Another picture attempt

 

Blogger seems to have eaten the last photos I posted. Here's another try. This is the cemetery at Notre Dame after one of our recent heavy snow falls. As you can see, we got about a foot of snow over just a couple days.

Short review of Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job

It's sketch comedy. Only without the sketches, or comedy.

Fair Enough

Edwards isn't going to fire his bloggers, but I wish he would have come out swinging at the hypocrites who started this mess. And I'm not afraid to say it, Bill Donohue is a bad man.

Charles Taylor's horizons of significance

In preparation for his visit to ND next month, I'm reading Charles Taylor's The ethics of authenticity. (That's the communitarian-liberal philosopher, not the Liberian dictator and war criminal with connections to Pat Robertson.) I'd like to think that I'm going to write a full review on this once I'm finished, so this will just be a brief note on his idea of horizons of significance. (cont'd below the fold)

Taylor takes as his starting point the idea that authenticity, in the existentialist and quasi-existentialist sense of, roughly, being true to one's own inner nature, is a significant and legitimate ethical principle. This is in sharp contrast with other communitarians, including possibly ND's own Alisdair MacIntyre, who dismiss authenticity as nothing more than a flimsy, incoherent relativism with (in MacIntyre's case) a lousy theory of personal identity or ethical selfhood. Taylor's primary thesis is that the idea of authenticity has been significantly corrupted. More specifically, he spends the first half of the book arguing that the flimsy, incoherent relativism that's the ethical status quo in our society is incompatible with actually achieving authenticity. That is, if you try to live your life according to this `soft relativism', you will never live authentically.

One argument-sketch his gives for this last claim is that authenticity presupposes (requires) external `horizons of significance'. To borrow the example MacIntyre uses to make the same point, consider the practice of painting. Painting well (or, being a good painter) presupposes standards of excellence in painting that go beyond your decisions and preferences. That is, you can't just declare yourself a good painter; you're judged to be a good or bad painter according to historically established standards over which you have no direct control. As Taylor puts it, in our culture of soft relativism, we `tend to see fulfilment as just of the self, neglecting or delegitimating the demands that come from beyond our own desires or aspirations, be they from history, tradition, society, nature, or God' (58, my emphasis).

The point is compelling, at least rhetorically, but also troubling. Why troubling? I think because the idea that the demands or standards are external to me means they're out of my control. Look again at Taylor's list of the sources of significance: historically, those demands and standards have been intimately linked with oppression and suppression; or, more generally, authenticity seems to be achieved more often by those individuals who reject the standards and demands of their society than those who embrace them. This is why so many existentialists (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Sartre) cherish both authenticity and iconoclasm -- the two seem to go hand in hand. Taylor appears to be arguing, contra Nietzsche, that authenticity is actually incompatible with iconoclasm.

Can we reconcile Taylor and Nietzsche? (Some day I really should write a bit on how reconciliation is so central to my approach to philosophy.) I think so, if we recognise that `external to me' is very different from `immune from revision'. Consider Picasso. Picasso successfully challenged and changed the standards of good painting, but was only able to do so because he was a good painter (indeed, an excellent painter) according to the very standards he challenged. Or consider the various civil rights movements of the 1960s and '70s. They were able to challenge and change our understanding of what makes for a truly just society by appeal to ideas of justice that were already present. These are examples of iconoclasm, but not complete and thoroughgoing iconoclasm. Instead of tearing down everything and starting over completely, these iconoclasts subverted selectively and rebuilt from within the status quo.

Hence, recognising that my pursuit of authenticity presupposes some horizons of significance determined by the community and tradition in which I engage that pursuit does not also presuppose that I can never criticise, rebel against, or change those horizons. This change won't be easy, of course, and a complete transformation of those horizons seems to be impossible, but I'm not sure that any of the four existentialists I mentioned above really believed authenticity required such a radical rejection of the status quo.

Edwards, Melissa, And Amanda

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan (know 'round the 'net as Shakespeare's Sister) were recently hired by the Edward's Presidential Campaign to develope the camaign's web presence. As was to be expected, the wingnut-o-sphere pounced at the opportunity to cull their posts for potentially objectionable content. Now the rumors are swirling fast that the campaign may fire the two women over this controversy.

This is complete and utter garbage. Look, I've never been a fan of Amanda. Pandagon was my favorite blog when Jesse and Ezra were on it. Then they left and, not liking the tone and argumentative style Amanda frequently takes, I pretty much stopped reading it. Don't get me wrong, Amanda's frequently right on the issues, I just don't like how she goes about making her case. On the other hand, I've always like Shakes. Regardless, if the Edwards campaign fires the two of them I'm going to lose a lot of faith in both the candidate and the campaign. These were two *very* public Internet personas. If they knew enough about the blogosphere to know who both of these women were, they absolutely knew enough to vet them by cruising through their posts before they gave out job offers. As Ezra says, firing these two either means the campaign is a bunch of cowards or incompetents.

This backlash from the Right was as predictable as it is stupid. Of *course* they were going to find arguably objectionable posts and take them completely out of context! Of *course* they were going to hypocritically damn the campaign for hiring those mean ol' Internet folks while completely ignoring worse from the Right.

All my best to Amanda and Melissa. They're qualified for the jobs and, well, they already got them. I hope the campaign has the sense to fight back instead of run. I have to say that if Edwards does fire them it will have a real impact on who I support in the primary.

Stay Tuned, True Believers!

Stan "The Man" Lee's going to appear in the 2/19 episode of Heroes! My guess is it's just a background role, but I love to see him in anything. Link.


Here's a very interesting question and answer session on Heroes. I found this bit particularly interesting:

"We're trying to keep this somewhat PG here, so we'll have to skip your
question! OK, last week after you threw out the name “Gabriel” as a name worth
looking into, it got our thinking caps spinning, as well as reader Erica, who
was traveling the same road with us. Gabriel, like Hana, Isaac, Matthew, Micah,
Nathan, Peter and Sarah are all from the Judeo Christian bible. Pretty much
every super powered individual has such a name. Now, Claire's adopted and does
not have a biblical name, but we're thinking that's not necessarily the name she
was born with. We're not sure where Jessica and Nicole derive their names from
biblically and Erica reminded us we don't know what DL is short for, but she
posited "David" as a likely first name. Of course, with Hiro and Mohinder not
being westerners, the rule doesn't necessarily apply to them.

(You know that gesture where you put your finger on your nose to insinuate someone just hit something on the nose? We're doing that. Right now. To Erica. Just to be clear – we don't think she smells.) Erica, we hope you feel that all your time in Sunday School and/or Hebrew school was not wasted. But we worry it may have eaten into you movie time in the ‘80s. Because if you watched the classic movie “The
Breakfast Club”, you would understand the true origin of the name Claire. It's a
fat girls name. "

Iron Man, Iron Man, Does Whatever A....hmmmm

Jeff Bridges joins the cast of the forthcoming Iron Man movie. He's added now to a cast that includes Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark/Iron Man, Gwyneth Paltrow as Virginia 'Pepper' Potts, and Terrence Howard as Jim Rhodes. Nerds on the interwebs seem to think Bridges will be playing Howard "Happy" Hogan. Now we just need Ken Watanabe as Mandarin and we're set.

Link to the story.

Why Bloggers Won't Leave Joe Klein Alone

Atrios and other bloggers around the net have spent a lot of posts recently picking on Joe Klein. Though it might be obvious to politico nerds like myself who spend lots of time reading about this, most bloggers haven't spent the time to properly explain why they're angry and why at Joe Klein. Well, here's a good post where my friend across the Delaware River does just that.

The real problem with people like Klein, and unfortunately it seems Hilary and John are in the same group, is that they seem to think the "My bad dawg" principle applies to national politics. They've all admitted that they made a bad call back in '03, but don't seem to think anything should be affected by that. Back at the start of the war it was perfectly acceptable to ignor the Left. After all, we were all just crazy hippies that hated all wars, so our arguments againt this particular was were obviously unserious. We were, of course, completely right about everything. Despite all that's happened in the past four years, where is Klein on Iran? Is he coming out swinging against any other attempts by the Bush Administration to engage in military adventures in the Middle East? Is he apologizing for ignoring the people who were right both then and now? Is he using his position as "liberal commentator" in both print and television media to articulate a liberal position which has a pretty good track record over the last several years? Of course not, he's much more interested in painting liberals who are angry with him as crazed lunitics.

Update: Ha ha! I beat Ezra to the punch, but, well, his post is a bit better.

Good news, bad news (Joss Whedon edition)

First, Bad News: Joss Whedon will not be making Wonder Woman. Now, I'll admit that Wonder Woman was never anywhere near my favourite character, or even my favourite DC character (some of you may remember my preference for Batman and Flash), but I really did think that Whedon was one of the few writers/directors around who could get Wonder Woman right.

Indeed, I've just realised that my list of favourite directors (Ang Lee, David Fincher, Gore Verbinski, David Cronenberg, Christopher Nolan, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Guillermo del Toro, Akira Kurosawa, David O. Russell, Stanley Kubrick, Tom Tykwer) has many a comic book fan, nary a woman. Have any women managed to escape the mainstream directorial ghetto of the `chick flick'? Sofia Coppola's the only one I can think of, and I've been less than thrilled by her films.

Anyways, Good News: Buffy is going to go up against the War on Terra.

How did giraffe necks evolve?

If you know a little bit about natural selection, you probably think it's because having a long neck enables giraffes to get food other grazers cannot. And you would be right. But you'd be non-trivially right, because, as you also know if you know a little bit more about natural selection, sexual selection (where the females choose the males with the best example of outrageous feature X) can be just as good an explanation as biological fitness.

So go read about the evolution of giraffe necks already. Via Evolving thoughts, which is in the midst of a really cool multi-post saga about Darwin's idea of `species'. This is absolutely fascinating if you're a HOPOS (History Of Philosophy Of Science) nehd like me.

Go Bears!

As noted in a previous post, Tony Dungy doesn't seem to like gays much. On top of that, an intrepid internetician found out that Peyton Manning gave Bush and another Republican money in the last election. If the person's to be believed, the only Bears that are politically active are liberals. As much as I like Manning's commercials, this is just another reason I'm hoping Chicago wins on Sunday.

In Boston, Nerds Have Their Pants Pulled Down And They Are Spanked With Moon Rocks

Boston officials were all in a tizzy yesterday because an ad agency hired by Cartoon Network to promote Aqua Teen Hunger Force had placed devices around the city that "looked like bombs." The artists hired by the ad agency to make and distribute the devices were arrested and the mayor of Bean Town referenced this crazy post-9/11 world we live in. The whole thing brought traffic to a screeching halt in parts of the town and supposedly cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The company also, however, put the devices up in other cities, including Seattle, with less dramatic results. Seriously, go to the story and look at the second picture to see what the "bomb" looked like. Is that terrifying?

Wait...I mean, if any Mooninites are reading this, I find your five thousand dimensions very intimidating.

Molly Ivins Dies of Cancer at 62

Molly Ivins Dies of Cancer at 62

Done Before It Began

People are "all up ons" Joe Biden now because of a *very* stupid thing he said about Barack Obama.

Now, I understand all the various ways this can be read as a racist statement, but I'm pretty shocked at the number of people who think it was intended as such, or even that he's under some kind of "I grew up in a different era" rule. Look, everybody has said something that just came out the wrong way and sounds horribly insensitive. I have no doubt that Joe Biden was attempting to say something nice about Senator Obama or perhaps expressing enthusiasm for a black candidate that has, at this early point in the horserace, a very real prospect of winning the primary and perhaps the general presidential election.

Still, it was a monumentally stupid thing to say, and a really rookie error for a guy that's been in national politics as long as Biden has. I'm sure this will kill his campaign, not that it had much life to begin with. Should it? I don't know, maybe, but like I said he really shouldn't be in this race in the first place. This faux pax just proves it.

God and gorillas and propositional attitudes

There's a fascinating interview in Salon today, with an anthropologist, Barbara J. King, who's just written a book on quasi-religious practices in gorillas and other great apes. What I find so fascinating about this interview is King's understanding of what religion and spirituality are. (Bolded passages in quotations are the interviewer; plain text are King's responses; italics are mine.)

So you're not talking about a set of beliefs? I think that's how most people think about religion.

I'm not talking about a set of beliefs. When I think about religion, what comes to mind are personal relationships with the supernatural, with God or with spirits, and compassionate action. Not necessarily books or texts that you read, but some sort of action in the world. This is coming from Karen Armstrong's work, who has helped me let go of the idea that religion is about a bunch of things in our head that we have to feel and believe. So if I'm going to think about religion as compassionate action, how do you look for that in prehistory? That's the real question that I face as an anthropologist. And the way I approach that is to look at the active expression of this emotional connection in something that I can identify as a spiritual realm.

Contemporary philosophers, especially in the analytic tradition, call belief (and its mirror image, disbelief) a propositional attitude: there's this super-linguistic thing, the sentence `as such', independent of a particular utterance in a particular language, and when the believer believes, he takes a certain cognitive stance towards this thing. This propositional attitude might be connected with action -- I might form a certain desire based on my beliefs, and then act to satisfy that desire -- but it also might not -- I could just sit here, immobile, just believing, without taking any action in the world.

Contemporary analytic philosophers -- even theists -- often take religion to be sets of these propositional attitudes, as though Christianity or Hindu or Islam were, first and foremost, lists of things to believe and things not to believe. Then the fundamental questions of philosophy of religion and theology, on this view, are (a) Are we justified in holding these beliefs? and (b) What are the logical implications of holding these beliefs? And hence the so-called God Wars, which are basically just theists and atheists bickering over how to answer (a).

The problem with this view is that it's a rather rarefied abstraction, radically foreign to the way religion actually works in the lives of actual people. It's the view Daniel Dennett (who critiques religious belief from a kind of evo psych perspective) takes, and King rejects it:

The problem that I see with Daniel Dennett's view is that a meme is this little bit of something that's supposed to live abstracted away from human pairs, groups and individuals. It has a life of its own. For an anthropologist, that just doesn't make sense. It's like taking a gene out of its environment. It's like taking a brain out of its environment. I believe in dynamic relationships with real people having real feelings in real social groups. Sure, we have genes and brains, but we are in a co-creative relationship with all these things. We're not controlled by our genes or our memes or our brains.

So what do we have instead of this view of Religion as Propositional Attitude? A view, drawing on Martin Buber (beloved by many philosophers in the Continental tradition) and not just a little Hegelian, that we might call Religion as Community.

OK, I'm not going to ask whether you believe in God. But I do want to know, do you consider yourself religious?

I consider myself a spiritual person because of the way I feel when I'm around animals in particular, especially apes. The idea that I'm here in this world with other beings who are conscious in different degrees makes me feel part of a very big picture.

Do you think there's a transcendent reality out there?

Define transcendent reality.

Something that might be supernatural. A reality that we can't necessarily experience with our five senses.

I'm always open to that possibility. But that's veering really close to asking whether I believe in God. For me, it's a private question, but even more than that, it's a question that doesn't really reflect the depths of what we are as a species.

Are you saying it's just not an important question, whether there is a transcendent reality?

I think we have evolved to believe in transcendent realities. What we're about as a group of humans on this earth is believing that there's something more than us. It takes many different forms. I don't know that I'd focus on a single transcendent reality. I would say that because we're made to relate, we think and feel that we're in relationship with something bigger.

But isn't that the core question that everyone debates? Did human beings just make up the spirits and gods that they worship? Or is there really some other reality out there?

Yes, in my book I say that's a question I will not take up. I think my stance is rather beautiful because it's about "agnosis"; that means not knowing. That's where I would like to leave that question. But we as human beings have gotten to this certain place because of our evolutionary history.

For King, religious experience is the experience of being part of a community of sentient beings. This is an understanding of religion that does away with the epistemological and ontological disputes, and turns our attention to the important questions of ethics and politics (in the sense of `political philosophy', not `political science'). And, still more importantly, this is an understanding of religion on which all varieties of theist and atheist can come together. When we abandon the requirements of (dis)belief in a transcendent or supernatural reality, we recognise that we (along with non-human animals) are all part of one extended global community. The disagreements between the Muslim, the Christian, and the Secular Humanist fade, as we all come together to make our one community a place of justice, where all its members can flourish.

Irony is great

My, aren't we being loquacious today. It's almost like we're a real blog, with real readers.

But that's not the irony. I just wanted to share this observation by Rad Geek:

So it turns out that yesterday was officially proclaimed Milton Friedman Day in the state of California, by executive edict of the Governor. Because, really, what better way is there to honor a libertarian intellectual’s memory than to get a tax-raising, insurance-mandating government windbag to proclaim a day for praising his accomplishments and influence?

A Trip To See God

Here's an interesting story about a study connecting the active ingredient in psychotropic mushrooms and religious experiences. Pretty interesting, though Joanna reminded me of a case from law school involving Native Americans wanting to use peyote for religious purposes. I can't remember the specifics of the case or how the reasoning applied there would be affected by a study of this sort. Little help legal buddies?

PETA and sexism

The sujet du jour in the feminist blogosphere is PETA's sexist and racist advertising. The denunciation started as a reaction to PETA's State of the Union (NSFW) ad, in which an attractive twentysomething woman delivers animal rights platitudes while gradually stripping. For more on this ad, read Jill, who also gives us a sampling of other sexist ads. Over at Pandagon, Amanda has a post comparing PETA with Operation Rescue (a notorious anti-abortion group). It's this post I want to focus on -- below the fold.

Amanda gives six reasons why PETA and Operation Rescue are deeply similar. Some of these (eg, `They think women are just bodies to be manipulated for their ends instead of full human beings', or `Both have a strong, irrational loathing for science.') are absolutely unargued, and actually false if read too literally (I've known PETA members who were feminists and scientists and even one woman who was all three).

On the other hand, some of her points are spot-on:

Neither seems to care that much about the real life well-being of the objects of their advocacy as they claim to care. Anti-choice groups uniformly oppose contraception and sex education, which are the only proven methods of reducing the abortion rate overall. PETA has an unsavory history of liberating research animals only to have them die from the stress of their liberation.

Then we have this one:

Both prefer to advocate for “victims” that are silent and therefore can be projected onto. It’s no coincidence that people who are bereft of arguments and prefer sentimental whining and shock tactics prefer causes where the supposed victims are not able to articulate their own desires. Animals/fetuses give them their excuse to work out all sorts of other feelings, and not just disgust and anger towards female bodies, though that seems to be part of it.

I find this simply bizarre. Members of both groups believe that there's a large class of beings who (a) deserve more legal rights than they enjoy now, and (b) cannot advocate for those rights themselves. Operation Rescue members think that foetuses deserves a legal right to life, and they stage demonstrations and so on as a form of advocacy on behalf of foetuses, because the foetuses (being non-rational beings confined to wombs) cannot advocate on their own behalf. Similarly, PETA members think that non-human animals deserve certain legal rights, and they stage demonstrations and so on as a form of advocacy on behalf of those non-human animals because (lacking the ability to use language and understand our legal system, etc.) they cannot advocate on their own behalf. We might disagree with the premiss that these beings deserve these rights, but that's a totally different issue. Given that someone should advocate for these rights for these beings, and that they cannot do it themselves, it follows immediately that someone else is going to have to be an advocate for them.

Being an advocate on behalf of another is not a vicious activity, in and of itself, and it's certainly not automatically an act of projection. If projection is a vice, and if members of PETA or Operation Rescue are engaged in their advocacy for no reason other than an act of projection onto non-human animals or foetuses, then the problem here is the projection itself, not the advocacy per se. At most, the fact that these beings cannot be advocates for themselves might make them more likely to be projected upon, but I don't think this is true: what else are racism, sexism, classism, etc., but the projection of the interests and beliefs of the dominant class onto other classes?

Decreasing Fuel Consumption

Gregg Easterbrook has fallen for a disingenuous proposal by the Bush Administration to decrease fuel consumption. Of course, nobody here would do that. Anyway, the comments to that story are filled with opinions about how to best decrease fuel consumption. Not one to be left out of some good old fashioned bloviating, here's what I posted*:

As I understand it there's really no short term solution that's very palatable. Increasing CAFE standards affects new cars, but in order for that to affect the nation's fuel consumption those new cars need to trickle down to a sizable number of consumers, which takes years. Additionally, the cars which are the worst offenders for pollution, older cars, are more often driven by people who can't afford to buy a fancy new fuel efficient vehicle, meaning the cars most needing to be replaced will be the last cars replaced. Still, it's not a bad medium term tool to reduce consumption, particularly if the government offers tax incentives to purchasing fuel efficient/hybrid cars.

Increasing the gas tax would be a good short term method if fuel consumption were elastic. Because the US has such crap mass transit infrastructure ,which would give people an option other than driving if the prices got too high, fuel consumption isn't elastic. Additionally, increasing the price of a tank of gas by $5 isn't going to be prohibitively expensive to people who can afford an expensive SUV so it won't deter them from driving. People with higher incomes are also more likely to drive for nonessential trips, say, to soccer practices or on vacations. Increasing the gas tax will, however, increase costs for people who can't need to drive to work and who don't have lots of disposable income to begin with.
The other options (investing in alternate fuels and investing in mass transit systems) will take enormous investments from the government and will take years to pay off. Obviously, those are options we need to do, but it seems to me that increasing CAFE standards is the best medium term solution.

*Admittedly, this comment was a bit off the cuff and as I reread it here it's not phrased as well as it could be. I don't have time to fix it, however, so I suppose we'll all have to live with a bit of mediocrity.

Picture testing

Just testing the new Blogger's integration with Picasa. Here's a picture of the objectively best pizza in the world.

It seems to be working pretty well. The only thing it doesn't have is an easy way to tag posts. Here's a picture of a typical April afternoon on Notre Dame's South Quad.