis of objections to unwanted touching of, say, a woman’s genitals by a stranger on the subway. Now, I would be inclined to give Eugene the benefit of the doubt here. Except for the part where he totally forfeits my trust.

Why the difference? I think that here too there is a connection with sexual arousal — either the possibility that you might be involuntarily sexually aroused, or the likelihood that the other person is deriving some sort of sexual arousal from touching you.

Again, taken alone, this might be reasonable, if only in a thought-experiment way. But the conclusion? Does it perhaps exclude the most obvious problem? Sources say, yes:

So while I’m not positive, it seems to me that there’s something interesting and possibly important in play here: Some conduct that involuntarily sexually arouses another (or seriously risks doing so) may be improper, even if similar conduct in which involuntary sexual arousal is absent is generally fine.

Wait, remember above, where we were considering both the possibility that unwanted sexual contact should be avoided because it might cause unwanted sexual arousal in the victim and the crazy, totally improbable problem that the person feeling you up on the subway might be sexually gratifying himself at your expense without your permission? What happened to option two, eh?
And then, having knotted the noose in boy scout fashion, Eugene just sticks his head right in:

It[unwanted sexual touching of a woman’s breasts or vagina by a stranger] may be both arousing and disturbing; it might in fact be disturbing partly because of the arousal, or of the possibility of arousal.

Now look. I somewhat hesitate to claim magic feminist backsies on everyone who disagrees with me. But. I’ve actually been raped before! Sweet! And I have sat next to someone on the DC metro who was jerking off while I was sitting next to the window and had trouble getting out. I sort of feel like I’m pointing at the sky saying, “hey, it’s teh blue!” The problem of a dude rubbing his thigh against yours while he jerks off is not, and now I must get all caps, NOT, a problem about involuntary sexual arousal on your part. No, it’s more of the problem of where a dude is rubbing on your thigh and jerking off. And my sister got assaulted in the metro elevator before when she was 13 and when she punched and kicked the guy trying to feel her up he broke her jaw in 3 places! Again, and I hate to get all irritated, but the problem was NOT that she was geting all turned on by that guy. So, in short, WTF? And then, W.T.F.???

Porter Goss has “resigned”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-White-House-Shake-up.html?hp&ex=1146888000&en=17709b88f1d4bcc3&ei=5094&partner=homepage.

Update: “Laura Rozen”:http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/004090.html has more.

Spring is here, and meat is in the air!

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I’m reacting a bit late to Brian’s post on thought experiments in ethics. Like some commenters, I’m unimpressed by such exercises. In too many cases the approach seems to be to postulate a totally counterintuitive situation (for example one in which pushing people onto railway tracks has good consequences) then claiming that people’s intuitions about such a situation tell us something useful.

Here’s another one quoted by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I’m reposting my response from a few years ago.

One common illustration is called Transplant. Imagine that each of five patients in a hospital will die without an organ transplant. The patient in Room 1 needs a heart, the patient in Room 2 needs a liver, the patient in Room 3 needs a kidney, and so on. The person in Room 6 is in the hospital for routine tests. Luckily (!), his tissue is compatible with the other five patients, and a specialist is available to transplant his organs into the other five. This operation would save their lives, while killing the “donor”. There is no other way to save any of the other five patients (Foot 1966, Thomson 1976; compare related cases in Carritt 1947 and McCloskey 1965).

We need to add that the organ recipients will emerge healthy, the source of the organs will remain secret, the doctor won’t be caught or punished for cutting up the “donor”, and the doctor knows all of this to a high degree of probability (despite the fact that many others will help in the operation). Still, with the right details filled in, it looks as if cutting up the “donor” will maximize utility, since five lives have more utility than one life. If so, then classical utilitarianism implies that it would not be morally wrong for the doctor to perform the transplant and even that it would be morally wrong for the doctor not to perform the transplant. Most people find this result abominable. They take this example to show how bad it can be when utilitarians overlook individual rights, such as the unwilling donor’s right to life.

I don’t know if it’s been pointed out before, but this example doesn’t work as claimed. The proposal of killing the test patient is dominated by the following alternative: With the agreement of the five needy recipients, draw lots. The unlucky one is cut up (but of course, they would have died anyway) and their healthy organs are transplanted into the others. The number of lives saved is the same as in the proposed case, no rights are violated, it’s a Pareto-improvement on the status quo ante and so on. We even save one transplant operation relative to the proposal.

Of course, you can impose some sort of ad hoc assumption to rule this out, but this just points up the other flaws of this example.
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I feel bad for _Star Wars_ fans, I really do. Most of them are in a kind of “abusive relationship”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/08/revenge-of-the-sith/ with George Lucas. I see “via John Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/may#thu-04-original_trilogy (a Vader-codependent himself) that, prior statements notwithstanding, Lucasfilm will “release the first three remastered Star Wars films unaltered”:http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/release/video/news20060503.html on DVD, together with the original theatrical release of each. This is the fake kiss-and-make-up period: now that everyone has bought the currently-available retroactively-reprocessed collection, and cried about that for a while, they can all go out and buy them again. “See.” they will say, “I _told_ you he was a good man!” Nine months from now he’ll announce an Ewoks/Gungans musical or something — “The Wizard of Endor,” maybe, or “My Fair Leia” — and the whole process will start over again.

Sue Gerhardt’s Why Love Matters (UK) has gotten less attention than it should have in the US, and almost none in the blogosphere as far as I can tell (even on the “mommy blogs”). I want to prompt some interest in it, and also to see whether anyone else who has read it has the reactions I do (or can point me to good critiques). Gerhardt is a practicing psychotherapist who specializes in working with parents (and especially mothers) of young children. When I started reading about child development I was struck by how much attention is given the cognitive and physical development, and how little to emotional health and development. Why Love Matters is the best I’ve found on emotional development. It’s a primer on the current science of brain development in the early years, looking at how well that work confirms various assumptions that therapists make about the importance of early attachment for emotional regulation. From what I can judge Gerhardt is supremely careful about her presentation of the science; where it clearly supports her therapeutic approach she says so, where it is merely suggestive her presentation is honest about that.

[Update: Sue Gerhardt’s comment at 46 below answers a lot of questions people have had — I’ll quote some of it at the end of the post]
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I’m reading Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality [amazon]. It’s a pretty ok little intro, suitable for undergrads; but kinda pricey for what it – a slim paperback, several years old (though I guess there’s a new edition.) Anyway, here’s a passage that raised my eyebrow: [click to continue…]

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!

Jury decides against execution. Seems like the right decision to me. Opportunist that he is, Moussaoui shouted “America, You Lost!” when being led from the courtroom, which is meaningless but may have its intended effect on those who wanted to see him executed. I’m sure he had an equally snappy alternative ready — perhaps something about martyrdom, or maybe just the same line, come to think of it — in case the decision had gone the other way.

In a desperate effort to stay afloat bold and forward-looking move, napster (which shares only a name with the program from the glory days of 2000 and 2001) has made (most of) its 2 million tunes available for free. The catches: 1. you need to register (or find a clever way around registration); 2. it pops up a flash player so you can’t download them (unless you’re much more clever about these things than I am); 3. there’s an occasional ad; 4. you can only play each tune 5 times (on each registration, I’m guessing); 5. it is relatively low quality.

It may not be as convenient as various internet radio stations (especially customizable ones like launchcast) that you can just leave on, but if you’re looking for a particular song – say, after soaking in Bruce Springsteen’s version of “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” you want to hear Ry Cooder’s version, or the original by Blind Alfred Reed (or the one by the Del Lords that I just found) – this is the place for you.

I wouldn’t normally just randomly link to stuff on the Guardian blog, but this one is quite important. The “ongoing genocide in Darfur” has been such a staple of Internet arguments over the morality of humanitarian intervention, the effectiveness of the United Nations, the unique moral awfulness of the European Unions etc etc, that it is easy to forget that this is actually a real place with a real war going on in it and that, as is surprisingly common in wars, the news does not stand still while you are writing your blog posts. The Sudanese government, who are villains right enough and who I am sure will face charges at the ICC in the future, are actually not the problem now; they are co-operating at the peace talks (peace talks? yes! and furthermore, they are being very capably supported by the USA! the USA? yes! apparently they do “the useless chit-chat of diplomacy” a lot better than they do wars!). At present, ill-informed comment in the developed world is potentially even worse than annoying; if it persuades the Darfurian rebel groups that the world is gearing up to decapitate the Khartoum regime, it’s actually dangerous.

Ow ow ow. Michael Bérubé uses his “web” “log” to bring the burninating. Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page attempted to defend incoming White House Press Secretary Tony Snow from charges of racism stemming, in part, from one of Page’s own columns. Unfortunately, he also inadvertently let slip the secret of Tony Snow’s mutant power…the power to see the future! (It’s totally like in this one story from Anne McCaffrey’s To Ride Pegasus, where there’s this mutant empath folksinger!) Read, and be amazed…

Tony Snow is eminently qualified to serve as White House press secretary not only because he is a man of conscience who genuinely cares about solving the tough problems of poverty, bad schools and sour race relations, but also because he can see the future. If you doubt it—or if you think, as an out-of-touch liberal elite critic who doesn’t understand physics, that this sensible blog has suddenly degenerated into trippy Fafblogisms—look again at Clarence Page’s “contextualization” of Snow’s remarks:

“Snow was trying to explain why the former Klansman had just won an estimated 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race. Snow wanted me to know that, just as those of us who attended Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March were not acting out of black supremacy or anti-Semitism, neither were all Duke voters moved by racism.”

That’s right: back in the fall of 1991, when David Duke had just won 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race, Tony Snow was able to compare David Duke’s white voters to black participants in a Farrakhan-led march that would not happen for another four years. That’s the kind of foresight and sagacity the White House needs now! Oh, how I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Tony Snow turned and said to Clarence Page, “You can’t write off Duke’s voters as racists, Clarence. After all, four years from now, many of your people will take part in a march organized by a nutcase anti-Semite. And don’t even get me started on O. J. Simpson! It may be hard for you to see it now, but I have the very strong sense that something bad is going to happen with that man, and many white Americans are going to get extremely upset. David Duke is just proleptically channeling that future racial tension into a right-now campaign, and if mainstream politicians don’t listen to the frustrations of ordinary people and address them in some constructive way, the loony extremists inevitably will move in.”

Man, Trogdor would be proud.