Crescat Sententia

Moving Day:

At long last, Crescat Sententia has made its way to movable type. [This sentence deleted.]

Fax in your ballots:

This from the U.S. Embassy in Ulaanbaatar's mailing list (no, it's generally not a very interesting list, but they don't email things very often, so it's fine). What I want to know is, how often does this happen (and how easy is it for the dead to vote)?

California To Allow Its Citizens Overseas to Return Absentee Ballots by Fax

Due to the short time frame for the October 7th Statewide Special Election,California Secretary of State's Office has decided to allow faxed ballots from Citizens outside the United States who are covered by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) who are legal residents of California.

The order is effective for the October 7th Statewide Special Election only. It requires that the voter be informed of and agree to waive his or her right to a secret ballot. All faxed ballots must be received by county elections officials by the close of the polls (8:00 p.m.)on Election Day.

Citizens may receive the blank ballot via fax and return the voted ballot by fax. Citizens of California who desire to receive their absentee ballot by fax should provide their county election official with their complete commercial or DSN (military) fax number, including country codes necessary when dialing from the U.S. This can be done by faxing a Federal Post Card Application as a request using the Federal Voting Assistance Program's Electronic Transmission Service numbers listed below.

Citizens should be aware that by faxing the ballot they are waiving the right to secrecy of their vote for this election and must sign a waiver that will be included in the faxed ballot materials. A citizen returning the voted ballot by fax which was either received by mail or by fax should referto Appendix C of the 2002-2003 Voting Assistance Guide (located at http://www.fvap.gov/vag/pdfvag/appendix_c.pdf) for instructions and a cover sheet (which includes a secrecy waiver) for use when transmitting the voted ballot by fax. Citizens should be sure to fax the entire ballot including
any oath or signature required on the ballot-mailing envelope.

*See below for FVAP toll-free fax numbers. Voters must provide a return transmission fax number (including international prefixes) on all documents sent via fax.

Refer also to the August 21, 2003 FVAP News Release: "STATEWIDE SPECIAL ELECTION IN CALIFORNIA ON OCTOBER 7, 2003" located at http://www.fvap.gov/press/2003/06-2003.html.

Strange Bedfellows:

In response to what he terms my "Libertarian yawp" Russell Arben Fox counters with a communitarian/authoritarian yawp of his own. Interestingly enough, even though our political views seem to be "near perfect opposites," we share a lot of agreement:

There is perhaps no crazier presumption out there than the "conservative" one which holds that the statement "economic laissez faire is good" and the statement "cultural laissez faire is bad" are compatible.

Of course, Mr. Fox believes that conservatives should be "willing follow through on their cultural beliefs to a demand for stability and equity in the fabric of the economic order," and that economic redistributivists should "understan(d) that achieving fairness in society requires a collective concern for the moral prerequsites for said society." I vigorously dissent from the idea that either of these philosophies are desirable. But here's the point (I think) that Mr. Fox and I both want to make about political realignments--

I suspect each of us would be a lot happier if the other's philosophy was our chief political opponent. If our partisan struggles were a battle of the Libertarians against the Communitarians, I wouldn't be nearly so dispirited about politics as I am now. And I think that the authoritarian/libertarian alignment makes a lot more philosophical sense than our current crazy divisions, where most people mysteriously hold economic activity to some bizarre standard (or lack of standards) much different than social behaviour.

So, oddly enough I feel an odd kinship with the "authoritarian" even though I'd much rather have a liberal or a conservative in power than a communitarian. At least the authoritarian understands what it is we're arguing about.

Proof Positive:

And while I'm math-blogging . . . those of you in the Chicago area should try to spot Gwenyth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins as they make a film of David Auburn's wonderful play Proof (which is wonderful even for those who aren't math-lovers). The movie is being filmed in Hyde Park.

Paltrow already played the same role in a production of the play in London last year, which I was very sad to miss. I don't know whether the movie will adapt the play well, but it will probably be worth a look in any case.

Numeracy:

(Via Ed Cohn) Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler are both really really smart U of C profs, so when they write something together, I know it's worth reading, even if it's a review of a book I've never read. As it happens, they might actually induce me to go out and read the book-- Michael Lewis's Moneyball, which has gotten plenty of blogosphere coverage.

It's a great blow for stat-addicts and numerophiles everywhere.

The problem is not that baseball professionals are stupid; it is that they are human. Like most people, including experts, they tend to rely on simple rules of thumb, on traditions, on habits, on what other experts seem to believe. Even when the stakes are high, rational behavior does not always emerge. It takes time and effort to switch from simple intuitions to careful assessments of evidence. This point helps to explain why baseball owners have been slow to copy Beane's approach. But at least they are starting.... Statistics can do a lot better than intuitions; and relevant statistics can do a lot better than irrelevant ones, which tend to take on lives of their own....

Another Blow Against Literalism:

(Via How Appealling) One of literalism's brightest foes, Richard Posner, is at it again, in a decision on whether cash is "tangible" or "intangible" for purposes of a bankruptcy exemption:

Oakley makes much of the fact that currency is tangible in the literal sense: it can be touched (also tasted, felt, sniffed, etc.), unlike a bank account. Although the amount of money in a person’s bank account is evidenced by a piece of paper (if only a printout of a computer record— and anyway the electrons in a computer file are tangible in a conventional sense of the word), the money itself cannot be touched, tasted, etc. You cannot peek inside your bank account and see something any more that you can look under the hood of your car and see the torque or the horsepower. A bank account, a bond, a stock interest in a corporation, and other such financial assets do not have a physical or temporal site; they are to currency as an idea or a number is to a rock or an onion. They have, in short, a different ontology.... for what (very little) it is worth, Oakley has literalism on his side....

The distinction that we are emphasizing is between use value and exchange value. A napkin has value; you can wipe your mouth with it. Wallpaper has value; you can decorate your walls with it. People do not wipe their mouths with money or paper their walls with it. They value cash only because they can use it to obtain useful goods like napkins and wallpaper. They value money in the bank for the identical reason. Oakley points out that if you lose your checkbook, your bank account is intact, but if you lose cash, it’s gone. It may not be. If cash is stolen from your house, and you have burglary insurance, the insurance company will restore the money to you—but not in cash, instead by check, which you’ll be happy to accept in lieu of cash. If what was stolen from you was a $100 bill, you could not complain if the insurance company wrote you a check for that amount, rather than giving you a $100 bill; or if it gave you five $20 bills instead of one $100 bill—which shows that the piece of rag paper, the tangible embodiment of cash money, is no more indispensable than the stolen checkbook or credit card. In contrast, if your chair were stolen, the insurance company might replace the chair or give you a check for its value, but the one thing it would not do would be to give you cash equal to the value of the check and tell you, sit on this. And So On....

A Fetus Wronged:

A New York Appellate Court has ruled that:

A woman born with birth defects can sue IBM and chemical manufacturers for fraud even though she was not even born when the semiconductor manufacturer allegedly lied to her mother about workplace safety, a divided appeals court has found.

The majority of a 3-2 panel of the New York Appellate Division, 2nd Department, said it did not matter that the woman herself could not, as a fetus, have possibly relied on allegedly deceptive statements made by IBM.

I'm told this isn't actually anything very new, that people often sue over medical malpractice involving their own births, but I thought I'd throw it out there for the curious. Maybe the anti-abortion gadflies at Diotima will have further thoughts.

Slippery Slopes (not the Volokh kind):

The new Lemony Snicket book, The Slippery Slope is available in my Barnes & Noble. Lovers of this series of children's books (like yours truly) can rejoice.

Kinda Neat (navel-gazing):

We're one of the top ten google hits for "'group blog'." Thanks to whatever reader found us by said search.

Private Lives:

Oh it's the old dilemma. On the one hand, you don't think an author's sex life has anything to do with the quality of his work, and he's made plain that he doesn't want his sex life to have anything to do with his work either. On the other hand, you're blogging, and the guy's already made the news, and indeed decided to pre-empt the scoop. (Why let them do what you can do yourself?)

In other words, Chuck Palahniuk is gay, and who cares? (Here's Mr. Palahniuk telling everyone to calm down).

Link via bookslut.

A Plague on Both Their Houses:

Steve at Begging to Differ has a post that's mostly devoted to making fun of liberals, but it has an intro that could be a (contentious) post in itself. Steve writes:

I am frequently confronted with a person who claims to be neither liberal nor conservative. While I understand the reluctance to take on a label that does not fit, I think the American political class divides itself into two large factions loosely representing "left" and "right." Regardless of the labels you prefer, when push comes to shove, most of us take a side. This is as it should be. As Mason said to Dixon, "You gotta draw the line somewhere." You can't just hang there in the middle like a philosophical scrotum.

Well why not? On the one hand, I care a lot about things like law, and the judges I most admire (keeping in mind, of course, that I am to law school as a fetus is to external life) tend to be conservative appointees. On the other hand, I like gay marriage, freedom from morality laws, and so on. On a third hand, taxes are bad. On a fourth hand . . . it's the old libertarian's lament, and Steve's dashed it in a paragraph. But never fear. He also offers those of us in doubt a test. Well all right:

I have a handy test for determining whether you're a "liberal" or a "conservative." It's easy. Just answer these questions: between liberals and conservatives, which group annoys you more? Which group do you find it most satisfying to ridicule?

But this begs the question. If one of the two groups annoyed me more . . . well then I wouldn't be having such trouble, or (as Steve puts it) be hanging in the middle. I'm not annoyed by either group qua group I'm annoyed by factions within them. For example, I'm annoyed by:

People who think that Judeo-Christian morality should be the foundation of Western Civilization.

People who think that communities have the right to control their membership, or the self-regarding activities of their members.

People who think that letting other countries trade freely with American citizens is a privilege granted to those countries.

People who think we should punish bad countries by not letting Americans buy things from them.

People who think that violating some biblical commandments (by, say, being a Hindu) shouldn't be punished by law, but that violating other biblical commandments (like, say, being a homosexual) should be punished, because the bible says so.

People who think that that the law should reflect the Bible.

People who think that the rule of law is a crock.

People who think that A Theory of Justice lays out a coherent proof of distributive justice.

People who support laws banning interstate wine shipments.

People who support marijuana prohibition.

People who think that inequality is inherently indicative of exploitation.

People who support rent control.

People who support price controls.

Gun prohibitions.

Anybody who bans books.

Maureen Dowd. (At least, ever since the end of June)

And so much more...

So what's a Libertarian to do? The simple fact is that a lot of us don't fall neatly on either side of the line. When I'm with liberal friends, I'm conservative (most of the time). With conservative friends, I'm liberal. With moderates, I'm an extremist. On any given issue, of course, I can almost always pick a side (except when I really don't care). Between any pair of people, I can almost always pick the one that most annoys me. But what if I were faced with the entire party platforms of both "the right" and "the left" (whoever Steve thinks they are)?

I'd abstain.

[Incidentally, for somebody who hopes to get involved in politics of one sort or another (the judiciary, one dreams?), this might seem dispiriting. It's not; it's sort of liberating. If I get associated with some party or another it will be because on some issue I've decided to care deeply about, there's a chance to make a difference, ceterus paribus-- whether that's protecting fake child pornography or attacking wine shipment bans.]

Which is to say that while the rest of Steve's post is very good and highly worth reading, I think he's simply wrong about how one has to take a side in the larger war. In the individual battles, yes, push often comes to shove. But on the broader question of which fundamentally flawed program for society to accept, I see no reason to take sides.

UPDATE: Russell Arben Fox posts here, I respond here, and Stentor Danielson weighs in here.

Austen:

Got a Jane Austen fix? Want to combine it with your blogging fix? You have two choices. You can visit Austentatious (now blogrolled), the blog devoted entirely to Jane Austen, or you can wait for my sister, who will be adding such things (I suspect) to the broad tent of this blog.

Today's Recall Must-Reading:

Lawrence Solum is at it again, with the latest must-read post for all law nerds interested in the California recall. Read his post on Standards of Review and Transsubtantive Procedure.

A Brief Huzzah:

Sorry for recent blogging silence. This is the aforementioned catch-as-catch-can blogging. Just wanted to pat ourselves on the back for having been admitted to Oxblog's blogroll. We're "Alexis de Tocqueville," and in very good company.

Apologies, incidentally, for the trouble blogger's been giving our permalinks lately. But we have a scheme that should fix that.

Soon the year begins:

Oi... Chicago's fixing to start up again on Monday. Clumps of 1Ls in orientation have been asking me if I'm the comp tech guy; how many student run journals are on campus; if I'm on any of them; and if I know who designed the law school (no; 4; no; Eero Saarinen). Somehow I've managed to duck the new College students, though. In honor of the summer ending and Will heading off, here's what WFMT broadcast at 8:00am Monday morning. [Text lifted from Sudeep, but I doubt he'll mind.]

'Tis the last rose of summer,
Left blooming all alone,
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
No flower of her kindred,
No rose bud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes,
Or give sigh for sigh.

I'll not leave thee, thou lone one,
To pine on the stem;
Since the lovely are sleeping,
Go sleep thou with them;
'Thus kindly I scatter
Thy leaves o'er the bed
Where thy mates of the garden
Lie scentless and dead.

So soon may I follow
When friendships decay,
And from love's shining circle
The gems drop away!
When true hearts lie withered
And fond ones are flown
Oh! who would inhabit
This bleak world alone?

Friedrich von Flotow's opera Martha is a wonderful arrangement of this Irish poem by Thomas Moore, sad and beautiful enough to prompt roommates who unfortunately are in the habit of being up at such hours in the summer (year-round, I fear) to go in search of it. [The library computer won't let me try to make sure this works, but apparently you can listen to it here]

Also -- When he wasn't writing romantic and nationalist poetry, Moore satirized economic concerns -- Corn Laws, the Public Dept, and such. They're not quite to my taste, but check them out, they may amuse you.

The Recall is Back:

Don't bother reading the 9th Circuit en banc panel's Per Curiam decision reinstating the recall election. Lawrence Solum tells you everything you ever wanted to know. (And Rick Hasen also has valuable thoughts).

In Memoriam:

Pablo Neruda, 1971 Nobel Prize Winner and brilliant poet, has been dead thirty years to the day. If you speak Spanish, here's a section of La Tercera, a Chilean newspaper, devoted to Neruda with all the relevant links you could want.

I've always had a fondness for Neruda, even though he was a rabid socialist. I never found his political poetry particularly appealling, but his love poetry, personal odes, and the like I find incredibly moving. Normally I have a strong preference for some sort of rhyme, form, or formal meter in my poetry, but for him I make exceptions. So in honor of Pablo Neruda, here are an assortment of Neruda related quotes and observations, and then a few poems.

T.S. Eliot accepting his Nobel Prize (in 1948):

Poetry is usually considered the most local of all the arts. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, can be enjoyed by all who see or hear. But language, especially the language of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead of uniting them. But on the other hand we must remember, that while language constitutes a barrier, poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier. To enjoy poetry belonging to another language, is to enjoy an understanding of the people to whom that language belongs, an understanding we can get in no other way.

Robert Heinlein, in Friday:

French is quite suited to lyric poetry, more so than is English - it takes Edgar Allen Poe to wring beauty consistently out of dissonances in English. German is unsuited to lyricism, so much so that translations fall sweeter on the ear than do German originals. This is no fault of Goethe or Heine; it is a defect of an ugly language. Spanish is so musical that a soap-powder commercial in Spanish is more pleasing to the ear than the best free verse in English - the Spanish language is so beautiful that much of its poetry sounds best if the listener does not understand the meaning.

Richard Stern, in an interview with Euphony:

"As for Latin America and Spain, the poetic and narrative traditions are very different-- remove sangre, suerte, and muerte from the poems and they melt."

Czeslaw Milosz (Nobel 1980), in The Captive Mind:

Pablo Neruda, the great poet of Latin America, comes from Chile. I translated a number of his poems into Polish. Pablo Neruda has been a Communist for some ten years. When he describes the misery of his people, I believe him and I respect his great heart. When writing, he thinks about his brothers and not about himself, and so to him the power of the word was given. But when he paints the joyous, radiant life of people in the Soviet Union, I stop believing him. I am inclined to believe him as long as he speaks about what he knows; I stop believing him when he starts to speak about what I know myself....
Let Pablo Neruda fight for his people. He is wrong, however, when he believes that all the protesting voices of Central and Eastern Europe are the voices of stubborn nationalisms or the yelps of wronged reaction. Eyes that have seen should not be shut. Hands that have touched should not forget when they take up a pen. Let him allow a few writers from Central and Eastern Europe to discuss problems other than those that haunt him.

And here are a few Neruda poems. One a free verse poem that isn't nearly famous enough called "If You Forget Me," the others a few of his late sonnets. The first is translated by Donald Walsh, the rest by me. I won't reproduce the original Spanish here, but you can email me if you're curious.

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.



LXXXIX

When I die I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me once more:
to feel the smoothness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I, asleep, await you,
I want you to go on hearing the wind,
to smell the aroma of the sea we loved together
to go on walking the land that we walked.

I want what I love to go on living
and I loved you and sang of you above all,
so go on flowering, flower,

so that you reach all my love shows you
so that my shadow passes through your hair,
so that they know the reason for my song.


XC

I thought I was dying, I felt cold closing in
and for all that I lived, I left only you:
your mouth was my earthly day and night
and your skin the republic my kisses founded.

In that instant, books ended
friendship, treasures unflaggingly amassed,
the transparent house you and I built:
everything ceased to exist but your eyes.

Because love, while life accosts us,
is simply a wave taller than the others,
but oh, when death comes knocking

there is only your glance to fill such emptiness
only your clarity to resist extinction
only your love to shut out the shadows.


XCVII

One must fly nowadays, but where?
Wingless, planeless, fly doubtless:
Unfaltering steps have already fallen,
not lifting the feet of the traveler.

One must fly at every instant
like eagles, like flies, like days,
one must conquer the ring of Saturn
and establish new bells there.

Now shoes and paths are not enough,
now the ground does not suffice for wanderers,
now roots cross the night,

and you will appear in another star
relentlessly ephemeral
finally transformed into poppies.

Confirmed Bachelor:

Much to my shock, I've just learned that the term "Confirmed Bachelor," is supposed to refer to gentlemen who are homosexual (though they may well be non-practicing). I say this is a shock because I've always loved the phrase, and use it all the time, but never having been aware of the connotations the term bore.

Minors! of the type not discussed below:

The University of Chicago has begun to offer minors, but currently only in Germanic Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Slavic Languages and Literature (see p. 8 of the pdf avaliable under I. Liberal Education at Chicago: The Curriculum).

Some concentrations offer minors to students in other fields of study. (Requirements will be avaliable online in September under descriptions of the concentrations noted above.) A minor requires five to seven courses. Courses in a minor cannot be (1) double-counted with concentration courses or with other minors or (2) counted toward general education requirements. They must be taken for quality grades and at least half must be taken in residence on the University of Chicago campus.

This is a shock. We've never had minors. Triple-majors in econ, poli sci, and law,letters,&society, yes (well, perhaps not plural, but I've met one), and we're fairly snobby about saying that the degree is granted in one with requirements fufilled in the others.

The Recall:

Well I'm currently watching the streaming video of the 9th Circuit Recall Oral Arguments. You can join me and watch them here. You can also read Lawrence Solum's thoughts on the claim-preclusion here. You can also read Dahlia Lithwick's Slate essay here.

A Few Corrections:

Template hounds will note that we have a new blogger, my sister Leora Baude who will be posting soon, and also that Lileks has been added to my (and Amy's) blogroll. His post today is after my own heart:

I’ve never understood why nations with great cheese don’t have better armies. Right now to my left I have a plate that contains six chunks of Stravecchoio Grana Padano, each wrapped in a gossamer-thin scarf of prosciutto. Any Italian worth his mettle would take one bite, contemplate the perfection this combination represents, and decide that his nation should - no, must muster the forces required to repulse anyone who would take such cheese from his countrymen. Cheese this fine would cause armies to cross the Alps to have it; surely they demand armies sufficient to protect it.

Fetus Blogging:

An interesting post by Steve Dunn over at Begging to Differ about super-precocious kids, including a discussion of the youngest blogger. He notes several people who have been blogging since birth. He misses, though Maximus Stefanescu, who Kate Duree (who I met this summer in the Koch program) calls "The First Fetus with a Blog!!!". I haven't found any other blogging fetuses yet, and I can't verify Kate's statement for sure, but he looks like a strong contender to me.

20 Questions for Brian Weatherson:

This week brings yet another installment in our now quite recurrent feature-- 20 Questions. This week we've asked questions of Brian Weatherson at Brown University, who blogs both at Crooked Timber and at his own blog: Thoughts, Arguments, Rants. Below he answers questions about The Matrix, getting into graduate school, comments, the Boston Red Sox, and much much more. Enjoy.

1: What made you decide to start blogging?

I decided that it would be fun to put some of my sketchy thoughts online. At the first it was just reading notes, ideas for short papers and so on. It didn't really look like a blog at first, because it had hardly any links. Eventually I started writing comments about other blogs, political comments and so on, but the core idea - this is somewhere to write about what I'm thinking about - has remained.

2: Crooked Timber has javascript comments. The Volokh Conspiracy has none. Should all blogs have comments? How should a blog decide whether to have them?

I don't think all blogs should have comments. Some blogs just have one or two line entries, and comments don't seem that important in that case. But I think Volokh should have comments.

There's two bad things that can happen with comments. First there can be flame wars. I don't mind those too much. Occasionally good points can come out of those. What's worse is when you get a cycle of people trying to outdo each other for who can be the most over-the-top. I stopped reading Atrios's comments board when that kind of thing started happening too often. From what I hear about some of the right-wing comments boards they aren't much better, but I've never felt the best use of my time is to find out.

CT's comments are very good I think - I'd be very disappointed if we didn't have them.

3: Do you think it's accurate to describe Crooked Timber as the left's answer to The Volokh Conspiracy?

That's a bit grandiose, but I think Volokh was certainly part of the inspiration for CT. If people end up thinking of us as a lefty Volokh, I'd be pretty happy with how we're going.

4: You blog not only at Crooked Timber but also at your own blog-- Thoughts, Arguments, Rants. Why do you maintain a dual-blog presence, and how do you decide which of your posts to put in which place, and when-- if ever-- to duplicate?

I have this image of what kind of interests the readers of the two blogs have. TAR readers are usually philosophers, either grad students or professors, or occasionally undergraduates, so philosophy stuff goes there. CT readers (or at least some of them) are interested in ethics and political philosophy, and the important issues in other areas of philosophy, but they probably don't care too much about the details of where the variables go in various contextualist semantics for epistemic modals. So I'm probably not going to send posts on questions like that to CT.

Obviously there's some overlap there, not just about ethics and political but about issues relating to academic life generally. So those posts go to both.

I worry occasionally about lowering the tone too much on CT. I wouldn't use 'fcuk' as an illustration of the irrelevance of letter order to word interpretation on CT for that kind of reason. It's one of the things about a group blog - if you screw things up it affects other people so I'm a bit careful there.

5: Are group blogs the wave of the future?

They have some advantages. It's easier to take a week off without the blog collapsing. On the other hand, one big reason for TAR was to make sure I was constantly producing stuff, so having it be a group blog would defeat the purpose a little. Normally I could take a month or two off research without anyone noticing. That's a bit harder on a solo blog, so it's a good spur to work.

6: You admit to what some might call an unhealthy obsession with the Boston Red Sox. Why the Red Sox?

Don't know really. I was more interested in baseball than any other American sport because it's the only one I played as a kid (I was *really* bad by the way) so it was going to be some baseball team. I think I liked the romance of the stories about the Sox. And the fact that when I moved to the states the Sox had Pedro pitching for them didn't hurt either.

7: Following up on that, how well will the Sox have to do this year to preserve your emotional well-being?

Winning the World Series in 6 games would do. I don't think I'd really handle game 7 very well given the history.

8: How about how much jargon should philosophical writing contain? How should a philosopher balance his need for precision with the barriers jargon creates for the uninitiated but interested?

It depends on what you are writing for. If you're writing for other professionals then you should just use all the tools you've got. I wouldn't want economists to be backing off using complicated mathematical tools because economics needs to be accessible, and sometimes I think philosophy should be the same. On the other hand, and the analogy holds up well here, sometimes jargon can hide bad mistakes that you're making and clear writing can be useful in seeing that.

Some people can do innovative work while writing clearly enough that a mass audience can follow your arguments. Dave Chalmers's book on consciousness is probably the best contemporary example of that. But it's hard, and I think for most of us it's best to use everything you've got, including jargon, to get to the right answers and then try translating it back into accessible English without losing too much of the important detail.

9: What do you think of the philosophy in pop culture works with philosophical pretensions (like, say, The Matrix or Ender's Game)? Is learning philosophy from pop culture like trying to get water from a stone, or merely from, say, a sponge?

I don't think you're going to learn much philosophy from just watching or reading bits of pop culture. But I think those stories can be a really good way to see what's an issue in some philosophical debates. So some of the philosophy papers that are on the Matrix website are really good philosophical work, both in terms of quality and accessibility, because they show the reader some useful ways to think about what's going on in the movie.

It's interesting that the stories that seem to be the most useful don't go out of their way to be philosophical. In Matrix II there's all those philosophical speeches, which aren't really very good, and I suspect it will be much less useful at stimulating debate than the first movie. Once you start making speeches like that, you stop telling stories that can be interpreted in useful ways, and start telling people how to interpret them. That's much less useful because it's less flexible.

10: I'm going to pose to you a question your co-blogger Chris Bertram has asked; Is philosophy more like mathematics or like creative writing?

I think philosophy is *much* more like mathematics. I think most of the philosophical questions we try and consider have objective answers and collective effort can move us towards the right answers. Of course the areas I work in, especially semantics and philosophical logic, look more like mathematics than creative writing so take my views here with a grain of salt.

And we shouldn't think that philosophers don't need some of the same skills as writers. We obviously have to express our theories in writing, and there isn't a clear enough divide between form and content that we can ignore than fact when theorising. In some areas of philosophy, especially moral philosophy, you can't really do good work unless you have a decent understanding of human nature. And that kind of understanding is often associated with the very best writers. And the kind of imagination that leads to philosophical advance is also more of a writer's skill than a mathematician's skill. I still think the objective, truth-directed features of philosophy make it more like mathematical theorising than creative writing, but it's not like there's nothing in common with writing.

11: You're teaching a course on Time Travel; in your view, is time one-dimensional?

I think 'one-dimensional' was the wrong term for me to use in setting up the problems. Slightly more precisely, I think there is a single space-time continuum and there is a consistency restriction on time travel (if x is F at t then time travel can't make it the case that x is not F at t), which is what I originally meant by one-dimensional.

12: In your experience, are Australian universities appreciably different from American universities in any articulable way?

There's a bunch of little differences.

Australian students generally go to university in their home town, and they aren't required to live on campus, so dorm life is a much smaller part of the university experience than in America. (I think at Monash it's under 10% of the student body in dorms, but I'm not certain of that.)

The drinking age in Australia is 18, so there's *much* more booze on Australian campuses. Or, more precisely, there's much more overt drinking.

This isn't really striking about Brown, but many big courses in Australian universities have no distributional requirements, or very few distributional requirements. When I got to Brown and people were saying it's such a big deal that students can take whatever courses they want, I couldn't really figure out what the big deal was meant to be, because it's no different to what every Australian university does. But I guess it's very different to the American norm.

And the basic degree in Australia is 3 years. (Or at least it's meant to be 3 years. When I was going through people often took 4, 5 or 6 years. I hear it's more common to complete in regulation time these days.) The first year courses there are often as hard, I think, as sophomore courses here so the final result is fairly similar.

I'm not an undergrad here so I can't really tell, but my impression is that the combination of these facts means there is much greater sense of community over here. If you're taking the same courses, living together, moving through at the same time (the idea that you could specify your graduation date when you enroll in college would have struck most of my fellow students as an odd joke) you probably get to know people a lot better.

13: Having served on Brown's graduate admissions committee, what advice do you have for those who want to pursue an advanced degree in philosophy?

The four things I paid most attention to were GREs, grades in philosophy (I didn't pay much attention to grades in other areas), reference letters and the writing sample. The GREs and grades are used to make a first cut - separate out those you'll look at really closely from those you think are unlikely to make it. The sample and the letters are then used to split the good ones into who we accept and who gets left out.

One thing to look for, and it's hard to find this out discreetly, is some faculty will write glowing recommendations for absolutely everyone. Don't get letters from them, because people know what's going on and will discount what they say. There aren't many such faculty, maybe only a handful in the country, but letters do get calibrated to what the standard letter from Professor X says.

14: What do you think is the most persuasive objection to Logical Positivism, the claim that "a statement is meaningful if and only if it is either verifiable or tautological."

I think what positivism says about religious statements is just wildly implausible. If someone says "God exists" I think I know what they are saying, what the world would have to be like for their statement to be true or false, and so on. Positivists used to go around denying all of that. So Ayer would not say he's an atheist because atheists deny theistic statements and he didn't think they rose to the level of deniability. That's just very bizarre to me.

I also think it isn't clear that "a statement is meaningful if and only if it is either verifiable or tautological" is either verifiable or tautological.

15: Are there (true) a priori synthetic propositions?

I think some anti-sceptical propositions, like "I'm not a brain in a vat being deceived into thinking I'm writing an email" are synthetic a priori. The reasoning here's actually pretty simple. I know that proposition is true, but all my evidence seems to point towards it being false. (It's not like my evidence is as of watching a Sox game, which would conclusively show it is true.) So it must be knowable a priori. But it's clearly synthetic.

I should add that practically no philosophers believe in this kind of argument, but it looks pretty compelling to me.

16: There's a lot of (rather gloomy) advice out there for prospective graduate students in the humanities (I'm thinking here largely of Invisible Adjunct and those linked to her). How hard is it to get an academic appointment in philosophy, and is the risk generally worth the investment?

Compared to the horror stories, it's actually not that hard to get some philosophical job or other if (a) you're prepared to move far enough, (b) you are only looking for a single job, (c) you don't have excessively high standards for which kind of university you're going to, and (d) you went to a pretty good (top 20, or top 5 in your area) department. That might look like a lot of qualifications, but actually a lot of people meet those conditions. I think 80, 90 percent of people meeting those conditions get jobs.

Whether it's worth it depends a lot I think on how much you enjoy grad school. A lot of people I know love it, so it isn't really a high cost investment. If you're not enjoying grad school at all, it's unlikely you'll enjoy academia much more, after all what you do isn't that much different even though you get a bit more money, so you might want to reconsider what you're doing.

17: What sort of instruction, if any, do you think students should have in philosophy in high school (or elementary school)?

I think it would be good to start teaching ethical theory in high school. It's good to have students thinking about tensions between the different views they hold, and about how they could justify some of the foundational principles they accept. And I think a course in critical reasoning, some intro logic and maybe some intro probability stuff, would be very helpful. I suspect both of those kinds of courses provide just as much assistance for people wanting to be involved in civic life, as citizens in a democracy should be involved, as the kind of civics courses students actually take.

18: Philosophically speaking, what is vagueness, and why should people care about it?

Well, that's a contentious topic, but we can illustrate by examples. Yao Ming is tall. Danny DeVito is not tall. If you line up 10000 guys from Yao to DeVito in order of height, where is the first tall guy going to be? It's hard to say, because there's only 0.1mm or so between consecutive guys. It's easier to say who is the first guy whose height is above 1800mm, or at least it's just a measurement problem in finding out who that is. It's much harder to find the first tall guy is. We'll say in those cases it is vague where the boundary between 'tall' and 'not tall' is.

I think it's important because there are some interesting arguments that the existence of vagueness should make us reconsider what the right logic for natural language arguments is, and because it makes us reconsider what kinds of entities go into the semantics for natural languages. But generally I think most things to do with formal properties of languages are interesting, and vagueness fits into that category.

19: Do you read fiction? If so, what sort of fiction do you read?

Not as much as I'd like to. Recently I've been alternating between reading contemporary stuff (Zadie Smith, Chuck Palahnuik, etc) and classics (Homer, Cervantes, etc.)

20: When not blogging, what do you do for fun?

Watching the Red Sox! I like to travel a lot, but that's an expensive habit.

When not on the road I try reading and writing lots of philosophy, and the blog has been a great help in helping that habit along.

Loose Ends (Old Friends?):

A fair warning to readers that blogging will be catch-as-catch can (at least from me) over the next week or so. I'll be hosting a friend from out of town, then making a trip to Chicago and flying from there to England for the year. I suspect that blogging will continue at my usual sporadic pace, but just in case a random weekday passes by, you'll know what's going on. I spent today learning to ride a bicycle (I know, I know) and this evening excavating my boxes of books from my closet and trying to get them on shelves or at least into neat stacks. I shipped about 300 pounds of books home from school at the end of the year and they were sitting in rather intimidating boxes in my closet. Now they can be in slightly less-intimidating piles.

In any case, in the process of doing that, I found two of my books of poetry that will give me the chance to tie up a few poetry-related loose ends from some of my recent posts. The first has to do with memorization, which I blogged on here in response to Kathleen's post here. I mentioned there a passage by W.S. Merwin from the introduction to his translation of Dante's Purgatorio. Here it is:

For in the years of my reading Dante, after the first overwhelming reverberating spell of the Inferno, which I think never leaves one afterward, it was the Purgatorio that I had foudn myself returning to with a different, deepening attachment, until I reached a point when it was never far from me; I always had a copy within reach, and often seemed to be trying to recall part of a line, like some half-remembered song.

The other poetic loose end is an Elizabeth Bishop poem. Last Wednesday I posted a very good villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop (which Eugene Volokh linked to!). While I think that poem is really, really, good, as is her "Sestina," I have always had a soft spot in my heart for another poem of hers, though it's not nearly as popular. Maybe it's some subjective emotional connection (gasp), maybe just something about the lilt and rhythm, or maybe it's because in less than two weeks I'll be leaving the country for much longer than I ever have before. In any case, I present Elizabeth Bishop's Questions of Travel:

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

Eesh, people:

Apparently, Northern Virginia/DC is still having problems getting things back together post-Isabel. 500,000 still without power; Fairfax County's recommendation to boil water before drinking has only now been lifted; 700 traffic lights, primarily in the district, still down. That wouldn't be a bad record, had they faced a hurricane, but this damage was wreaked by winds of 30 mph with gusts to 50 mph, combined with 2" of rain. That's not even barely a tropical storm (minumum: sustained 34 mph), much less a Category 1 hurricane (min.: sustained 74 mph). How is it that these folks could handle last winter's blizzards with only a few days of schools closed for incliment weather, yet they can't take this? [No sympathy, please, from those in NYC who not-long-ago congratulated themselves for not rioting during a weekend of no power. Right.]

Andrew: now that was a storm.

Child Sex and Aged Wisdom:

Number 2 Pencil has a post about the rather unusual doings of a 13-year-old girl on her class field trip. The girl performed oral sex on one of her classmates on the bus, and her mother is now fighting the girl's expulsion on the grounds that the school wasn't clear enough in its policies that oral sex was not allowed.

This prompted Nick Blesch to retort with a pretty strongly-worded post called "Shame on Me? I Don't Think So." This, in turn, caused a bunch of the commenters to basically roast Nick over coals-- especially Daryl Cpbranchi, who wrote:

Performing a sex act in public is nothing to be ashamed of? Nick, when you grow up and have kids of your own, come back here and read what you just wrote. I promise you'll regret every electron.

and

Nick grew up in the Clinton years. 'Nuff said.

Of course, most of the criticism took the form of attacks on Nick's age and relative in-experience with life, rather than substantive disagreement with his original post, which was actually pretty interesting. This provoked another response from Nick on ad hominem attacks.

So I think there are three interesting questions for debate here. Firstly, is the mother's substantive point groundless? That is, what sort of anti-sex policies did a middle school have? Given how rare middle school sex is believed to be (regardless of whether middle school sex is good or bad) how explicit should a middle school have to make its policies? Of course, we don't have a lot of information on the school's policies, so it's hard to pursue the empirical inquiry very far.

Secondly, (and this is the point where Nick first got in trouble) is it a bad thing for 13-year-olds to engage in consensual sex acts with one another? Those interested in the topic should read Judith Levine's book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (I have a short review here). I think there's room for serious debate on this point, which I'm a little worried about rehearsing at length. The public nature of the acts here and the possible role of peer pressure make this a tough case for even a libertarian to love. On the other hand, I knew several people who had sex in middle school (on the field trip bus, in fact . . .) and while none of them are my close personal friends, I don't think early exposure to sex with their peers ruined their lives, or even affected their lives that dramatically. (Which is not to say that there aren't horror stories one could find . . .)

Which brings us to the third question. As Nick puts it:

Why do people fall back onto the "I'm older and so I know more" arguement? Why is it that someone would think my thoughts don't deserve a response beyond "he's a product of the times?" Telling me (effectively) that my thoughts are meaningless drivel is, to say the least, a cop out.

[Literary note: Here's Ayn Rand (from The Fountainhead)on the topic:

"When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least say. It's taken for granted that he has no voice and the reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced-- since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. . . though how in hell one passes judgment on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I'll ever understand. However that's how it's done." ]

I'm particularly sensitive to Nick's complaints because I, too, am pretty young. Old enough to legally drink, but only barely. I try not to advertise the fact that I'm just an undergraduate student, because I find responses like the one Nick has met to be so unhelpful. Of course, sometimes "wait until you have children" just might be true. If so, of course, the proper response is "well, I guess I will, but I won't be convinced until then." (Turnabout being fair play).

I wonder, though, whether people are actually using Nick's age to dismiss his arguments, or whether it's the other way round. Maybe people read something provocative that they flatly disagree with, and then come up with a quick excuse for why the speaker can be easily ignored. I don't know any of the folks involved other than Nick, so I really have no idea whether I should cast aspersions on their intellectual honesty.

How does it end? With a few words to parties on either side of the age/ad-hominem divide. Dear Elders, please remember that being wiser and older than we are doesn't inherently make you more persuasive; arguments are won on the merits and not by fiat. The people whose opinions we most respect (and therefore the people we most respect) are those who judge our arguments by their quality and not their pedigree. Besides, if you really are older and wiser than we are you ought to be able to tell us why we're wrong rather than just insisting we'll agree with you in ten or twenty years. Dear Youngsters (myself included), please have some humility. Being older doesn't always mean being wiser, but neither does being young. A lot of people do change their minds about things as they grow older, think about them more, have more experiences and weather better and different arguments. You might be one of them. This is especially true where things like children and marriage are concerned. Remember that ten years ago you had barely discovered girls/boys. [Incidentally, this doesn't mean that what parents think about children's rights is entitled to more deference than what children think. But it does mean you should be mindful of the fact that you're no more of an impartial observer than they are.]

Rhodes Scholars- Megalosers?:

Okay, so this Andrew Sullivan post probably doesn't really need much refuting:

To my mind, the most important thing about Clark is that he was a Rhodes Scholar. Almost to a man and woman, they are mega-losers, curriculum-vitae fetishists, with huge ambition and no concept of what to do with it.

But just in case you found that vaguely persuasive... here are just a few men and women who are Rhodes Scholars, yet aren't mega-losers, c.v.-fetishists, or ambitious people with no concept of what to do with it. Given that almost all of my readers have some political persuasion or another, and given that these choices cover the political gamut, I assume that none of my readers will agree with all of these choices, but surely they will find enough agreement to agree that Sullivan is being just silly.

President William Jefferson Clinton

University of Chicago Professor Dennis Hutchinson

U.S. Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind)

U.S. Senator Russel Feingold (D-Wis)

Former Senator J William Fulbright, creator of the Fulbright scholarships

Blogger Josh Chafetz

Supreme Court Justice David Souter

Librarian of Congress James Billington

Astronomer Edwin Hubble

Robert Penn Warren, author, poet, and man of letters

I rest my case. Email me if you want more examples.

Comment-ary:

So one of the great ironies of my anti-comment post yesterday is that I found a long retort (to me) in somebody else's comments. Your guess is as good as mine as to why the commenter, Beldar, didn't send me an email with these thoughts. Anyway, I reproduce them:

Thank you, I believe I will!

Will's more than just a little bit elistist, he's actually being very close-minded. I've been blogging less than two months, and I seriously doubt my blog is on his reading list. If he reads something interesting I've written in a comment on a blog he reads, he might click on the link to see what I have to say on my own bandwidth (which tends to be many, many times longer than what I ever leave in anyone's comments).

The bit about "I have to read fifty dumb comments to avoid looking stupid for not having found the three good ones" is easily answered. If you don't care how you look, don't read them. If you do, do. Nobody makes you read the comments. Skim. Skip. Study. Whatever butters your bread.

Which brings me to my last point: On his blog, it's his rules, including the decision whether to offer comments or not. On yours, friend Curmudgeon, it's your call, and on mine, mine. One of the things I like about TypePad, for instance, is that it lets me turn comments on and off on a per-post basis, which is handy. Tacitus runs ones "open thread" per day, on which the comments become insanely long, but that's another method for dealing with it. There are many paths to Nirvana, grasshopper. But only you can choose yours.

I have a thought in response to each paragraph. Firstly, I've got nothing against people who use a comments section to say "Hey, I've got a response over at "blahblah," take a look," Or even those who just reproduce their posts in comments-text as well. That's a way of tightening the web, and fairly unobstrusive, but also doesn't bury pearls amidst muck.

Second, here's the trouble with having to read fifty dumb comments to find the three good ones. I like good comments and feedback. I want to know what people think about my posts, and I want intelligent commentary. But it's hard to find intelligent commentary amid a hundred voices. So what I'd particularly like is for those who already have loyal readerships to make it easy for me to follow them-- to post responses to other people's articles on their own blog (like I'm doing now). As it stands, I skim a whole lot of comments. I'd really rather not, and my eyes hurt. Thus the plea.

Finally, yes each blogger's blog is his own fiefdom (though this blog, of course, is run by a semi-democracy). I'm not quarrelling with that, and I know that I can only affect my own blog. That's why I've framed this request as what it is-- a request. I'm telling you what I'd like to see people do, and giving all of my reasons why I'm much happier reading blogs without comments than those with, and why I'm happy that bloggers like Eugene Volokh seem not to use anybody else's comments at all. If you think my reasons are insufficient, more power to you. But if you've never thought about it before, or if you'd like a little feedback, well, I propose ditching your comments-- if on a trial basis only.

Wonderbread:

(Via Oxblog): If I actually read The Corner on a regular basis, I would think about boycotting it just for these pro-Wonderbread comments.

Wonderbread is simply not "an often overlooked treat." I have no objection to people who eat it because it's cheap or easily available or useful for blowing one's nose, but this is one of those small areas of taste where there is a right answer.

Losing Battles:

The New York Times, on copynorms.

Enough Already:

[Warning. The tone of this post is just a wee bit less judicious than the tone the author usually tries to adopt. He apologizes in advance.]

All right already. I'm a little bit loathe to resurrect the comments war, but here's a recap for the blessedly benighted. Comments are those little links at the bottom of some people's posts (not on this blog) that let a whole bunch of people post their thoughts and responses to each post. Curmudgeonly Clerk has spoken against comments here and here. Begging to Differ has voted against them here. I have ranted against them here (and here(and here)) . Matthew Yglesias has tentatively defended them, and Jivha has done so aggressively, wondering whether anti-commenters were narcissists. Balasubramani's Mania and All The Sins of Mankind are pro-comment as well. CalPundit also threw in a few observations here and here. If you want to get my basic arguments, just read my posts here and here.

Why, you rightly ask, am I dredging up this painful topic? Because I want them to go away. That is, I'm asking bloggers who have comments to please consider getting rid of them. Please. Okay, I'm begging. But why?

I think comments-sections divided into two categories. Those that get a lot of comments, and those that don't. For those that don't get many comments, it seems clear that the benefits and the costs are both pretty slight. But I think that the costs outweigh the benefits. The benefits are close to non-existent. The occasional lonely poster could just as well email the author (who can use his editorial judgment to decide whether to update the post or not), or could post something on his or her own blog. I read a lot of blogs in a day (as do most bloggers, I suspect) and I like to respond to other people's posts, but I get tired of always clicking on the comments scripts to see what other people are saying-- I'd rather the blogger made the editorial decision him or herself. Further, I think comments are just plain un-aesthetic.

For big comments-sections the decision is harder. Some blogs, like Matt Yglesias's have basically developed self-sufficient communities of commenters (not unlike fungal parasites). But these upset me too. When I respond to a post on Yglesias's blog, or Crooked Timber, I don't feel that it's fair for me to post back to the post without reading the comments first. But because the comments are unedited and voluminous, wading through them is a great chore. I'm sure the Crooked Timberites get so much traffic that they don't care much about my links anyway, but there definitely have been posts I just didn't bother to write because the thought of reading 50 stupid comments just in case there were 3 good ones in there was too draining.

And what about the 3 good ones? Well, I've noticed that the most productive and useful comments are almost always from people who also blog, and interestingly, almost always from people whose blogs I already read. So if Jacob Levy hadn't made his comments about Mystique in Yglesias's comments section, I would have seen them anyway when he wrote a blog post about them. And the occasional non-blogger with great insights will probably be willing to send an email to the post's author (or to another blogger) happy enough to post the thing. I think the number of people who are both insightful enough that they have productive things to say (that is, things I want to read) and lazy enough that they wouldn't say them without a comments function is very small.

The whole reason I read Daniel Drezner rather than, say, jack schmo, is that I want to know what Drezner has to say. But then sometimes perfectly reasonable bloggers, like Kevin Drum or Jacob Levy or the Crooked Timber folks, go comment in Drezner's comments so I have to sift through the things for them. Why can't they just write in their own blogs, so that I don't have to wade through dozens of posts to find their insights?

I'm thinking back to J.H.Huebert's inaugural blog post, where he replied that blogs were nothing more than message boards. I disagreed:

Blogging brings the masses to the "message boards" precisely because it provides an easy way to filter out the wheat from the chaff (namely by typing in "http://volokh.com"). Sure the vast majority of blogs are dumb, but you don't have to read the vast majority of blogs. The trouble with old message boards is that it's WAYY too hard to read only the popular posts, or only the good posts, or even focus only on the posts by authors you truly respect. Blogs are better precisely because thread-following is made so much harder. Editorial judgment, ironically, is the watchword that helps keep the marketplace of ideas from drowning in its own spam.

Incidentally, a version of this argument is part of the root of my opposition to "comments".

I know this sounds terribly elitist, and-- well-- it is, at least a little bit. Blogging has an element of meritocracy to it, and that's part of what makes it work. Emails, updates, technorati and trackbacks do everything comments want to, only better. So I'm issuing a crusade. No, a request. No, an outright plea. If you have a comments section, please try deleting it-- just on a trial basis-- and see how you like it. And if you run a blog of your own, please stop posting interesting comments in other people's comments sections. Either double-post, by posting the comments again on your blog, or just post your thoughts on your blog and put a link to them in the comments section. Please.

My eyes have been hurting when I spend too many hours on the computer, so it would be really nice if I could stop having to read so many silly little javascript windows. And drop me an email to let me know what you think (or to let me know about your relevant blog posts).

Committed to Memory:

Kathleen Moriarty blogs on memorization. Kathleen's basic question--

Memorisation of poetry is something that sort of went out with the druids. In our written world, is memorisation still necessary?

And her answer:

Maybe. For poetry, I think it can be easier to say it from memory rather than reading it. It makes it easier to ge tthe rhythm right when you don't have to think about saying it. "This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper." doesn't work when you read it.

On the other hand, memorisation also encourages the sort of rote reading that you hear so often, people droning on about poems that don't understand. Sometimes reading the poem makes the reader think about it a little more.

I have Kathleen's sympathies for poetry memorization, which might be related to the fact that like her, I think I'm pretty good at it. I memorized my favorite poem, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, two years ago, and still say it to myself on a semi-regular basis. (I've found, incidentally, that when walking the streets of Chicago's Hyde Park at night, if you babble T.S. Eliot in a moderately-loud voice people give you a comfortably wide berth.) But I think Kathleen's defense of memorization doesn't go far enough.

Memorization didn't just go out with the druids, it went out with the bards. Czeslaw Milosz writes that the bardic tradition lasted much longer in Eastern Europe ("In Central and Eastern Europe, the word 'poet' has a somewhat different meaning from that which it has in the West. There a poet does not merely arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a 'bard,' that his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of interest to all the citizens."). There, I suppose, it might have been more necessary and more important that words be able to travel from mouth to mouth without leaving a damning paper trail. I think the lack of bards in the western world is a serious loss, and that the various groups that take their social place-- rock stars, bloggers, lawyers, and novelists-- leave sadly gaping gaps.

And memorization of poetry is important, I think, even for poetry that isn't of great social importance. Poetry is often a quest for immortality, an attempt to (as Tom Stoppard says), "get the right ones in the right order . . .(to) make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead."

My feelings on this are grounded largely in subjective preference and experience more than anything else. When I write it's often by copying down various lines, turns, and phrases that have been fluttering about in my head. Sometimes I keep a pen and paper to write these things down. More often I just try to remember them. I used to write stories and essays by writing a first draft blind, then destroying it and writing it again from scratch, under the theory that all the lines and ideas worth keeping would be the ones that would stick. And the books and novels that I'm most attracted to are the ones that have lines, passages, and phrases that I simply can't help but remember. My favorite works are those that impress themselves upon me, that force themselves, unbidden, into me like a maddeningly addictive pop song.

And forced memorization, as Ed Cohn notes in Kathleen's comments, can be a terrible, terrible thing. Students should never (in my opinion) be forced to memorize a specific work of the teacher's choosing. That destroys the charm of memorization, the strange metaphysical resemblence it bears to possession and love. But if I were a high school english teacher (and you never know) all of my students would be required to memorize something, whether the opening passage to a book that had captured them, lines from a meaningul poem, or the Gettysburg Address. But part of the experience that makes memorization so valuable is the act of choosing what to memorize. [Sometimes, of course, students make bad choices. Like Kathleen, I memorized an e.e. cummings poem in school-- a nonsensical one about 5 derbies with men in them that I've thankfully forgotten. I did it mostly because I hated the assignment at the time and wanted to be contrarian by memorizing the worst poem I could. The activity filled me with a loathing of cummings for several years (until my love for him was reawakened by a high school girlfriend); I still think 75-90% of his poems are pretty terrible, but I now realize that I shouldn't have picked one of the terrible ones.]

Which is to say that for those who love words, and love trying to figure out how to get the right words in the right order, memorization is-- I think-- part and parcel of the entire package of reading and writing. Things you like will stick in your mind and then become a part of the way you write as well. And to the extent that poetry succeeds at communicating and shooting from heart to ear to heart, it's often because of just a few lines or fragments repeated at the right moment. (In the introduction to his translation of Dante's Purgatory, W.S. Merwin movingly describes the experience of sitting on a London train while a few cantos of Purgatory ran through his head; I'd quote the passage but it's currently buried among the hundreds of pounds of books in my closet.) The most poetic moments in life tend to occur when it's inconvenient or impossible to reach for one's copy of Dante or Neruda or Shakespeare.

Sure dry recitation from memory can be terrible-- but the people who drone on uncomprehendingly from memory will be just as droning and just as uncomprehending with paper in front of them, if not worse. Memorization isn't a sufficient condition for relating emotionally or intellectual to poetry, and it probably isn't a necessary condition, but it's definitely a helpful one.

A Minor Hurrah:

Cryptic Elliptic Susan Ferrari has ditched her comments. A small victory for the forces of good and light.

Darlington's Fall:

I've just finished Darlington's Fall (mentioned below), and I thought it was extremely good-- though I can't quite decide to classify it as one of my favorite poems or one of my favorite books, because I can't quite tell whether I like it more for its language or its story. In any case, as usual a bunch of my favorite quotes from the book are here (including the last stanza, which I think is excellent, but which I won't reprint here for fear of spoiling the book for any of you who might be thinking of reading it). A few choice (non-consecutive) stanzas ensue:

(You know you're a true entomologist
If--if on those infrequent but
Not-rare-either occasions when your fingers climb
Down past the sealed door of your navel to form a fist
Around their brother-limb, you find yourself wondering
Sudenly, with dizzying fervor, exactly what
It would be like, like the dragonfly,
To mate and-- over riffled streams, over thundering
Flumes, over lily-pad-paved ponds, over high
Seas of silky corn-- to fly at the same time.)


When he can bear to think of her at all, he'd rather
Think of what he likes to think of
As the last time the two of them made love:
A pair of kids, nothing more, just a you and a me
(As the song would have it), a he and a she,
Rolling at night in a private sleeper car,
Bound for that ocean licking at the far
End of the continent (through woods where Kodiak bears
Waken to train whistles in their hillside lairs),
Two homesteaders in the land of each other.


(You know you're a true entomologist
If-- if after some thirty, dirty years
Of digging into buggy lives, one day, rereading
Fabre, you come upon the phrase, "Still damp
With the humours of the hatching," and your every limb
Prickles anew, with longing, as when, when you were just
A little boy, you read, in The Three Musketeers,
"Milady let one of those looks fall upon him
Which make a slave of a king"--and yearned for the stamp
Of a glance so brutal, beautiful, overriding.)


(He often thinks-- can't quite manage to refrain
From thinking-- of all the coarse desire she must stir,
How raptly the males in town must lay eyes on her
During her daily rounds: buying a pork cop,
Or a few onions, or--indulging herself-- a day-
Old cinnamon bun . . . It's the closest he comes to a real
Hatred of his fellowman,
pondering the way
She rouses in them the longings she makes him feel:
The urge to touch her neck, drop his face on her breast, drop
Her clothes to the floor, one by one till none remain.)

Publication and Privacy:

Venkat Balasubramani poses an interesting question for those of us (like me!) hotly interested in the intersection of blogging and etiquette. How private are emails, especially emails to bloggers? (Go to Balasubramani's blog for the controversy that sparks the original question). As my loyal readers might expect, I turn to Miss Manners for guidance on this.

As it happens, I think the blogospheric consensus gets this about right. On the one hand, Miss Manners rightly instructs that letters (and affairs) are the joint property of the two people engaged in them. Therefore to be strictly proper, one shouldn't reveal the contents without the consent of the other person involved. On the other hand, Miss Manners acknowledges that the publication of this kind of information is a distinct possibility, that it isn't a very serious offense, and that one should therefore be a little circumspect in who one says what to. As she puts it:

The only safe place to keep damaging letters is in the fireplace, between burning logs

And also,

People who unburden themselves freely cannot then become indignant when others allow this information to pass into their own conversation. With each passing, the obligations become weaker. At the very least, one should assume that one's confidants indulge in pillow talk, and these days it is hard to know how many pillows may be involved.

In other words, there's a balancing test involved, and the balancing decision isn't appeallable to a higher authority except in cases of clear error. The more intimate the connection, the less anonymous the publication, and the more public the forum, the less acceptable the telling is. Publishing love letters with names in a widely-read publication would probably be the worst offense. Forwarding an email from an unknown person to a close friend would be the most obviously acceptable.

And blogospheric practice seems to accord with this sense of nuance and blurry lines. I, for example, try not to post emails without asking the person who emailed me for their permission. But I'm more likely to ask permission from my close friends (partially because the blog-related and the private are more likely to become blurred) than I am from those who I know only in an online situation. I take the warning "Off the record" very seriously, and can't think of a case where I'd violate that admonition by posting the "off the record" information, but I might let a trusted friend read such an email over my shoulder.

In other words, proper men and women should try to keep their correspondents happy, if for no other reason that people are much more likely to speak freely to you if they think you're the sort of person to whom one can do safely. This doesn't mean absolute fidelity to the principles of secrecy-- bloggers are journalists after all, so a little muck-raking is okay, but it must be done with judicious discretion, and with the acknowledgment that anybody who you publish against their will is unlikely to say anything they don't want published to you again.

And on the other hand, we should all be realistic. This is the internet, and many bloggers don't even try to meet the aforementioned standards of proper men and women. So be aware that unless one attaches express disclaimer (and a little email signature isn't going to do it), and even with a disclaimer nothing is certain, that anything newsworthy, noteworthy, scandalous or scurrilous that one says is unlikely to remain private for long.

Pryor:

Though the permalinks are broken, Southern Appeal has up excerpts from a recent speech by Alabama Attorney General and Filibustered Appellate Court Nominee William Pryor.

Now, I disagree with pretty much everything in the speech myself-- I don't "consider the Ten Commandments to be the cornerstone of law for Western civilization," (only three of which, at my last quick count, were currently illegal where I live). I don't believe I have "'a moral obligation to obey the commands of our government,' except when doing so would require us to 'violate a Christian duty or moral obligation.'" [I don't, for example, think it's immoral to smoke marijuana for one's own pleasure in the privacy of one's own home, but I also don't think it's a moral obligation or Christian duty to do so.] Of course, I also don't share the religious conviction that undergirds Pryor's speech. Nonetheless, it's interesting stuff, and an interesting insight, I think, into Pryor. Worth reading.

Excuse and Explanation:

Incidentally, I apologize for the slower-than-usual posting rate the past couple of days. I've been reading a book I just ordered off of Amazon-- no, I haven't gotten a pre-release copy of Quicksilver-- called Darlington's Fall.

It's really really good, but it's a little strange. I mean, how do you tell people (with a straight face) that you're reading this fascinating verse novel about a young lepidopterist in Indiana? I haven't found a way to do it without sounding really pretentious, which is unfortunate because the novel/poem is actually quite a smooth read. The author is my current obsession, Brad Leithauser (who John Updike regularly compares to that other lepidoterist's literary hero-- Vladimir Nabokov). Leithauser says in the introduction:

It's long, I know, for a poem (5,708 lines) but short for a novel (46,265 words, my computer tells me), and a novel's what I aimed to create here. I looked for dailiness and rootedness-- for verse with the firm calendars and solid place names, the ingrained habits and the incremental persuasions and erosions, which the novel has typically found congenial. I wanted specificity. Although all characters within these pages-- including the narrator-- are fictions, in nearly every case I've tried to get the science right. If the people are fabricated, I'd like to think the insects are genuine.)

A word about method, for those interested in verse mechanics. Having permitted myself rhymes that fall catch-as-catch-can, I vowed that nearly every line would have an exact, or perfect, rhyme. I 've eagerly made exceptions, though, for those irregular rhymes I often prefer to "perfection": especially rime riche (prays/praise) and pararhymes or rim rhymes (please/applause)...

And, what would a blog post about poems or books be without the obligatory Baude pull-quote? Here's one of the opening stanzas, where young (7-year-old) Russ Darlington is trying to catch a frog, "the jewel of the world":

Hands are hungry and with hungry hands
You must work extra hard to keep
Your wits about you, to be slow and quick
At once, as the situation demands.
(When you're so full of wanting, it's no small trick.)
Boil down all the trees in the forest until
They form a single cup of resin, still
You would never concoct a green
So bright, so dark, so dizzyingly deep
As this, the purest color he has ever seen

Even though I like the beginning of this stanza more than the end, and it's really two separate ideas, I quote the whole thing so you can get an idea of Leithauser's rhyme scheme. Every word has a rhyme-mate in the stanza[hands/demands; keep/deep; quick/trick; until/still; green/seen], but the order is, as he says, "catch-as-catch-can". It's a scheme he uses in quite a few of his poems, actually, though he's also been known to adhere to strict forms or ignore them altogether. (One of his more famous poems is a 14-syllable, 14-line, 13 word sonnet called "Post-Coitum Tristesse").

Anyway, just an excuse by way of explanation about the slower-than-usual posting rate. Things will pick up soon.

A Fad Continues:

The online interviewing fad continues. Another Rice Grad has an interview with the CEO of Trupoker.com. Definitely worth reading for anybody interested in the game. (Incidentally for interviews with famous bloggers look to the 20 Questions sidebar on the right. For links to Howard Bashman's interviews with various judges, click here. Also, don't miss Kevin Drum's Paul Krugman interview.)

(Sigh):

So a few weeks ago, Dear Prudence egregiously suggested that wedding hosts could demand money from their guests. This is wrong, not only because wedding hosts shouldn't be asking for gifts (of any sort) from their guests (presents are supposed to be "emotionally motivated") but also because wedding hosts shouldn't be presuming the existence of these gifts at all. Luckily, Prudie recognized the error of her ways and issued a retraction.

Sadly, Prudie has received a rather sickening firestorm of counter-retraction email from her readers, all of whom strongly believe that it's okay to ask for cash in one's wedding invitation. As I've said before, it's not. It's just not.

[This is not to say that just giving cash is impermissible. Like so many things in polite society, it's perfectly acceptable to give freely, just gauche to ask for it.]

Research:

Open call to readers. What drug policy blogs do you know about, or bloggers who blog about drug policy a decent fraction of the time? Please send me anything you can think of.

P.S. . . Keep your eyes peeled for an exciting entry into the blogosphere. That's all I can say for now.

Quote of the Day:

From Judge Alex Kozinski's opinion in United States v. Bonas:

(T)his is not a Harry Potter novel; there is no charm for making a defendant’s constitutional rights disappear.

Words of Wisdom:

A few interesting thoughts about sex (based on a movie I haven't seen-- The Man From Elysian Fields)from Alina Stefanecu:

the charm of a one-night-stand or purely physical sex lies in its unintelligibility. We overestimate the extent to which ascribing meaning to all human interactions is a positive good. Some things are best left devoid of meaning. Perhaps this is because meaning adds aftertaste, or provokes nostalgia. There are moments and phases and moons in which the best memory is not inscribed on the skin as deeply as a scratch or scar; only lightly outlined. Love is the language by which we make sense of sex-- the grammar which turns nuance into shades of the describable. Maybe sex is better left unsaid or unread at times.

[Full Disclosure: Alina, a really awesome lady, was the head of the 2003 Koch Fellowship Program while I was a Koch fellow]

A Minor Note on Links:

I troll pretty regularly (i.e., obsessively) using sitemeter and technorati to keep track of other blogs or websites that link to this site, but each of these sources is unreliable in its own way. If you write a post linking to any of my posts (or any of my co-bloggers' posts) and have the time to drop me an email letting me know, please do.

Hey Y'all:

Much as I sympathize with Half The Sins of Mankind about the virtues of "Y'all" (a logism that's been creeping into my speech despite being born, raised, and educated in the midwest), I have to quarrel with two points in her latest post:

1: "Y'all" is a brilliant solution to the problem of the English language's loss of a second-person plural. Spanish has ustedes; French has vous; American English has y'all.

I actually think "vosotros" is a better Spanish equivalent to "Y'all". Granted "vosotros" is regional (local to Spain itself) but then, "Y'all" is regional too.

2: [On "You guys"]: Also, one should not address a mixed-sex group with a word that is solely for males.

"You guys" simply isn't a word that's solely for males anymore. [See, for example, Dictionary.com, Definition 2]

Sorry to quibble. Y'all probably don't care.

Art of Losing:

Incidentally, it's about time somebody combined A.O.Scott (Bill Murray's Art of Losing) with Elizabeth Bishop (One Art, below):

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Rdany Btreant is aezamd. Kaiern Haley is mcuh mroe stackipel. Check it out.

Note to Jeremy Reff::

Okay, I'll read it.

Clark News:

So much for the Dean-Clark ticket . . .

Hmm. A Boycott?:

Warning. I'm about to link to Clayton Cramer's weblog.

Clayton Cramer has an interesting post about somebody he knew once who decided to boycott the carrying of 20 dollar bills. I wonder if I could find a way to manage doing the same. (Andrew Jackson, for those who don't know, is my personal pick for most evil American president in history, though he does have some stiff competition.)

Starting next month I won't be carrying American currency very much for about a year, so I guess that would be a start. And this might well be too much trouble to be worth the effort. But I do think it's a nice symbolic gesture and the sort of eccentric motion of principle I generally admire in other people.

Taken out of context:

"Using simple linear regression, we find that about half of the variation in Quality is a function of Easiness and Sexiness."

And here's the context.

Internationalist Jurisprudence, yet again:

If, like most of the rest of us, you didn't feel like slogging through the 66-page decision from the 9th circuit today that enjoined the California recall (previous post here), you probably missed a rather entertaining paragraph about how Democracy in Iraq affects the election for governor in California:

In addition to the public interest factors we have discussed, we would be remiss if we did not observe that this is a critical time in our nation’s history when we are attempting to persuade the people of other nations of the value of free and open elections. Thus, we are especially mindful of the need to demonstrate our commitment to elections held fairly, free of chaos, with each citizen assured that his or her vote will be counted, and with each vote entitled to equal weight. A short postponement of the election will accomplish those aims and reinforce our national commitment to democracy.

Republicans:

In the wake of this weekend's Republican convention, newspapers are rife with speculation on whether or not Tom McClintock will step down to clear the field for Arnold.

However, despite the fact that McClintock's withdrawal would probably ensure a republican victory, such a move is, I think, highly unlikely. For the conservative core of the Republican party--the Bible-thumping moralists who never met a tax cut they didn't like--Swarzenegger would literally be no better than a democrat. Not only is he unacceptably liberal on the hot-button issues such as abortion, gay rights, and gun control, he hasn't even promised not to raise taxes. For the Republican party to force out McClintock to clear the way for Swarzenegger would alienate their most faithful, committed, and energetic members. At that price, I suspect that the party hierarchy will find the governer's mansion too dear.

Of course, all of this sort of speculation may become irrelevant, as the ninth circuit has approved an injunction to delay the recall election.

The Case for Irresponsibility:

Eric Muller wishes that Instapundit hadn't posted a picture of the WTC "Jumper" leaping to his death (other posts here and here). Mulller was rather upset and shaken by seeing the picture, and now he's swearing off of Instapundit, at least for a while. Interestingly, he's taken an incredibly quantity of flak from his commenters over this, much of which has devolved into pretty un-helpful argument. All right.

I'm posting about this because I, too, posted the Jumper picture. In fact, I had the Jumper picture on my wall for over a year when I was living in the dorms, and now that I think about it I do think it made some people pretty uncomfortable. Now, I don't want to join the firestorm of silly people lambasting Mr. Muller for being disturbed by the image-- his post has nothing to do with his feelings about 9/11, his machismo, or his moral worth, at least, nothing that I can discern. But I also don't agree that Instapundit's original decision was an error in editorial judgment. Muller writes:

What I said was that Glenn Reynolds made an error in editorial judgment when he chose to put a photograph of a WTC jumper atop his enormously popular and widely read blog "Instapundit." I said that some people have worked to avoid exposure to those photos, and that as unsuspecting Instapundit readers who are familiar with its ordinary tone and content, these people could not reasonably expect to have this graphic image greet them when they click their way to his site. I think that's a big mistake in editorial judgment for a widely read, general-interest blog like Instapundit.

Blogging is journalism, of course, and bloggers are expected to exercise judgment. There are blogs I don't read regularly because I find the tone too snarky or the content and commentary too uncontrolled. As it happens, these are the reasons I don't read Instapundit. But even though blogging is journalism, the expectations about what one can blithely post are different than in mainstream media. Thus, even the famously magnanimous Eugene Volokh blogs about vibrators, though he puts a warning label on the post (which presumably makes Mr. Muller happy). I actually disliked the warning label, but maybe that's another matter too.

The point I want to make is that a lot of the fun of reading blogs (for those for whom reading blogs is fun) is in picking which blogs to read and which not to. Another part of what makes blogs fun is their relative human-ness, their edginess, their unedited-ness. Sure this leads to the occasional incoherent post, and sure it means that sometimes the things that a blogger wants to say aren't the things that his readers want to read right then. But since most bloggers derive only satisfaction and not renumeration from doing what they do (the paltry paypal pleading notwithstanding), bloggers ought to be more willing to toe the line, and even to tread across it from time to time.

Which is to say that edgy, slightly disturbing pictures are what the alternative medium is for and if it shook Eric Muller up a bit, that doesn't mean he's a bad person. It means that Glenn Reynolds is a good blogger. Art (and the photo, whatever else it is, is clearly art) can do that, and part of its power is in being unexpected. I understand if Mr. Muller feels he was emotionally manipulated and doesn't want to go back to Instapundit. But I'm sorry that Instapundit took the photo down, because I think posting it was ballsy. (Though there's nothing "un-ballsy" about disliking the same picture.)

In other words, if blogging is going to be as responsible, as bowdlerized, as fit-for-the-consumption-of-every-man-and-child as print news media, what's the point (though don't forget that the Jumper photo originally ran in the New York Times, albeit not on the front page)? If Muller wants to stay away from Instapundit, okay. [Easy for you to say!--ed.] If he wants to stay away from this blog (which I gather he does), okay. But a blogger shouldn't try to appeal to all of the blogosphere all of the time. [Nor should anybody take it up with Mr. Muller or argue he's a coward. There's no accounting for taste, which is what's at issue here.]

It's true that some or most of Instapundit's readership might have been caught by surprise. But I'm not sure that's a bad thing, all things considered. Part of the role of a poet, a bard, and (yes) a blogger, is to surprise as well as to inform. Sometimes these surprises are pleasant. Sometimes they are un-. I think that's a good way for things to be. [Incidentally, if you posted a picture of the Jumper on a blog of your own, please drop me a line and let me know.]

Eric Muller finds a picture of a man jumping from a building so disturbing it shouldn't be in the general content of a blog. Fair enough. I find the same picture so poetic, so moving, that I'm filled with admiration for others who post it. Also fair enough, one should hope. So here's to a little bit of "irresponsible" blogging.

A Riddle:

What word in the singular refers to a collection of people as a whole, but in the plural refers to the individuals within a group?

The Answer.

(Via my sister)

News from the North:

Can somebody please explain this?:

The increasingly bitter tone of the Ontario campaign took a surreal turn Friday when a press release from the Tory election machine labelled Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty a pet-eating alien.

The bizarre insult, contained in a statement e-mailed to media representatives shortly before lunchtime, immediately deflected attention from the health-care agenda that the Conservatives had hoped to pitch Friday.

"Dalton McGuinty," the statement said. "He's an evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet."

The full text of the letter is available here. Why don't cool things like this happen in American politics?

(Link viia Josh Barro)

Reff Continues:

...with a to-be-continued post on the analogies between aesthetic argument and political argument.

To illustrate why thinking about politics in line with the ways we think about art makes sense, let me offer a parable.

A man and a woman sit down to argue. They argue first about American television in the late 1970s. The man begins with his assertions. Taxi? Overrated. All in the Family? Groundbreaking. Charlie's Angels? The beginning of the end.

The woman disagrees.... (read more)

P.S. Madame Bovary???

Davis v. Cast of Thousands:

The Ninth Circuit has delayed California's Recall Vote. Summary here. Ruling here. Links via the inimitable Howard Bashman.

UPDATE: Rick Hasen has thoughts here.

Record Companies, for the last time:

Ampersand is still on the record-label case. Much to my relief, he now seems to be writing that a lot of what's wrong with my opinion of the record industry is what's wrong with libertarianism generally. This is good because here I'm on much surer ground. If all that Ampersand is complaining about is that some people have access to a very very valuable service (the ability to reach and sway public opinion) and they are using this very valuable service to exact huge fees from people so desperate for the service that they're willing to pay for them using largely consensual contracts, I'm not unhappy with that at all.

What I want to underscore is that when somebody comes along and tells you that a current system of bargaining is "unfair" but that the explanation for this unfairness isn't some sort of natural monopoly, or the coercive use of force, you should be skeptical. I have no doubt that a lot of artists get a lot more screwed by the current system that Ampersand would like them to be. I happen to be skeptical that making copyright untransferrable (which seems to be what Amp wants) will help artists on the whole more than it will hurt them. And I'm really skeptical that it will help the music industry more than it will hurt it.

If it's expensive, difficult, and valuable for record companies to do what they do-- take gambles on new bands (most of whom suck), push the ones with half a shot at popularity and make stars out of nothing-- then I don't see what's wrong with bands paying an arm, a leg, or their eternal souls for the privilege. And if what record companies do is largely value-less pencil pushing, then, as I wrote earlier, I think it's time for somebody like me to break into the business and offer the low-cost alternative. I suppose one view of things is that the record labels have established a lot of popularity and now the entry costs for new firms is very great, creating a monopoly pressure. But given the number of new record labels, of successful indie bands, and the ease with which one can create and distribute music using the internet, I'm not convinced that's the situation, or that Ampersand would be happier if ten more record companies entered the fray to join in the exploitation.

But in general I'm really happy that our disagreement has now boiled down to "what so many libertarians seem incapable of understanding - in the real world, contracts are negotiated from very unequal positions, in which the party with the power sets the terms," because I do understand this. I even agree with this. When two sides enter a contract with unequal positions, the stronger party gets a better deal on the contract. But it's not at all clear why this is a bad thing. When I go out to buy mechanical pencils, I'm in a very weak bargaining position. Bis has a bajillion pencils to sell, and if I don't like their terms, well they'll sell them to somebody else. Of course, if Bic's prices were too high, I'd go buy them from another pencil manufacturer. Similarly for college tuition. I may not like the fact that the University of Chicago costs tens of thousands of dollars per year, but we're negotiating from very unequal positions, and the reason for that is that our unequal positions are caused by the fact that one of us is bringing far more irreplaceable services to the table. Either record companies offer a replaceable service, in which case Baude Records starts in a few years to replace them, or record companies offer a largely irreplaceable service of marketing, coordination, and all the rest. But note again that plenty of artists produce their own music and avoid the major record companies. Most of them don't do so well, which might be a sign here that people who pay the record company are getting something for the money. Amp is just upset because the people making most of the money off of this are the rich fat-cats rather than the starving artists, whereas I don't care who makes money off of this so long as they play fair. And I don't think it's unfair to bargain hard from a position of strength.

Incidentally, what of the notion that bands are doomed because the record company can always sign with another band while the band can never go sign with another record company. First off, this is a reason that signing a "Deal memo" (who's contractual status I'm still skeptical about, incidentally) is a bad idea, no matter how desperate the band is. And this will be one of the offerings of Baude Records; we'll sign contracts without deal memos. Bands will flock. Secondly, not all bands are replaceable. Sure a beginning band probably is, and might well have to sign away their copyright, royalties, and immortal soul to be able to get a great deal and become the next sensation to sweep the nation. But so long as they didn't sign away the copyright to their second album (and even if they did, there are ways around that), then they've got the bargaining capital to make a second cd, and they can get money off of this one.

It's not a great arrangement, but it's the same as the one a lot of business face-- lose money for the first while, getting your name out there, building up a customer base, then come in and reap the rewards. It's also similar to the arrangement a lot of people who pay income tax face. If one's success is dependent on the valuable services of various people, it doesn't bother me tremendously when those people negotiate their own terms. And the more popular a band is, the more bargaining power it has. This explains why, contrary to the doomsayer view, a lot of rock stars are in fact millionaires, some even from CD sales.

Incidentally, Amp claims that

There are a very limited number of labels who can provide access to a national audience (radio play, nationwide distribution of CDs, etc). There is a virtually unlimited number of young bands full of members who are sick of flipping burgers for a living and who are starving for a chance to reach a nationwide audience. Simple supply and demand would suggest that bands will be willing to accept very lousy terms indeed.

I'm not actually sure that's a correct reading of the economics. Suppose, for example, that there are 8 labels who can provide national audience access and 8,000 bands who want it. Suppose further that there's no real limit to the number of bands a record label can promote-- there's a lot of time on the many stations of the radio, after all, and a lot of space in the music stores. Maybe not enough for 8,000,000 bands, but clearly enough for 8,000 (especially since the record companies aren't going to marshall Norah-Jones-sized support behind most of their clients, and their clients don't expect them to). Now the marginal cost of promoting a CD is, whatever it is, to the record companies. Let's call it $1,000,000. And the marginal benefit of that promotion is, on average, $2,000,000 in sales. Sometimes a record makes it big for ten times that much, but most of the time, it flops entirely and the money is lost. Now suppose that one of the big evil record companies offers contracts only to bands that agree to give away, on average, $2,000,000. All of the bands sign with them. But then one of the other big record companies, evil to steal from its competitor, offers terms at only $1800000. Bands flock to the new deal. But then one of the other big record companies . . . and so on down the line. Ampersand can't be right that the cause of the terrible world that artists face is "just capitalism at work."

Anyway, I've now prattled on about records for a very long time, so barring anything particularly egregious, I'll let Ampersand have the last word, as it were, on the matter.

Incidental Update: At least someone agrees with me.

Life imitates...:

One of my favorite bumper stickers is one that I picked up years ago at a gaming convention in Milwaukee. It says "If guns are outlawed, can we use swords?" I guess I shouldn't have asked.

Something to Do:

Are you going to be in Chicago, Columbus, Auburn Hills, St. Paul, San Jose, Anaheim, or Los Angeles in the next few months? (curses, I'm not!) Then go see Simon and Garfunkel.

And somehow I'm reminded of my sister's comment on Beowulf:

The poem--which seems just indiscriminately ancient to us--is written by a Christian poet about a pre-Christian world--and it's about a hero whose last, great fight is one he's too old for--so the theme of returning, of dipping in the same river twice, is at least two layers deep.

Begging to, well, Differ:

Incidentally, not all bloggers think highly of the Begging to Differ Sunday Comics. J.H. Huebert pronounces them "just as unfunny as the ones in your local paper".

He's Alive:

Jeremy Reff is posting again at Refference after a 3.5 month hiatus. He reaffirms that:

Ada is still the best book ever written by an American. Communism was still the worst idea ever. My mom's chocolate chip cookies are still the best in the world. My two sets of roomies are still awesome.

Just in case you were wondering.

A Puzzlement:

Why is it that I'm more surprised to hear that people believe in Ann Coulter than to hear that they believe in Santa Claus?

Quote of the Day:

"Arafat can no longer be a factor in what happens here," the vice prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told the Israel radio. "The question is: How are we going to do it? Expulsion is certainly one of the options, and killing is also one of the options."

Finding Dems:

Dave Kaiser has some thoughts on the presidential election that's coming in 14 months and its connection to the war on terrorism. Namely, he believes (surprise, surprise) that "as long as Americans are concerned about terrorism, the Democrats have no chance of winning the Presidency or Congress." Color me unconvinced.

Long-time blog readers know I'm no strong ally of either established party, and that my posts take aim at the left at least as often as at the right. But I'm simply not convinced that terrorism will be a dramatically losing issue for the democrats. Kaiser's evidence amounts mostly to an essay in The Nation, Ed Koch's assertion that Howard Dean is McGovern 2, and a few other things.

I'm not saying these are wholly irrelevent, but they seem to ignore points that the Democrats could capitalize on in a campaign-- namely, that George W. Bush's anti-terror activities still haven't captured Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein (if, as Kaiser says, Bin Laden is still "blowing up stuff", mightn't that hurt Bush's claim to be tough on terrorism?), and that he's thus far managed to botch the Iraqi reconstruction fairly severely. Sure, folks like Jonathan Schell say it doesn't matter because we shouldn't have been in Iraq to begin with, but Jonathan Schell isn't running for president, and neither (really) is Dennis Kucinich.

Folks who talk about a "post-9/11 world" are generally long on rhetoric but short on actual facts. Is it really true that the Democrats are out there pretending domestic issues are all that matter, while the Republicans are adopting a new, post-9/11 strategy? (Can you say "tax cuts"? What about "steel tariffs"?)

Now, yes, President Bush is a relatively popular wartime president, and I don't mean to say I'll think he'll lose; I do think he's got the statistical edge against any challenger. And, yes, the last popular wartime President Bush only lost the election because of the economy; but that doesn't mean this Bush couldn't lost it on account of the war. Furthermore, if Howard Dean can, he should draft Wesley Clark as vice-president. It wouldn't be impossible for Bush (whose military experience largely consisted of not-serving on the National Guard) to cast himself as having better wartime experience, but it wouldn't be easy either.

Heck, if I were in charge of Dean's cabinet, I would combine VP Clark with Secretary of Defense John McCain and Secretary of State Richard Lugar. The former is the perennial thorn-in-the-Republicans'-side who probably couldn't be convinced to desert the party, but now that BCRA is passed (and probably safe from the Supremes), who knows? The latter, of course, is a not-terrifically-pro-war Republican Senator endowed with incredible resources of integrity and intelligence, who would probably make a better SoS than even Colin Powell. Of course, I'm not in charge of Dean's cabinet, (must to the relief of all of my leftist friends, I'm sure) so this isn't going to happen, but I mention it only to remind people too quick to latch onto the tried-and-true formulations that the political war on terror isn't necessarily a dead bargain.

I care a great deal about making sure terrorists don't blow me up, but I'd feel a lot better about things if I was convinced that the current administration were making me significantly safer than another administration would be. I'm not saying that won't happen in the next year or so, but they have a way to go.

Comics:

Begging to Differ has Sunday Comics. Read them.

New Digs:

The Curmudgeonly Clerk has relocated. Please change your bookmarks accordingly.

20/20 Hindsight:

A little poker arithmetic: Suppose that three players are playing a game of Texas Hold'em (two cards are dealt to each player, they bet, then five community cards are gradually dealt. Players make the best five card hand). Suppose also that after a series of bets and reraises, all three of them end up going all-in. Now suppose that when they lay down their hands that one player has two Kings (K-K) one has two Queens (Q-Q) and the third player has an Ace and a Jack, unsuited (A-J). Who's the favorite and by how much?

If you said that K-K has a lead, you're right. In fact, my very-back-of-the-envelope calculations show the probabilities of winning to be about 65% for K-K, 16% for Q-Q and 19% for A-J. Why?

[Incidentally, if wants to run this hand through a monte-carlo simulation on their computer, please email me the results.] Let's ignore a lot of the truly unusual hands that could flop (four of a kinds for the K and Q, or a triple on the A or the J, and also the flushes and straights). Then note that the chance of a K or a Q being in one of the next five cards is about 20% each. (This is 1 - (44/46 x 43/45 x 42/44 x 41/43 x 40/42)). The chance of an A being in one of those five cards is about 30%, and all of these events are more-or-less independence. [sheesh. how many sloppy approximations are you going to make?-- ed. plenty.]

If we ignore all of the rare funny-business (which I suspect won't too much affect the final outcome) then the Kings win whenver a K flips, which happens 20% of the time. The Kings also win whenever nothing at all flips, which happens (.8 x .8 x .7 =) 45% of the time. The A-J, meanwhile wins whenever an Ace flips if no Q or K arrives. This happens (.3 x .8 x .8) = 19% of the time, and the poor Q-Q win only when a Queen comes but a King does not, (.8 x .2 =) 16% of the time. Now, I suspect the actual percentages give the A-J a little more of an edge than I have here (since that extra "funny-business" is disproportionately likely to help the A-J, and I can't remember the suits of the cards which determines what would happen with the possible flush draws). But I suspect these percentages are pretty close to accurate. Which makes us wonder-- what the hell was the Q-Q doing in there?

Incidentally, the Queens (played by me) won, through no fault of their owner's playing skill. The five communal cards held a Q and an A, but no K. Now back to your regularly scheduled blogging.

UPDATE: Thanks to Another Rice Grad I see that I did indeed give the A-J undeservedly short shrift. Using my best recollection of the suits, the probabilities were 58% for the KK, 18% for the QQ and 24% for the AJ.

Worth Reading:

The New York Times has a book review of Judge Richard Posner's Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy. It's worth reading, though like all book reviews of it's sort you're struck by the feeling that . . . well, you've just read more of an Op-ed than a book review.

Are Music Companies Evil? or The Founding of Baude Records:

I have no idea. I've always had a sort of inner inkling that creators get themselves screwed over (I read the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay). Ampersand has a long list of ways we should reform the system of contracts into which artists and their promoters are permitted to enter. Now, I know very little about the economics of the music industry, and Ampersand doesn't provide a lot in the way of serious economic data, or federal court transcripts, or the other sources I might consider reliable, so I don't know to what extent it's true that the process currently lets labels screw over artists. But I'm generally skeptical of solutions that suggest-- without such economic data-- that we get rid of a lot of contracts that seem like perfectly sensible elements or rational commitment to me.

I'm really confused about the legal rule that could cause a "deal memo" to force an artist to sign a particular contract. If it specifies a particular time period or term under which the artist must sign the contract, well that's a bad memo to sign (and any band thrilled to sign a memo that bad is asking for trouble). And if it doesn't specify anything at all, then I find it hard to imagine why the band couldn't insist that they will sign a contract, but just . . . a different contract.

Indeed, especially now that there are low-cost and easy alternatives to mass-label production (namely creating the tracks yourself and distributing them on the internet and making money on concerts; or mass producing cds at home and selling them in indy record stores or on the internet or via amazon; or....) it's difficult for me to understand why a label's monopoly power would be so unbreakable, especially when there are so many labels out there.

Now it's possible that there's some secret cartel among record labels to keep deal terms shitty. If so, then why I graduate from law school (or at least when I finish first-year contracts) I'll start my own record label, and I'll offer big royalties to the bands and non-shitty contracts and steal everybody away from the evil labels. If things are as bad as Ampersand says this shouldn't be too hard.

Incidentally, when a band signs a "deal memo" does it also make the label sign a "deal memo?" That is, why can't the band use its stand-off bargaining power just as well as the label can in this sort of time-limited standoff equilibrium? If record companies really do represent a cartel, then a symmetric "deal memo" would probably be advantageous to the band. [This is because absent a deal memo, a contract will be signed whenever either side gets desperate. A band is likely to get desperate first, since it doesn't have any money yet. This only works if all record companies represent a monolithic face. If they don't, then a deal memo hurts the band a lot more, but there's much less explanation for why the bands would sign the deal memo in the first place.]

In other words, I have no idea if Ampersand's allegations are true, but I hope they are. If so, then I think there are millions of dollars awaiting me when I get out of school, both from representing artists in court and from creating my own record label to destroy the record company hegemony. Since start-up costs of CD production are so low (and getting lower), and since indy music even has a positive cachet, I figure this can't be too hard.

This is why I'm skeptical. Despite being pretty arrogant I find it hard to believe I'm the only person who's thought of these things. I'd like to see some of the actual numbers at work in the recording industry. Courtney Love complains that even major bands get almost no money, but this just doesn't immediately jive with the existence of millionaire musicians.

Incidentally, I think that trying to make the argument by analogy to the minimum wage doesn't much help Ampersand's case. There's serious reason to believe that minimum wage laws disadvantage a particular sub-class of unskilled labor, generally some of the lowest skilled labor which often turns out to be teenagers or minorities (and especially minority teenagers). [This is because as long as you have to pay at least 5 dollars an hour, you might as well hire the best worker you can get who'll take that wage. When you can pay less, you often choose to hire somebody less skilled who knows he's less skilled and is willing to do the job for less money. Of course, teenagers have very little voting power, so don't expect a change any time soon.] Similarly, I'd worry a lot about the impact of Ampersand's 5-step plan on crappy or little-known artists willing to take any deal they can get in order to get a record contract. I do think that there's a lot of value in there, but that to the extent possible these proposals should be turned into affirmative waiver requirements and strong presumption of contract construal, rather than setting up a regime of ironclad thou-shalt-nots, given the fairly low entry costs, both in generating one's own music and in generating a record label. But again, if Amp's right, then just wait a few years and look for Baude records.

Finally, a note in response to Ampersand Commenter Avram who writes:

The important point that Will is missing is that file sharing (and it's close cousin, net radio) are alternate methods of marketing and promotion. This is why the major labels are so intent on crushing them -- as long as they hold a monopoly on promotion, would-be major artists have to sign with them.

Most of the CDs and tapes I own I bought because I heard some music from them for free. I suspect this is true for most people.

Posted by: Avram on September 13, 2003 11:00 AM

Will doesn't mean to suggest that he misses this point at all. I think that sharing files with the consent of the copyright holder should be absolutely positively protected. This means that we shouldn't be able to shut Napster down just because 99% of Napster transactions are illegal. And Avram's reasoning is precisely right-- file-sharing allows those small artists who want to let people get free singles to do so. A smart choice might be to let people trade your one or two biggest hit singles for free, but require them to buy the CD to get the rest of them. But this has nothing to do with any of the questions at issue-- should record companies be allowed to purchase copyright in the songs? is it okay to file-share files without permission of the copyright holder?

UPDATE: Incidentallly, "The Bitch Has Word" has covered this much better than I can.

UPDATE: Baude is at it again.

Oh, that's nice:

New York City schools have begun to offer a free breakfast to every child, rich or poor, in the hope that a good meal first thing in the morning will help students concentrate and learn. Even with the size of the place, it's only expected to cost an additional $500,000 a year to the city (the fed gov't is strongly behind such initiatives). But really, for me this brings back happy memories of the free breakfast program my school district installed when I was a junior: the first year, we got free Krispy Kremes every Friday; the next year, Krispy Kremes for breakfast every day. It was bring your own coffee, and life was sweet.

Sex:

Sara Butler recently commented on this article by Jennifer Roback Morse criticizing the hook-up mentality. The author's main point:

The major premise of the sexual revolution is that sex is nothing more than a pastime. But the presence of date rape crisis centers demonstrates that no one really believes this. If sex were really just harmless fun, then being talked into it shouldn’t be any bigger deal than being talked into a basketball game. The issue of consent wouldn’t loom so large nor be so difficult to discern.

Let's assume for a moment, along with Sara, that one can, as Ms. Morse does, differentiate between "unwanted" and "coerced" sex (a plausible assumption), and that date rape crisis centers do not exist primarily to dea with coerced rather than unwanted assumption (a bit less plausible assumption, but perhaps). For the claim, however, that date rape centers prove sex is inherently meaningful, to make any sense, one must also assume that the same people who feel it necessary to visit a crisis center after an unwanted (though not coerced) sexual encounter are the ones who claim that sex is a recreational activity on par with watching a basketball game.

Given that my experience has shown that people hold a wide range of views on the significance of sex, this seems like a rather implausible assumption. I certainly agree that someone who visits a rape crisis center after unwanted sex is demonstrating that, for them, sex carries a deeper meaning beyond recreation. However, this does not mean that another person, after the same experience, cannot deal with it by regaling the crowd gathered for Saturday morning brunch in her college cafeteria with a hilarious account of exactly how unappealing she found Friday night's hookup to be, when seen by the light of day, and facetiously swearing of alcohol and frat parties, at least until next weekend.

What I find infuriating about this article, though, is that Ms. Morse's claim for the correctness of her view rests not on on any substantive reasoning about the dangers of casual sex (other than a few vague comments about emotional harm) but rather the assertion that everyone (or at least "every reasonable person") already agrees with her! If this is really the case, why did Ms. Morse bothered to put fingers to keys? And if it is not the case, then all one can really conclude about hooking up is that it's not for everyone, a point with which I think Ms. Morse would be hard-pressed to find someone to disagree.

Classics:

Ted Barlow's post on Amazon reviews reminded me that I needed to visit the always-amusing Amazon World blog, where one can find a graphic demonstration of why classics do not recieve five star ratings.

Hint: Bitter, barely literate high school English students seem to make up a significant portion of the reviewing demographic.

NYU Colloquium in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory: Week 1 Report:

Advance warning: Long post to follow. Skip it unless you really care about the topic.

For those in the know, Lawrence Solum's Download of the Week was Philip Pettit's "Akrasia: Collective and Individual," presented at NYU's Colloquium in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory. As it happens, I'm sitting in on that Colloquium this semester, and so I've decided to report on each week's presentation. So, without further ado, part 1 in a continuing series.

Pettit starts with a general definition of akrasia:

The agent holds by intentional states in the light of which he or she sees that a certain response is required; the states involved may be beliefs or desires, judgments or intentions, and the required response will typically be an action. The agent functions under conditions that are intuitively favourable, and within limits that are intuitively feasible, for acting as required; there is nothing abnormal about how things transpire within his or her constitution or circumstances — no malfunction, for example, or perturbation. But nevertheless the agent fails to act in the required manner.

Pettit wants to make two basic points. First, that certain types of groups can, in certain situations, exhibit behavior that can be fairly termed akratic. Second, if we're willing to acknowledge this, we may wish to rethink our view of even individual akrasia: perhaps it isn't necessarily a hierarchical problem, where reason fails to subdue baser elements, but an incoherence problem, where the agent just can't get his act together. Furthermore, we may wish to extent the concept of akrasia to beliefs, not merely actions.

The Colloquium was packed, with lots of big names in the room--Dworkin, Pettit, and Nagel, obviously, but also Joseph Raz, Jeremy Waldron, John Ferejohn, Russ Hardin, and others I didn't recognize. I'm going to try to convey what I thought the big questions were and how Pettit responded to them, throwing in my own comments where appropriate. I'm sure I will leave out plenty of interesting stuff. But this is just a blog post!

So, back to Pettit's argument. His take is that only a certain sort of group can fulfill agency, which is necessary for the possibility of akrasia. A mere collection of agents--just some group of people--obviously fails this. But even a cooperative, a collection of agents who are actively attempting to bring group attitudes into existence, through some form of universally held agreement, either about specific action and purpose or decision rules more generally. Cooperation, a sense of solidarity, is the key here. But even a cooperative doesn't have the agency Pettit wants. Specifically, such a cooperative may not exhibit the sort of rational unity we demand of genuine agents, the unity that says that "if the system believes that p and comes across evidence that not p, it must tend to unform that belief." Even a cooperative may fail, here.

Why may this happen? Pettit speaks of the discursive dilemma (DD), where we have agents A, B, and C voting on P, If P, Then Q, and Q sequentially. If the agents hold the following beliefs, we get a problematic outcome: the group "believes" in P, and in "if P, then Q", but denies Q.

	p	if p, then q	q
A.	Yes	No	No
B.	No	Yes	No

The failure of even a cooperative to escape this possibility is enough to deny it agency.

What he wants, then, is a self-unifying cooperative (SUC), a group that can form intentional attitudes, but that will also do so in a unified, rational way. How might this happen? Basically, all we need is for the members of a normal collective to feel a sense of responsibility to achieve this agency. They need to be bothered by the existence of discursive dilemmas, and they need to work at avoiding them.

In short, as long as everyone in the group, when confronted with a DD, feels really bad about it, they (1) preserve their collective agency, and (2) have demonstrated collective, rather than individual, akrasia.

As I said earlier, Pettit wants to draw some broad lessons about individual akrasia from the group case. He wants us to accept that, just as there is no necessary hierarchy in the agents who compose the self-unifying cooperative, there need not be a hierarchy within the 'divided soul' who finds himself falling prey to akrasia. We might conceive of different voices within ourselves engaging in some sort of collective decision making process that leads to a discursive dilemma--but the akrasia here is in failing to achieve rational coherence, not in refusing to obey the dictates of the particular voice labeled Reason. As Pettit puts it, "The picture of individual akrasia that this suggests is attractively egalitarian and emphasises, intuitively, that the recalcitrant elements in the akratic agent need not be voices of temptation but voices that make a serious claim on the person."

Okay, enough summary. Now the criticisms.

One broad avenue of critique, starting with a question posed by Dworkin, was an attempt to get at what really counts as a valid intentional state for a group. Pettit's "p, if p then q, q" options aren't really the sort of things that groups typically act on. Often groups specifically *avoid* giving reasons for their actions, precisely because they can't agree on the reasons themselves. That is to say, when groups decide things one at a time, can't they always extricate themselves from an apparent discursive dilemma by saying, "well, no, this isn't *exactly* Q; or we didn't *really* agree to the general principle if P then Q; you read more into our decision than was really there"?

Pettit's response to this was that while, certainly, not all groups feel this need for handing down coherent judgments, some--self-unifying cooperatives--do; indeed, many feel that doing so is part of their institutional mission. Courts, for example, must do more than simply say "A wins, B loses;" they must give some hint of *why*, or they fail to provide guidance and stable expectations. So, while it's true that even a SUC will rarely face options as stark as P, if P then Q, Q, it will build up an accretion of decisions that will make other decisions unacceptable in the face of logical coherence.

Another line of questioning, opened up by Hardin, was whether such discursive dilemmas are really any different than the well-mined ground of preference cycling in social choice theory. What makes it akrasia, rather than simply incompatibility of preferences/beliefs?

Pettit's answer--that you can tell it's akrasia when they feel bad about it, essentially; if the group feels a collective responsibility for coherence in their actions/judgments, that *makes* it akrasia--seems to beg the question. Sure, you can have groups that feel such a responsibility, but couldn't we say that these groups just haven't thought very hard about the pervasiveness of discursive dilemmas and other social choice problems? That is to say: is it particularly *rational* for individual members of the group to expect their self-unifying collective to meet such high expectations?

That said, I think there's definitely something more than idealism to the belief that certain sorts of collectivities have a duty to approximate coherent rationality in their actions/beliefs. Courts, of course, stand out as one prime example. But now we run into another line of criticism, one that was taken up by quite a few questioners--

Is collective akrasia really anything more than what you get when you have a certain sort of group and members of the group individually act akratically? To go back to the discursive dilemma--if everyone in the group really believes that they have a duty to preserve group coherency, then why can't Agents A or B vote Yes on Q? If A and B hold to their own individual views, rather than their judgment about what is necessary for group agency, aren't they each being *individually* akratic?--after all, in defining the self-unifying cooperative, we have postulated an *individual* commitment to the collective decision procedures used, as well as an *individual* commitment to preserve the coherence of the group's agency--don't those individual commitments bind A and B?

It seems Pettit can get out of this if he retreats back a step--if, in such a situation, each member agrees that *something* has to be done but they can't agree on what, and it ends up a simple deadline--but then the situation seems less analogous to the individual case. Pettit's own definition talks of there being a "required response;" if the "required response" is merely "we've got to get out act together; either Q, or we repudiate P, or we repudiate If P Then Q; we've got to pick one, guys"--well, that seems a bit too vague. That seems like paralysis, indecision, not akrasia.

Unfortunately, so much time was devoted to these issues that there wasn't much chance to discuss what was supposed to be the punch line of the paper, the applicability of the collective analogy to the individual case. On the other hand, as one of my classmates pointed out, if the analogy fails, maybe that's all there is to it.

Still, there was time for one exchange on this topic--Dworkin asked Pettit how, in the individual case, the reconciliation among competing voices is to take place. Where's the analog, that is, of the committee member who gets up and says, "Okay, guys, we're being inconsistent; let's get our act together"--doesn't this actor bring some element of hierarchy back into Pettit's egalitarian idea of akrasia? I mean, we can't really expect the appetite to play that role--aren't we relying on Reason after all?

Pettit's response seemed to be that the desire for coherency and continuity--the desire to maintain one's identity--goes beyond a simple voice called Reason, and can better be characterized as harmony *among* the aspects of the soul. And with that, the Colloquium ended. A very interesting paper, and great questions from everyone in the room!

Joy:

Sarah McLachlan fans rejoice. Her first live album in over six years is due out in November. If anybody knows where I can (legally, legally!) hear any of the singles that have been released, please let me know. Otherwise I might just have to start listening to our local radio station.

UPDATE: For a free registration, you can listen to "Fallen" here. Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Via Bag and Baggage Via How Appealling:

Judge Alex Kozinski rules in favor of this proposition: "The same lawyer should represent both sides on appeal."

Via Austentatious:


You are Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice.
You're pretty arrogant, but that pride stems
from the deep-seated knowledge that you are
generally the most superior creature in any
given room. The good news is that you are
deeply loyal to your family, and you have a
generous and charitable streak, even though
most people don't notice because you are too
busy practicing a large vocabulary of stern
looks.


Which Jane Austen Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Jumpers:

I found this Esquire article on the "jumpers" particularly visceral because I've had this picture up on my wall since the disaster. . . .

And For What It's Worth . . .:

Last year on this day I wrote the following piece about the anniversary of September 11th.

9/11/02: The American economy is said to be so immense, so elastic, that you can slam a sledgehammer into it without making a dent. Raise the minimum wage, impose steel tariffs, no ruin will follow; after a few local adjustments the behemoth keeps rolling on in its indefeasible, heedless way. American life and politics– although this was not exclusively an American tragedy– seem to be the same way, for better or for worse. Some short-lived turbulence, a small fraction of lives forever rerouted, but for most of us the event is over.

I do not mean to belittle what happened. . . Read on.

Odd Views:

It's not often that a politician opposes safe-sex but supports polygamy. David Kaiser has the details.

But then this is the guy who wanted Russia to invade Alaska.

Public/Private:

Having egged Sara Butler on, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that she's succumbed to temptation and now has another post attacking the private/public distinction, as it were.

I'm not that eager to discard the public/private distinction. It seems to me that it evolved to solve a very difficult social/political problem - the wars of religion that tore Europe apart after the Reformation - and, as a solution to that kind of problem, it's worked quite well. Furthermore, being a good conservative, I'm not in any hurry to discard a way of looking at human society that has functioned relatively well for several centuries.

Here's the thing though - since the public/private distinction is one we create rather than one that arises organically in human society, you have to make an argument for it, which Will tries to do, and which Ms. McElroy definitely didn't. I suppose I'm just asking for way too much in a weekly column, but there was something about the way that she seemed to assume the public/private distinction was not just useful but natural that really irked me.

But back to Will: I guess I'd object to his characterization that I'm just redefining "public conduct" as "all conduct." Since there is no real category of "public" conduct, I don't think I even have to do that. What we have in reality is human conduct, and we've chosen to label some of it public and allow that behavior and only that behavior to be regulated by the modern state because it's a system that seems to work pretty well. Mill makes a good argument for doing so, but his argument doesn't change the nature of human conduct. And while it might be useful to make a distinction for political purposes between "public" and "private" conduct, between our actions which "directly" or "indirectly" affect other people, those distinctions remain, ultimately, artificial and not entirely adequate to describe human behavior. These artificial categories can and will break down and will never entirely satisfy.

But of course, all categories, especially of human behavior, will be artificial. That's what a category is-- a manmade way of labelling some things that have some stuff in common in a particular way. Now, I don't disagree that one has to "make an argument for" why public conduct should be publicly regulable but private conduct should not. That's what Mill does, and it's what I do from time to time. But one doesn't have to make that argument anew every time. The whole point of using terms like that, with their inherited intellectual history that stretches back centuries (an intellectual history that Sara is familiar with, I'm sure) is that one gets to inherit some of their arguments, too.

So some people, like me, don't demand a reinvention of the wheel every time one wants to write about private conduct. Others, like Sara, haven't yet been convinced and would like some more arguments please. Now, I don't actually think the McElroy piece is very good, so I'm not going to defend it no matter how much Sara baits me, I just want to make clear that the public/private distinction is no more infirm than your average run-of-the-mill distinction.

What of Sara's charge that "the public/private distinction is one we create rather than one that arises organically in human society"? This is silly. Distinctions are things we create. After all, in some literal sense, everything is distinct from everything else. I am distinct from Sara Butler, who is in turn distinct from Amanda Butler. In fact, I'm distinct from the person I was when I wrote that last sentence, since I occupy a slightly different temporal (and physical) location, consist of a different arrangement of particles, and the like.

Similarly, all conduct is in some literal (and silly) sense distinct from all other conduct. Praying is different from herding elephants which is different from doing crossword puzzles, gardening, or having sex. But in order to talk productively, and in order to reason philosophically about classes of conduct, we like to refer to conduct in classes. The distinction between private/public is a distinction we created to talk productively about the kinds of things that directly bothered other people, and the kinds of things that only indirectly bothered them, or didn't bother them at all. But just because we created it doesn't mean that it didn't arise organically from human society. After all, human society created the distinction, didn't it? And we created the distinction to match some real political and philosophical instinct in our own skulls, to fill an organic (if you will) need that had arisen in society. Indeed, one paragraph earlier Sara seems to recognize this:

It seems to me that it evolved to solve a very difficult social/political problem - the wars of religion that tore Europe apart after the Reformation - and, as a solution to that kind of problem, it's worked quite well. Furthermore, being a good conservative, I'm not in any hurry to discard a way of looking at human society that has functioned relatively well for several centuries.

In other words, yes the public/private distinction is a created category, but that's just a thing about categories. They're created. It's also a category that has "evolved to solve a very difficult . . problem" and "functioned relatively well for several centuries." If one believes that these things ought to be organic (which I don't, particularly, but seems to matter to Sara), well it's hard to have a much better pedigree than that.

In Memoriam:

Well, since it's September 11th and all, and some bloggers are treading trodden trails, I thought I'd offer this recycled reading. It's the 2001 Aims of Education speech by Professor Danielle Allen here at the University of Chicago.

What I Would Have Said

By early last week; we had drafted my Aims of Education address. It was light-hearted, jocular. Its central subject was humor and the good of it. But I’m unable to give that speech now.

Forgive me, then, for straying from my original plan, for you still deserve such a laughing speech. After all, you are the joys in your parents’ lives; your successful entrance into a fine university one validation of their great accomplishment. You yourselves look upon new vistas and will soon see your worlds’ horizons expand at dizzying rates. Indeed, you deserve to laugh, to cheer, and to be gay at heart with the prospect of the coming years.

And so, I had intended to talk to you about the importance of laughter in the classroom. I wasn’t going to put it that way,
so ploddingly and prosaically and in such very unfunny terms—I wanted to dance my way lightly into a serious point—but I was,
for all the play of it, going to argue that laughter is education’s catalyst. Why is it so? Because laughter is a mark or source of
friendship, and friendship is crucial to encountering what is novel, alien, and unsettling, and such is the business of learning.

Let me explain....

Read the whole thing

Must Reading: The Lichtman Op-Ed:

I blogged earlier about a very good op-ed by Professor Douglas Lichtman in the Wall Street Journal, which provoked an also very good response from Lawrence Solum. I've now gotten permission to post the op-ed on this site, so here it is. Enjoy.

KaZaA and Punishment

The federal courts have over the past two years struggled to understand why Grokster, KaZaA, and related Internet entities should be held accountable for their role in online music piracy. On Monday, and in no uncertain terms, the music industry answered the question: if the courts refuse to hold Internet intermediaries adequately accountable, copyright holders will have no choice but to file suit against the individuals who use those intermediaries to infringe.

Courts have been reluctant to impose liability on Grokster and its ilk for the simple reason that these entities do not directly commit the alleged bad acts. Just as a steak knife can be used both to facilitate the consumption of a good meal and to separate a businessman from his wallet, Grokster and KaZaA have both legal and illegal applications. Why hold providers of tools and services responsible, and perhaps inadvertently interfere with legitimate activity, when it is the individual users who have final say over whether steak knives and peer-to-peer technology are used for good or ill?

That logic has appeal, but it inevitably leads to the events of Monday morning: 261 lawsuits filed against specific individuals randomly chosen from among the millions who have engaged in the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted music online.

The better approach from a public policy perspective would be for the law to immunize these individuals from liability and facilitate instead meaningful litigation between the bigger parties. Such an approach would bring before the court those entities best positioned to articulate the complicated tradeoffs inherent in applying copyright law to the Internet. That is, KaZaA and the music industry can both afford to hire fancy lawyers who can in turn lay bare central issues; and litigation between these two behemoths is sure to at the same time attract the helpful attention of public advocacy organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation who can further ensure that the public interest is represented in court. Individual defendants, by contrast, lack the resources necessary to put up this good fight, and they face enormous pressure to preserve their bank accounts by quickly and quietly settling.

Moreover, lawsuits against individuals have a disquieting randomness to them, and that should give the legal system serious pause. To hold accountable only a handful of the individuals who swapped songs without permission -- to extract steep damages from those unlucky few while leaving millions of equally culpable peers untouched -- smacks of unequal justice. Admittedly, sometimes judicial inequality is a necessary evil; where intermediaries can effectively be held accountable, it is not.

In short, let KaZaA and Grokster profit from their technology and then pay their due. And let the college student, whose offense is something between an arrogant disregard for existing law and a praiseworthy enthusiasm for the technologic future to come, walk free.

Douglas Lichtman is Professor of Law at the University of Chicago.

Reprinted with permission of The Wall Street Journal © 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Say it ain't so...:

Surely the website Amy cites below isn't real, is it? Could anybody really believe such gems as:

Another way we can see the rational Truth in Christianity is by considering how many of the things that the Lord teaches against are actually zero-sum games where one gains at the expense of another. For instance, all gambling games - which the Lord considers to be a form of the sin of covetousness - are zero-sum games. Homosexuality is a zero-sum game as well since one man plus another man equals zero children.

(March 28, 2003) Dr. Troy Franklin, OBJECTIVE occult expert, has brought to our attention a disturbing new danger to weak-spirited Christians and unsaved persons that we feel needs to be reported.
As he tells it, while out at a local supermarket shopping for food for his cat, Dr. Franklin noticed one of those small tents advertising "Free Rock Chip Repair" that have been springing up in our nation's parking lots. Curious, he went to enquire about getting a ding in his windshield sealed, only to learn that the person manning the tent had other intentions, namely to try and recruit Dr. Franklin into a cult!
Fortunately, the good doctor has become quite immune to cultic recruiting ploys from his years studying their tactics, and thus he was able to extricate himself from the situation with his soul unharmed. However, those less skilled in their Faith -- and especially those of false faiths or no faith at all -- would have soon found themselves back at the cult headquarters doing all manner of unspeakable rites and blasphemies... or maybe even brainwashed into manning a tent of their own.
For the safety of your soul, do not be tempted by the lure of impulse rock chip repair from strangers in parking lots. It may say free, but it could cost you your soul! If you need your windshield fixed, go to a qualified Christian repair shop.

"But surely malls are just places of commerce, not deliberate attempts to lead people away from Christ," you may be thinking to yourself. Unfortunately the facts point to the malls' knowing complicity with the cause of anti-Christian Secularism. Besides the complete lack of Christian references in their so-called Christmas displays and decorations (just try and find a Cross or depiction of the Baby Jesus amongst all the Santas and snowmen and shiny balls), more subtle subconscious suggestions of Secularism's anti-Christian stance can be found by studying the names of common mall stores:

J.C. Penny - The J.C. makes us think of Jesus Christ, thus associating our Lord with the lowest monetary value, the penny (even Judas valued Him at 30 pieces of silver!).
Sears - What the flesh of the damned does in Hell. It also sounds like "seers", Pagan mystics who engaged in occult premonitions.
Cinnabon - Sounds like "Sin Upon".
Orange Julius - Named for the Pagan Emperor of Rome. This company's mascot was once a devil, until they changed it to hide their true intentions.
Hot Topic - A recent store aimed at children that openly sells devil paraphernalia. Any guess as to why "hot" is in their name?
Hallmark Gold Crown Stores - Purveyors of Santamas tree ornaments depicting anthropomorphized woodland creatures (reference to Evolutionism) and Harry Potter merchandise. What notable person will have a mark and wear crowns? [Rev. 13:16, 13:1]

Clearly there are ulterior motives evident. Even the word "mall" evokes evilness being a homonym for "maul" - the violent rending of flesh - and "mal" - Latin for "bad" and root for words like "malicious" and "malevolent". These Malls of the Damned - open even on Sunday! - are no innocent business centers, but active parties in the conspiracy to promote Secularism.

It really just can't be real. It can't.

And while we're on the subject of stupid people...

As someone who wants to advance the cause of human knowledge, reading a website like this (link via Oxblog) is enough to make me want to go out and shoot myself. How can I possibly make any difference in the world when people continue to believe sincerely that projects such as "My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)", "Women Were Designed For Homemaking", and "Using Prayer To Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria" constitute science? And to perpetuate such a massive deception on children! It's enough to make me want to found a new religion, one whose theology will allow me to imagine closeminded bigots who corrupt innocent children burning in the deepest, darkest pits of hell for all eternity.

But enough ranting for one evening. No name-calling in my next post, I promise.

Honestly, People:

A certain blogger, who may at this point be glad he is anonymous, linked approvingly to this Washington Post article, which makes the following claim:

With $166 billion spent or requested, Bush's war spending in 2003 and 2004 already exceeds the inflation-adjusted costs of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War and the Persian Gulf War combined, according to a study by Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus. The Iraq war approaches the $191 billion inflation-adjusted cost of World War I.

If this is actually what Mr. Nordhaus claimed (reporters do sometimes make misrepresent the opinions of their sources), he is a colossal idiot whose mere presence at Yale should be cause enough to have Yale's Ivy League status revoked. As an economist, Mr. Nordhaus should realize that costs encompass more than cash outlays. In considering a war, for instance, one might also want to consider such costs as casualties, or property damage. In fact, let us consider such costs for the Civil Wars--just one of the wars Mr. Nordhaus mentions. Approximately 620,000 American soldiers died during the Civil War. If we conservatively estimate the monetary value of the life of one young man at $1 million, then the cost of this one aspect of the war alone equals $620 billion. Nor does this figure include economic losses due to disruption of trade, conscription, rationing, severe shortages of basic necessities, or widespread property destruction. Remember Gettysburg? Antietam? The Union Blockade? The siege of Vicksburg? The burning of Atlanta? Sherman's march to the sea? Do you still wish to say that the Civil War "cost less" than Gulf War II?

Even if we charitably interpret the meaning of the word cost to be limited to direct government expenditures, it is still grossly misleading to say that the Civil War cost less than the current Iraq war. The price tag of the war may, strictly speaking, carry a lower number, but we are also a much richer country than we were in the middle of the nineteenth century. A car of any sort is an expensive purchase for a recent college graduate, but a BMW sports car makes a negligible dent in the fortunes of a successful corporate executive. And if this war is so much more expensive, how much of the difference comes from the fact that the Union Army during the Civil war subsisted on hardtack, salt pork, and not much of it. Nowadays, soldiers in Iraq complain because there aren't enough vegetarian options in their meal service.

In Iraq, we are buying ourselves a BMW war, because we can afford to do so. Yes, the tax cuts are silly, and yes it would have been nice if the administration had been more forthcoming about the costs of the war. But to compare the cost of the war to that of the Civil War in such a fashion is more than the usual sophistic drivel spouted by partisan hacks--it is just plain wrong.

The Inner Conflict in the South:

It was Friday afternoon, and what did I chose to read to relax with for a few hours? Robert Penn Warren's Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. He wrote it in 1956, shortly after Brown came down, traveling to parts in Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana; trying his best to slip back into the voice he learned growing up in Guthrie, KY so he wouldn't be taken as a Yankee come down to criticize. Why do segregationist fear integration, and to what degree and for what reasons do the oppose it? What will it take for integration to be accepted?

He describes a segregationist, come down towards the more mixed counties from the nearly all-white hill country, who is digging himself deeper and deeper into penury in order to work as a barely-paid recruiter for a Klannish organization: "No, he's not out for money, but something else. He is clearly a man of force, force that somehow has never found its way, and a man of language and leadership among his kind, the angry and ambitious and disoriented and dispossed" (13). Sure, Gary Becker argues that while some people have a taste for discrimination, in a job market it will lead to white labor costing more than black labor; this inefficiency will eventually lead to integration as the firms that hire the best person for the job, regardless of race, prosper, and those that do not follow their lead are driven from the workplace. But as Warren made elsewhere (All the King's Men, while everyman can be bought, his price is not always monetary; Gov. Stark bought Dr. Adam Stanton, who romantically and passionately hated all of Stark's methods, by realizing what motivated the good doc: "You want to do good, and he is going to let you do good in wholesale lots." Cash or fear could not have driven Adam to be the director of the Charity Hospital. Becker's thesis admits this in the short-run, but does not think it holds over the long-run. I think he overestimates the lure of economic riches; underestimates other motivators.

The mixing of the races. Being neighbors with society's least of the least, who show the marks of nearly a century of second-class citizenship. [A teacher in a black school complains, "Why didn't the Federal Government give us money ten years ago for our school? To get ready, to raise us up a little to integrate. It would have made it easier. But now--" (21).] A belief in the fundamental inferiority, of mind and character. States rights against the federal government's meddling, an outside interferer who looks down on the South, attempts to apply its own values and scientific sociology of equality. A Biblical verse, Acts 17: 26, "and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation." A tie to the traditions of the grandparents, upheld in homage. Warren wisely buys none of these excuses as the full reason. Not one of the interviewees mentions theories raised by David Roediger in his The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class: that the white identity is a class identity, set against the black, not simply because of the latter's race or servitude or so that each white person could point to someone who was in a even lower condition than he, but because the latter's very form of labor and demanded obedience represents the anti-citizen whose very existence damages the republic. Without ever fully resolving the question of why segregation has caught such a following, Warren very presciently moves on to predictions of its end.

About the only thing he doesn't foreshadow is that the federal government would withhold funds from the South until de facto desegregation of the schools occurred. What does "with all deliberate speed" mean? The blacks with whom he speak think opine that desegregation must necessarily come in stepwise pieces. Warren is himself a gradualist, "[i]f by gradualist you mean a person who thinks it will take time, not time as such, but time for an educational process, preferably a calculated one, then yes. I mean a process of mutual education for whites and blacks. And part of this education should be in the actual beginning of the process of desegregation. It's a silly question, anyway, to ask if someone is a gradualist. Gradualism is all you'll get. History, like nature, knows no jumps. Except the jump backward, maybe." (65)

That was the way it had been coming all along, from the slow integration of graduate schools and law schools to the secretary who tells her segregationist boss "a gentleman is waiting. She shows him in. He is as black of the ace of spades. It just never crossed that girl's mind, what she was saying, when she said a gentleman was waiting" (47). The court cases and orders, as they hit each locale, would be a blessed excuse to end the segregation without anyone accepting responsibility for its end and without much violence. He is also right on the money to say the doctrine of separate but truly equal, even if fully realized, would never satisfy, for the "ultimate goal [is not] just to go to white schools and travel with white people on conveyances over the country. No, the Negro, he is a growing people and he will strive for all the equalities belonging to any American citizen" (40). Citizenship, not just social stature; the latter alone is not enough for dignity.

Warren does not spare either the North or many Southern facial supporters of integration in his indictment of the attitudes leading to segregation: "Now you may eat the bread of the Pharisee and read in the morning paper, with only a trace of irony, how out of an ultimate misery of rejection some Puerto Rican school boys--or is it Jews or Negroes or Italians--who call themselves something grand, The Red Eagles or the Silver Avengers, have stabbed another boy to death, or raped a girl, or trampled an old man into a bloody mire If you can afford it, you will, according to the local mores, send your child to a private school, where there will be, of course, a couple of Negro children on exhibit. And that delightful little Chinese girl who is so good at dramatics. Or is it finger painting?
"Yes, you know what the relief it. It is the flight from the reality you were born to." (51)

His general thesis of what will save the South starts to rise to the surface in a quote from one school superintendent in Tennessee, "You take a good many people around here that I know, segregationists all right, but when they read about a thousand to one, it sort of makes them sick. It is the unfairness in that way that gets them" (7), speaking of Autherine Lucy, the first black student to enroll at U Alabama [after three days, and in the face of a mob, she was expelled 'for her own safety.']. What will finally save the South is, in his mind, the self-division that runs through it. "There's a fifth column of decency here, and it will, in the end, betray the extremists, when the politicians get through" (53). How long can segregation stand against it? Warren outlines several fault lines in those who try to oppose integration: social idealism v. Yankee Phariseeism; social views v. fear of the power state; allegiance to organized labor v. racism; Christianity v. social prejudice; democracy v. conceptions of the black; local attitudes v. concern for the nation's international image; total economic inefficiencies of discrimination v. personal gain; "It may be, and disastrously, between his sense of the inevitable and his emotional need to act against the inevitable.
"There are almost an infinite number of permutations and combinations, but they all amount to the same thing, a deep intellectual rub, a moral rub, anger at the irremediable self-division, a deep exacerbation at some failure to find identity. That is the reality." (54)
The moral in the South is the Christian.

"Q: Has the South any contribution to make to the national life?
"A: It has made its share. It may again.
"Q: How?
"A: If the South is really able to face up to itself and its situation, it may achieve identity, moral identity. Then in a country where moral identity is hard to come by, the South, because it has had to deal concretely with a moral problem, may offer some leadership. And we need any we can get. If we are to break out of the national rhythm, the rhythm between complacency and panic."

But what is the moral state in the South now -- where is our blessed inner conflict today? It was religious motivation that led to the Texas sodomy law. It was religious motivation that wasn't strong enough in Alabama to pass Gov. Riley's tax reform. Dangerous stuff. Ineffective motive. But to truly live religiously is to live an examined life (and here I guess, for to my sometimes-regret, I am not myself religious, but simply respectful of those who are). Sin. Guilt. Powerful motivators, they are. Why, because they might somewhat resemble a stick, should they be distrusted? The Eighth Amendment allows for plenty of motivators that aren't carrots. The flip side to sin and guilt is, after all, a feeling of having done good, of having fulfilled a mandate. And the religious life, the one that prompts a person to look at himself and the life he leads, will at least lead a person to ask the proper questions. His answers may be quite different from mine -- Texas's sodomy law, for the over-cited quick example -- but it at least can be seen as a bold attempt to make a community better, even if I think it has adverse effects.

Professor Fox wonders about my thoughts on "establishment." Staunch supporter of the First Amendment, to be precise. However, I don't think the First precludes religion as a motivator, or talking about how one's religion is grounds for an idea. The personal is the political when the personal delves into questions relevant to the community; so too the religious is also the political. Whether The Republic or The Bible, I'm always interested in what drives people and I think it makes them more understandable. Speaking openly about one's religious influences--if that is the driving force--is a part of intellectual honesty (citing one's sources is a virtue, says I who once thought I'd become an editor). I'm leery of the Baton Rouge mayoral candidates when n-2 cite the Bible as their favorite book (1 cites Grisham, 1 cites something reasonable): come now, I don't believe you, you're just trawling for votes. And I don't know how effective the religious-civic combination really is in treating social problems; some synopsis I have scanned suggest it's not in a position to be very helpful at all. But when Gov. Riley says that the Bible commands him to treat the dispossed better than Alabama is currently treating them, standing as the outlier to all theories that incumbents seek reelection, then I trust his faith and I hope for it to be effective at convincing others. Before I come off as entirely dependent on the situation, choosing my rules to apply as the particular instance strikes my fancy, I will say this: I trust Christianity, rationally-applied (ie, gather the attractive spirit, not the plausible exhortation to personal propertyless communal living, unless one has the strength of conviction of the Shakers). I like it as an influence, causing my lawgivers to question the morality of their actions and compelling my citizens to be concerned about their community, properly channeled through the constitutional means by which we express what we think.

Application Mania:

PG at Half the Sins of Mankind is applying to about half-a-bajillion law schools. I'm not applying to nearly as many, but if any law professor (or anybody else) reading this wants to offer advice on how to get into law school, it's welcome.

Hungering:

(Via Patrick Belton): Remember the London hunger-artist that we blogged about earlier? Well he's being even less well-received than Kafka's:

Since the showman began his stunt Friday, people have attempted to dislodge him by throwing eggs at his transparent box -- measuring 7ft deep, 7ft long and 3ft wide.

Blaine, a self-styled modern-day Houdini, has also been taunted by the smell of fish and chips, and woken up by a man banging a drum

Also fascinating, CNN has the story of Blaine's fruitless quest to get included in the Guinness Book of World Records, which was unimpressed by his encase-in-ice stunt or his buried-alive stunt, and which refuses for (they say) "obvious reasons" to endorse fasting records.

This last bit falls into the "life imitates art" category, as Kafka's hunger artist also had a hard time impressing onlookers with fasting records:

[T]he hunger artist . . . alleged that if he were allowed to fast as he liked, and this was at once promised him without more ado, he could astound the world by establishing a record never yet achieved, a statement that certainly provoked a smile among the other professionals, since it left out of account the change in public opinion, which the hunger artist in his zeal conveniently forgot.

Long Live the Middlemen (was Going Over The Top):

Ampersand says that the RIAA is a pot calling the kettle black. As anybody who uses the internet already knows, the RIAA is suing run-of-the-mill copyright infringers by the hundreds, and offering only a very restrictive amnesty agreement. [Those seeking amensty have to not only promise to forever cease and desist but also delete all illegally acquired files. And as Kathleen Moriarty reminds me, the affidavit only gives one amnesty from the RIAA itself. One is still wide open to a suit from an individual artist, and having signed the affidavit would probably be pretty good evidence that one had done something for which one wanted to be forgiven.] So I certainly don't have warm and fuzzy feelings towards the RIAA at this point. But Ampersand writes:

Seeing the RIAA get robbed by Napsterites is, well, kinda like watching those movies where someone steals millions from the mob. Does anyone feel bad for the mob, watching those flicks? The RIAA has spent years robbing musicians and gouging consumers; they don't have much moral credibility when they whine about their losses nowadays.

Sure, stealing is wrong, but it's hard to muster much sympathy for a burglar whose pockets have been picked.

Wait a file-stealing minute. The RIAA may play hardball, but do they actually "rob" musicians, or do they just bargain for particularly tough contracts? And doesn't price-gouging consumers (whatever exactly that means) damage one's moral credibility a lot less than breaking their kneecaps or hitting them up with a protection racket?

Leaving aside the question of whether it's less immoral to rob from the robbers than from other people, is the RIAA really as bad as the mob? It may be quaint of us libertarians to think so, but it seems to me that getting people's money from them by force (as the mob does) is a whole lot worse than getting it by signing consensual recording contracts and selling pricey CDs to upper-middle class kids in a free-market economy at a shopping mall.

UPDATE: Ampersand replies.

Let me ask some different (and I think more relevant) questions, Will.

Do I think it's immoral for a company to use a vastly superior bargaining position to exploit much poorer people, and thus gain ownership of work that the company didn't create and doesn't deserve ownership of? Absolutely. Do I think that music companies have taken advantage of their power and position to take virtually all of the profits from record and CD sales, giving an unfairly low share to creators? Absolutely. Do I think CD prices have been artificially inflated by collusion between music companies? Yes, I do. (And that's what "gouging" means, Will.

When two parties negotiate - on one side, corporate music factories, who have a virtual monopoly over music distribution in this country; and on the other side, young, hungry musicians who are desperate to break into the music industry, and who have the choice of doing it the industry way or never doing it at all - the result is going to be vastly one-sided, unfair contracts.

Do I care when the exploiters who have benefited for years from this dreadfully unfair system get robbed? No, I don't. Frankly, they deserve every bad thing Napster has done to them and more. Given all the horrible things going on in the world, that a bunch of leeches like the RIAA is being robbed isn't important enough to rate my concern.

Okay. Ampersand's new arguments are far more interesting than the previous ones, and far more nuanced. Note that the accusation is no longer that RIAA has been engaged in literal "robbery" and thus deserves to be counter-robbed. Now the argument is that RIAA's unfair business practices, and all the other horrible things going on in the world, mean that one shouldn't be bothered when file-sharers "rob" musicians and the RIAA of royalty payments.

In fact, there's a definite tone of Marxist concern (not that there's anything wrong with that) in the above-- the claim that since the musician is being separated from the fruits of his labor the system is horribly unfair, etc. etc. etc. Anyway, Ampersand's claims include:

1: that it's "immoral for a company to use a vastly superior bargaining position to exploit much poorer people."

2: "that music companies have taken advantage of their power and position to take virtually all of the profits from record and CD sales, giving an unfairly low share to creators"

3: CD prices have been artificially inflated by collusion between music companies?

I'm glad that Ampersand has made these claims more explicit, because now I can explain why it is I feel one way about those who rob the mob (I don't mind them) but differently about those who "rob" RIAA (I don't feel the same sense of vigilante joy). While Ampersand may think that one shouldn't use one's market muscle to extract the terms the market will bear, I'm not so convinced. RIAA, remember, actually provides benefits to people with whom it signs contracts-- our bajillion dollar entertainment industry is highly dependent on marketing and reduced transaction costs and lots of other things. There's a tendency to deride agencies and the like as useless middle-men, but to a large extent American is a country that depends immensely on those middle-men to make the system work. After all, nothing stops an independent artist from producing her own CD (the equipment to do it is pretty cheap) and selling them herself at concerts, taking out her own advertisements, and all the rest. In fact, a lot of indie artists do just that. But these artists rarely "make it big" without signing with one of the evil exploitative record companies. Why is that? Because the evil exploitative record companies have something to offer in exchange. The networks, marketing know-how, and other "middle-man" abilities that it usually (but not always) takes to become a big star.

Both claims 2 and 3 are highly empirical ones. I have no idea whether some sort of formal conclusion to keep CD prices up exists among the record company, and I don't why Amp thinks there is one. CDs are expensive, sure, but they also sell relatively well, the latest RIAA whining notwithstanding. Further, since the CD market is one of monopolistic competition rather than of oligopoly, I think it's pretty unlikely that any formal collusion would be that successful. [The monopolistic competition v. oligopoly question depends on how much one thinks that the products are interchangeable or substitutable. The market for books or restaurants, for example, is one of monopolistic competition-- a bunch of similar but different products meaning that I'm not going to buy "The Devil Wears Prada" instead of "The Substance of Style" just because it's a little cheaper, but if the TSoS went up to $40.00 and Devil dropped to $4.00 I'd certainly think about it. The market for airplane tickets, on the other hand, is oligopolistic. There are few enough firms that it's possible for them to collude and price-fix (I have no idea whether or not they do) but when I buy a ticket I usually just grab whichever one Orbitz tells me is cheapest.]

Now, these allegations against the RIAA might well be true. I don't really know whether or not they are or how Ampersand knows. But even if a company is engaged in monopolistic business practices (if what Ampersand claims is true, a big antitrust suit against RIAA would be very successful), there's a serious question of whether or not it should bother us when people pursue vigilante justice against the company. I don't particularly have a problem with Microsoft, but even if I did, I wouldn't counsel people burning copies of Win XP in revenge for the high purchase price.

One reason for this is the rule of law. But more importantly, I think antitrust situations usually lead themselves to difficult questions of proof and nuanced economic analysis. I simply don't think a bunch of college kids, or me (a college kid myself) have any good way of knowing whether RIAA is being particularly monopolisitic and exploitative, or is just about as exploitative as your average big corporation. If you're a hardcore leftist who thinks that all big corporations are so exploitative that one can rob them just like one can rob the mob, well that's one thing. But I'm not, so I think turning a blind-eye to robbing illegal monopolies is like a bad idea. Your average file-sharer lacks, as we say, the "institutional capacity" to know who is and isn't an illegal monopoly.

After all, if what Ampersand says is true-- that there's a conspiracy to keep CDs between $12-20 each, and that corporate music factories have such illicit power that they can get virtually all the profits-- why hasn't there been a big counter-RIAA lawsuit lately? I think the headline would be great: "26,100 musicians counter-sue RIAA".

So RIAA may not be Ben and Jerry's but I don't think that it's the Corleone family either. I don't even think it's Standard Oil, but the place to find out isn't the streets of Napsterville; it's a court of law.

[Incidentally, Ampersand accuses me of "criticism by way of over-interpreting metaphors," writing:

Most folks understand that a metaphor comparing "A" and "B" isn't the same as saying "A" is identical to "B" in every respect.

True enough. But my claim isn't that "A" (the mob) is different from "B" (RIAA) in some small respect. My claim is that A and B are sufficiently different in the fundamental ways that matter here that one can't simply extend the right to rob the first into the right to rob the second. That argument takes secondary reasons, like the one Ampersand has now offered up (though I still find those unconvincing, as I've written).]

Another UPDATE:

What Will's Reading:

Barnes and Noble finally acquired copies of Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style. More on which as I read it.

What Will is Listening to Tonight:

If you've got four hours to kill, you could always listen to Monday's oral arguments on BCRA. I figure if I listen to it while going to sleep, I'll absorb all I really want to.

Copynorms:

The RIAA has gone on the warpath, suing 261 individual copyright infringers and offering amnesty to others only if they agree to stop downloading illegal music and abandon all music illicitly obtained. Personally, I wonder why the RIAA is demanding so much in its amnesty agreements-- why not offer amnesty to anybody who agrees to stop downloading any further illegal music and let what's already done be done?

One possibility is that the RIAA wants to give courts and legislatures an extra incentive to fix this problem. It's hard to go after Grokster, Kazaa and all the rest under current law, but if the RIAA shows that it will go after whoever it has to, lawmakers might be more willing to offer up Kazaa (which does not vote) to save their constituents (who do).

If you get the Wall Street Journal, Professor Douglas Lichtman has an op-ed on the issue today, and it's highly worth reading. [Full Disclosure; I worked for Professor Lichtman last spring, and he's really smart.] In any case, Lawrence Solum at the Legal Theory Blog has a post on the latest developments and also links to past coverage, including his own.

UPDATE: Lawrence Solum has a response to Professor Lichtman's op-ed.

The Mail From Somewhere:

I know it's rarely fair to pick on the letters to the editor in one's hometown newspaper, but, Compare and Contrast the following. This letter by Stan White on why secularism is flawed.

...The Constitution bars relations between church and state. The Constitution (written by devoutly religious men) said nothing about the separation between religion and state....

with the text of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

Now, it's not incoherent to argue that the "separation" doctrine is flawed, but arguing that the Constitution focuses on "church" rather than "religion" is just silly. The word "church" does not appear in the bill of rights; the word "religion" does, and not in a clause that clearly limits it to churches or organized religions.

Personal and Political:

Is the personal political? Sara Butler thinks not, or not quite:

I do think all actions and attitudes have political significance and impact society. All "society" is anyway is just the sum total of individuals' actions. Our "personal" lives create our "society." Our "private" actions are not deemed such because they actually take place in some sort of bubble, affecting only ourselves, but because it is politically (and I mean politically in a broader, pre-modern sense, not the narrow, modern one) and socially expedient. The private/public distinction is a modern fiction, albeit a useful one. The division between the private and public spheres is traditional, to be sure, but not natural and not entirely accurate.

If I don't like people with red-hair and so I don't talk to red-heads, that actions has effects beyond my own "private sphere." Say I convince all the blondes and brunettes not to talk to red-heads, too. We're not violating the red-heads' rights, so Ms. McElroy would say we're not wronging them. And maybe us blondes and brunettes aren't (that's a separate argument, which Ms. McElroy seems to smoosh together with the "personal is personal" argument), but our actions are definitely having an impact on "society" and probably have some "political significance" as well.

But if the public/private distinction is a useful fiction, then why is Ms. Butler so eager to discard it? Yes, of course in some literal sense all "personal" actions affect the public because all people are part of the public. But that's only in some sense. The sense of private/public that Libertarians often intend (see, for example, The Institute for Justice's Lawrence Brief) and also, I think, the sense that McElroy intends is something like J.S. Mill's idea of self-regarding behavior. Yes, you can define "public conduct" to mean "all conduct" but this definition isn't very useful (nobody who argues that government ought to regulate only "public" conduct means that government ought to be able to regulate all conduct). Our private actions are called "private" because the Millian idea of personal liberty actually has a lot of currency (at least among certain types).

Of course, one can fight about where the boundaries are. Indeed, Mill's On Liberty is devoted to pretty much that. Thus one can make a plausible argument that creating a mass movement of redhead shunning (perish the thought!) is actually public or non-self-regarding behavior, whether or not one thinks it's a good idea. One can also fight about whether private behavior ought to be regulable-- most people do seem to think so.

But the general philosophical distinction-- that actions which don't directly (in the sense that Mill expounds) affect other people are what we mean by "private"-- and actions that do are "public" seems to me to be a useful way to classify conduct, and it's silly to try to make the distinction go away either by arguing that actions which only indirectly affect other people can't be separated out from those that are more direct, or by arguing that all actions affect people and all people are part of society, and that it doesn't matter whether an action affects oneself or somebody else.

UPDATE: Butler responds. Baude responds.

Reflections on movie pricing:

I've just received some thoughts on movie theater pricing from Kathleen Moriarty who has plenty of first-hand knowledge about the inner workings of movie theaters. She offers, among other things, the following observations:

Just for the record, theaters have nothing to do with the prices for movies. Those are set by contract with the distributors of the movies. The distributors also receive all revenue from the movies for a set period, usually the first two weeks, after which the theaters begin to receive percentages of the take. So the theaters would rather that you decide to go see a movie in two weeks on a Saturday night than see it on the Wednesday after you come out. The question becomes why don't the distributors try to reduce weekday evening prices and raise Saturday/ Sunday matinee prices.

and

Theaters would just as sson prices stay as low as possible so people will be more inclined to buy concession, where they make their money. Also, people are much more likely to buy popcorn if they see others buying it, so keeping the crowds on Saturday night is important.

My personal theory is that no one cares about matinee prices during the week since about 90% of the people who come qualify for senior discount and thecost is usually the same as or lower than the matinee price anyway.

Just so you know.

Even more goodies from Dahlia::

If you haven't read all 300-plus pages of the legislation by now, you should. If you can't, in the following four-part series, Slate has attempted to summarize and synthesize the most controversial portions of the act so you can decide for yourself whether you want Patriot, and the Patriots that may follow, to be a part of your world. Part 1 tackles Section 215, the law dealing with private records. Part 2 will address changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, and "sneak and peek" warrants. Part 3 will discuss new electronic surveillance, and Part 4 will discuss miscellaneous provisions, including alien detentions.

Part 1 is here. While it's written in a more serious tone than her court reports, it's still quite useful, as I have no intention of reading all 300 pages.

Don't Forget Paris:

Much has been said about David Bernstein's original post regarding lack of efficient price discrimination by movie theaters. Of the cities in which I've spent significant amounts of time, Paris was the one that had what seems to be the most efficient price discrimination policy. As in many U.S. cities, the first showing of the day is quite cheap (at the going rate of exchange when I was there in 2001, tickets were about two dollars). Furthermore, Sunday evenings through Thursday afternoons, children, students, the retired and the unemployed (all of whom one imagines would be particularly responsive to price) can buy discounted tickets--usually about five dollars, though this varied by theater. However, even with this system, to the best of my observations, Paris movie theaters only seemed less empty at off-peak times than American theaters because they tended to be smaller, and on Friday and Saturday nights the theater lobbies rivaled the subways at rush hour for crowdedness.

Delightful Dahlia:

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick is back in fine form with her coverage of the arguments in the campaign finance reform case currently before the Supreme Court. But what we really want to know from her is when we get to see the pictures.

The baby pictures, of course. Not pictures of the interesting goings-on in the first floor women's restroom.

Blegging Briefly:

So I'm looking for a blog about victorian literature or, in particularly, about the novels of Jane Austen. Does anybody know of the existence of such a blog or anything pretty close? My eternal gratitude and the like to anybody who can help. Drop me an email. Thanks.

Sophistry:

This New York Times Op-ed by John Mollenkopf attempts to support the closed-primary system in New York, where the Democratic primaries are often determinative of the whole election. He begins:

On the face of it, New York's Charter Revision Commission makes a good argument. The current system of party primaries, it says, prevents the three out of 10 voters who are not registered Democrats from participating in the primary that nominates the candidate who usually wins the general election. Opening primaries to all voters and candidates, it reasons, would lead to more participation, wider choice and more competition. Who could possibly object?

The answer, incidentally, is John Mollenkopf. He mounts three basic objections-- that open democratic primaries decrease voter turnout, that they increase sound-bytes, and that they will decrease minority representation. Here is the first argument:

First of all, opening the primary to all registered voters will allow the participation of those who are the least attached to a party. But these citizens are also the least likely to vote. Thus there is a strong chance that this change, although it may result in an increase in the sheer number of eligible voters, will lead to a decline in turnout rates, which are already low.

This is a profoundly silly argument. Mollenkopf suggests not letting a group of people vote in a particular election because the percentage of them who will vote in that election is lower than the percentage of people who already vote in that election. Hopefully this is ridiculous on its face, but if not, just think about how this exact argument could be used as a rationale for keeping minorities from voting, which I'm pretty sure Mollenkopf would strongly oppose. Then there is his second point:

... by taking parties out of the primary, the proposed changes would put more emphasis on raising money and devising direct-mail campaigns and less emphasis on a candidate's party history and personal connection to the voters. This will promote the kind of candidate-centered, sound-bite-oriented politics deplored by thoughtful critics.

This argument isn't silly so much as empty. So far as I know, there's not much of a claim that closed-primary states have more "thoughtful," less "candidate-centered" campaigns than states with open primaries.

And then there's Mollenkopf's third argument:

The biggest problem with the commission's proposed revision, however, is that it removes the only major advantage the system provides to minority voters — one they badly need to offset their many disadvantages. Although non-Hispanic whites account for 36 percent of the city's population, they accounted for 52 percent of votes cast in the last mayoral election. This is because they are more likely to be voting-age citizens, to have good educations and to own property.

But they are much less likely than other city residents to be Democrats. According to my research, 54 percent of non-Hispanic whites but 75 percent of Latinos and 85 percent of blacks are registered Democrats. So the voting public in Democratic primaries looks much more like the city as a whole than does the voting population of general elections. Ending party primaries would seriously erode the influence minority voters have in picking candidates.

Again, think carefully about what Mollenkopf is actually arguing: A number of people of a certain race have low voter turnout. Therefore, we should restrict membership in Democratic primaries (which, Mollenkopf concedes, are often the determinative election) to registered Democrats, because minorities are most likely to be Democrats.

I can only hope this is meant as a clever parody of affirmative action rhetoric. The entire article seems like it was written to prey on people's innumeracy. After all, the objections "this will decrease voter turnout" and "this will decrease minority representation" sound compelling on their face. But it's important to realize that while these things are true, Mollenkopf is misleading about the way they will happen. Voter Turnout and Minority Voting Power will decrease under this change because the change extends the ability to vote in meaningful elections to those who don't now have it. By extending the ability to vote, it will thus dilute the power of those who already have the ability, but why should that be a bad thing? The tyranny of the majority is bad enough. The tyranny of the minority is just as bad.

Movie price dicriminations:

Will highlights a discussion betwen the Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein and Tyler Cowen over the lack of price discrimination in movies, other than the common matinee v. evening prices. I can't shed any light on why we aren't seeing more layered price discrimination, but it already does exist. It's just only the Brits who are doing it.

From the same folks who brought you EasyJet, EasyCar, and all the rest, there's also Easy Cinema

easyCinema is about going to the pictures for as little as 20p. By re-engineering the business of showing films and removing the frills from going to the cinema we have made our business more efficient so that we can offer consumers lower prices. What we concentrate on is the core competence of showing good films in good cinemas at great prices.

The efficiency of easyCinema starts at the box office which we have quite simply removed. Seats are booked online or by phone (soon to be available on a premium rate line), and the earlier you book the less you pay. There are computers in the cinema itself so that customers can book online while they are there. Something else which we have removed is popcorn which we think is a rip-off. If you want to eat and drink at easyCinema, bring your own - you'll probably find it much cheaper than the prices charged by cinemas for food and drink. All we ask is that you don't leave any litter behind.

easyCinema, like all easyGroup businesses, is high volume, low margin. What this means is that we want to get many more people to go to the cinema so that we can charge each one less. On average across the whole cinema industry and across all showings the average occupancy of cinemas is currently only 20%. Four fifths of cinema seats are going empty and yet cinemas continue to charge high prices. What we are doing at easyCinema is lowering the price in order to get more customers. We will make money as a business and more members of the public will get to see more films more often.

I remember reading a Slate article, way back, about easyCinema's opening. Apparently the theater was having trouble getting firstrun blockbusters, but otherwise was looking fairly successful.

Indiana Blogging:

My governor, Frank O'Bannon, is in the hospital undergoing surgery for the cerebral hemmorage he suffered this morning. More news as I learn it.

Hashish Eaters:

Another Rice Grad complains that people who attempt to kill smut mogul Larry Flynt are called "assassins." He says:

Since when is a pornographer someone who is assassinated? I think the correct term for the attack of Flynt is "attempted murder."

The Oxford English Dictionary (subscription required; if you're at one, your university probably has one) first identifies an assassin as:

Certain Moslem fanatics in the time of the Crusades who were sent forth by their sheikh "The Old Man of the Mountains" to murder the Christian leaders.

Of course this definition applies neither to murderers of Larry Flynt nor those of John F Kennedy. Thus the OED offers this as the second definition:

One who undertakes to put another to death by treacherous violence. The term retains so much of its original application as to be used chiefly of the murderer of a public personage, who is generally hired or devoted to the deed, and aims purely at the death of his victim.

Now, it's my unconfirmed suspicion that people who attempt to kill Larry Flynt probably do so for ideological reasons, or reasons connected to his public persona. Those who attempt to kill him for personal reasons are clearly not assassins, but nor would be those who attempted to kill President Bush because of an old greivance from the Yale days. Though I suspect that Flynt's alleged assassins aren't hired by anybody, they probably are (if my hypothesis is correct) "devoted" in much the same sense that John Wilkes Booth was devoted to killing Abraham Lincoln, and so on.

So this leaves the second prong of the test. I suspect that Another Rice Grad thinks assassination should be reserved for some other class of people, a class that does not include "pornographers" but does include presidents(JFK) and religious leaders(MLK). Of course, such a class couldn't be as broad as "politicians" because Flynt is clearly a politician within the broadest definition of the word. Thus, I think the OED's requirement, that the target be of "public personage" makes the most sense, and I also think it's clearly the case that Flynt fits. When devoted people attempt to kill a public figure for reasons related to his public persona, I think it's fair to call that assassination. Thus, whatever one thinks of Larry Flynt, I think the unnamed "they" that Rice Grad refers to are not using the word unfairly, and those who wish to express disapproval of the broad class of pornographers should find some other way.

UPDATE. Another Rice Grad writes back:

I believe the word has evolved to the point where assassinations can only occur to religious or political leaders. Certainly, we never talk about the killings of famous people as being "assassinations."

But wait. What about John Lennon? A Lexis search for the phrase "John Lennon Assassinated" in major U.S. Newspapers turns up 62 hits, most of them usages like the following:

We are ever-changing and always the same. Like the Kennedy brothers, John Lennon was assassinated, and George Harrison succumbed to the very cigarettes the surgeon general warned us about in 1964.

9 John Lennon assassinated, December 8 1980, 2%

There was a long, long silence. Broken by my mate Noel Gallagher, bless him. "I was in my front room in Manchester listening to a football match and they interrupted it to say that John Lennon had been assassinated," he said. "It was like, 'Fuck'; it was just silence really. I didn't know what it meant until I dissected the White Album. And then I thought: 'Fuck, this guy is not even around any more.'"

to name just a few. If Rice Grad's complaint is the prescriptivist one, that "assassination" shouldn't be used to merely refer to famous figures who have been killed because of their fame, he'll have to find authorities to contradict the OED. If he means to make the descriptivist complaint, that people don't refer to these killings of famous figures as assassinations, he'll have to find evidence that the killings of people like John Lennon aren't referred to as assassinations.

The Supreme Court Rises Again:

After a summer of quiet, the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments again. Stay tuned to the blogosphere's election law expert, Rick Hasen, for semi-live commentary from the oral arguments in McConnell v. FEC, discussing the constitutionality of BCRA, McCain-Feingold's Campaign Finance Reform bill. He reports no surprises thus far. Justices Souter, Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer seem generally supportive of the legislation while Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas seem generally hostile to it. O'Connor and Rehnquist are the tough votes.

Discriminations:

David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy asks:

When a business has such great demand and limited supply the obvious solution (until more supply can be brought in, at least) is to raise prices. So, why don't theaters price discriminate between weekend nights and weeknights, the way they do between matinees and other shows?

Tyler Cowen, also on the Volokh Conspiracy, suggests 6 reasons. All of his reasons are farily interesting but none offers a particularly good explanation for why charging higher prices on Saturdays is more unfair, buzz-destroying, etc. than charging higher prices at night which almost all theaters already do. (And to no avail; the matinee I attended yesterday afternoon had six audience members, and my father and sister and I were three of them).

20 Questions for Tyler Cowen:

Professor Tyler Cowen, economist and provocative blogger has agreed to answer 20 questions about group-blogs, economics, and ethnic food. Tyler blogs both at the Volokh Conspiracy, and at Marginal Revolution. Read and enjoy:

1: Why did you start blogging?

Eugene Volokh asked me to blog, I hadn't thought about blogging before. And it took me months to get started, I was marrying and moving house and wanted to have that behind me.

Eugene is a force of nature. His brother Sasha is very impressive as well, and I knew and thought highly of the other contributors. So I was very flattered to be asked. I didn't think it through much, I simply figured that being affiliated with Eugene had to be a good idea.

Going back earlier, the first blog I ever read was Andrewsullivan.com. He does a remarkable job of bringing readers into his life, and into his thoughts. At the same time, he offers only smidgens of detail about his life, but it doesn't matter, readers follow him like a soap opera. Reading him, which I find gripping, made me realize the power of blogs.

I think blogs, or something like blogs, are the wave of the future in academia. Right now the lower-tier journals and presses don't perform much of a certifying function, the material in them simply doesn't get read. At the same time the best journals and presses are worth more than ever.

I envision a world where people compete intensely for some "home runs" in the top scholarly outlets. That provides their initial certification. They then use their names to present ideas in a variety of forms, including blogs. Eugene Volokh and Brad DeLong already operate this way, they are ahead of the curve. Academic name and academic celebrity will become increasingly important. Academic "home runs" will matter more and more. Why should anyone pay $75 for a book that will sell only 600 copies? Why should anyone publish in a lower-tier journal for a handful of readers? Internet publishing, in one form or another, will sweep this earlier world away. Research home runs, followed up by blogs, will become increasingly important.

2: You currently blog as part of The Volokh Conspiracy. Are there any disadvantages to group-blogging and have you ever thought about breaking off to form your own independent blog?

Group-blogging is the wave of the future. You need fresh, timely content on a regular basis and no one person, except perhaps for Glenn Reynolds, can keep it up without assistance. Single-bloggers also tend to get stuck on topics. I agree with Andrew Sullivan about gay marriage, but I am tired of reading about it.

That being said, bloggers will always have different styles, so a group needs a strong central personality or personalities. Eugene serves this role. My background, from economics, gives me a very different style from the legal bloggers. Legal scholarship places a premium on precedent, common sense intuition, and a certain kind of conservatism (I don't mean that word in the political sense). Economic reasoning, in contrast, looks for the counterintuitive conclusion and seeks to provoke. So some of the volokh.com readers may feel like I am coming from left field. I think Eugene is right to keep law at the center of the blog, but offer some diversity at the fringes.

Alex Tabarrok and I have just started our own blog, MarginalRevolution at http:\\marginalrevolution.blogs.com, available under the easier to remember www.marginalrevolution.com as well. It will have more of an economics focus than does Volokh conspiracy. Over time it will become a group blog, Alex and I will start off to set the overall tone and then invite some more economists to join us, maybe a demographer and sociologist also. I will continue blogging at Volokh.

3: George Mason University, especially in its economics and law departments, has a reputation for being pretty biased in a pro-Libertarian way. Do you think there is any truth to this?

What does "biased" mean? A recent study by David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture could not find a single registered Republican at MIT. For every Republican on the Brown faculty, there are twenty registered Democrats. The study found only three Republican administrators in the whole Ivy League. My department probably has more libertarians than Republicans but in any case we are bringing diversity and balance to academic life.

You know, I hardly ever talk politics with the people in my department, or in the Law School. I don't doubt that many of them have libertarian leanings, but problem solving and debate come first, which is how it should be.

4: John Bates Clark medal-winner Steven Levitt (recently profiled in the New York Times) likes to focus on solving and analyzing problems creatively using "economic thinking" rather than complex econometric work or formal theory. What advice do you have for economics students who want to pursue this sort of economic study (which seems quite a bit like much of your work) rather than follow the paths of formal theory or econometrics?

My advice is simple: go study with Steve Levitt. Or with Andrei Shleifer at Harvard. This kind of economics is the wave of the future. We promote this same approach in the economics Ph.d. program at George Mason. No one wants abstract game theory any more, it has to be relevant to the real world.

5: To what extent would you guess college students choose their major for economic reasons? What about economics majors in particular?

We don't understand very well why people go to college. How much of it is just certification? How much is the value-added of learning? Making personal connections? The simple pleasure of being in school and having better access to parties? All of these matter, but I've never seen a convincing treatment of their relative importance. Not surprisingly, we also don't understand how people choose their majors.

6: In recent years there has been a growing amount of "Economic imperialism" as economists bring economic analysis to bear in non-monetary markets. This includes the economic analysis of law, and public choice theory but also things like the economic analysis of literature or justice. In some ways it seems as if economists are taking over most of the serious statistical work that used to be done by sociologists and others. Do you think there are any downsides to the growth of the discipline?

Sociology is the current frontier for economics, as evidenced by the work of Levitt, which you mentioned above. An economist today might study how social networks operate, or how criminal gangs finance themselves. Psychology and experimental economics are also very important. We have moved away from the simple rational actor model in favor of richer models of choice. The rational model remains very powerful, but many of its implications already have been played out, so people look to new frontiers. In the longer run, I wonder if there won't be a single degree in social science, with an emphasis on inference and statistics. People will then immerse themselves in particular fields of study, and learn the details of their topic as they do the work.

Much of the current "economic imperialism" is going in the other direction. Right now economics is importing more ideas from other disciplines than it is exporting, unlike say fifteen years ago, when the Becker approach was ascending everywhere. Economics is becoming more of a behavioral science, more context-dependent, and less a priori. Even Gary Becker is looking into what determines preferences, rather than taking them as fixed and constant. Ultimately these changes are for the better. But it is also less exciting. When everyone is doing something different, and context-dependent, it is harder for a single new idea to sweep the world. I already miss this, we are a less unified discipline than before. The years of 1960-1985 were amazing for high theory, in everything from law and economics to macro to game theory. Now that time is over, which I find sad. It is what I grew up with. More people are doing good work than ever before, but there are fewer revolutions in thought, fewer seminal articles.

7: Last month I was at dinner with a bunch of Washington D.C. interns arguing about whether there is anything left to the study of literature or art that cannot be covered by economic analysis. Everybody at dinner said that there was not-- that the economic analysis of literature and art answered all "important" questions. Obviously this statement depends on what you think is "important," but do you think this is true? Do economic analysis and artistic analysis proceed in parallel or overlap?

Don't centuries of Western intellectual and cultural history show they are wrong? Reading a good critic is amazing, whether it is early Harold Bloom or the music people who write for Fanfare magazine today. And these critics either don't know any economics, or if they do they don't show it.

Economic models are one good way of generating and evaluating new ideas. The economic way of thinking says the following: "If you have a new idea, try specifying your idea in terms of explicit preferences and explicit constraints. Then look at some data." Now this is extremely powerful and useful. But can it really be the end-all and be-all of human thought? No way. And you can't be a good economist if all you know is economics.

8: You were the first to start a serious online flak about the telemarketing do-not-call list. Having thrown some of your original thoughts out there, what do you think now? Is it a good idea? If not, what modifications would make it a better idea?

If I had my finger on the button, I would not undo the list. But I think it is a dangerous precedent for the federal government to be so closely involved in defining appropriate solicitation standards. I would not be surprised if we ended up regretting this. I asked my readers how they would feel about a Federal "do not sell me french fries" list, for those people trying to diet.

Recently my stepdaughter installed a telezapper on our phone, which is supposed to weed out automated telemarketing calls. We will see how it works, overall I would prefer technological solutions to the problem.

9: Is there a place for serious economic theory in political discourse, or is it generally too hard to "sell" most rigorous economic thinking?

The quality of economic discourse in the public arena is low. But many intelligent policymakers are thirsty for new ideas. Where would New Zealand be today if Roger Douglass, who led their reforms, had not read Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek? Friedman and Hayek were influential in the Czech Republic as well. The Chicago School of Economics has had a big influence in Latin America. Jeffrey Sachs helped with the Bolivian reforms, and so on.

10: You are the director of the Mercatus Center, which aims to "to bridge academic learning and real world practice." Whatsort of real world effects does Mercatus have?

One of our best programs is called Capitol Hill Campus. We put on economic seminars and talks for Capitol Hill staff, bringing in top professors from around the country, usually economists though not exclusively so. Most of the Hill offices send people to these talks, and many Chiefs of Staff, from both sides of the aisle, attend our events. We view ourselves as contributing to the education of Washington policymakers. I am convinced that ideas and education make a huge difference in this world. Our particular contribution, of course, is harder to sort out.

We also helped bring Vernon Smith, last year's Nobel Laureate in economics, to George Mason. Vernon is the father of experimental economics and also an expert in electricity economics. He finds George Mason, which is right outside of Washington, to be a better locale for promoting his ideas (he came from Tucson). Vernon, like Eugene, is a force of nature.

11: What ended the Great Depression?

I once wrote an article ("Why Keynesianism Triumphed, Or Could So Many Keynesians Have Been Wrong?" Critical Review, Summer\Fall 1989, no link available) arguing it is a puzzle why the Great Depression lasted as long as it did. True, governments did many stupid things at the time, but this is hardly unusual. The overall level of intervention, or wage and price stickiness, pales in comparison to today. For whatever reasons, coordinating forces were very weak in the 1930s. It also seems that much of humanity entered into a kind of collective insanity for a while, the attractions of communism, fascism, and all that. We had these new technologies of warfare, and of communication, and somehow they combined in deadly fashion, Western civilization didn't have the norms and social capital to handle it. I don't feel we understand this period very well. Brad DeLong, one of my favorite economists (and of course a famous blogger) is writing a book that covers this question.

12: Why do you think there are so many more lawyers than economists in the blogosphere?

Blogs are well suited to legal methods of reasoning, you can cite cases, precedents and the like. Economic reasoning is starker, less tied to individual facts, and more speculative and provocative. In many ways it is more vulnerable.

Legal blogs also make for better stories. argmax.com is a high quality economics blog, it covers macroeconomic developments, but it is not so entertaining. It is hard to tell a good story about the behavior of fourth quarter inventories, not the stuff of either legend or soap operas.
Not surprisingly, there are many more good legal blogs than economics blogs. Every spring I teach a class in Law and Literature, to law students, it would be much harder to teach a class in Economics and Literature. Melville, Kafka, Sophocles, Shakespeare and others have much to say about the law, however implicitly. Not to mention the Torah. Dickens covers economic themes but is not very insightful and much of it is simply wrong. But his Bleak House has amazing insight about the law. There is something anti-literary about traditional forms of economic reasoning, and I think this is related to why it is hard to blog economics. I am writing a paper on whether we can find connections between economic and literary ways of reasoning, the topic has long fascinated me.

13: Which presidential candidate seems to you to have the least disastrous economic policies?

Bush has been a big disappointment on fiscal policy, as domestic spending has gone through the roof. I don't know of any major candidate who has promised to cut domestic spending. Iraqi reconstruction is arguably the most important economic issue at hand, but do we know what any of the Democrats really favor in that arena, as opposed to what they say to make Bush look bad? I think it is very hard to tell who will be a good President.

14: Has Alan Greenspan lost his touch?

I don't blame him for the slow recovery in the job market. Much of the business cycle is luck in the first place. You can't blame Greenspan for the dot.com bubble, 9/11, or the war in Iraq, all factors behind our recent economic malaise. But if I were he, I would have quit while I was ahead, a few years ago.

15: Should the government use any sort of policy-- monetary or fiscal-- to attempt to "smooth out" business cycles and create economic stability?

The question is hard to answer as phrased. The very course of the business cycle changes monetary and fiscal variables. Yes, a government can "sit tight" on some variables, but others will move, so the default position of "doing nothing" is hard to define. Economists, including Keynesians, have become more skeptical about fiscal policy over time. Opinion is split over the effectiveness of monetary policy. I am skeptical, but I could be wrong, and in the meantime I don't see anything wrong with monetary loosening during a downturn, provided it is kept within reason. If the government/central bank literally "does nothing" the money supply will contract in pro-cyclical fashion, which is hardly desirable.

16: You published a very interesting five-part sequence on Macroeconomics on the Volokh Conspiracy, which received some very harsh criticism at the anti-Volokh Conspiracy, Crooked Timber. (I'm thinking of the posts by Daniel Davies here and here.) As somebody who likes to post fairly provocatively, how do you decide when to respond to criticisms in the blogosphere and when to simply let them stand?

I don't know Daniel Davies but from the little I have read I think he is a smart guy. I do feel he misunderstood my post. He published a later post when he wrote: "…it seems clear to me what the problem is. Basically, Tyler’s got a view of the macroeconomy not too dissimilar from my own." Brad DeLong, the best and best-known economics blogger, covered this whole episode, with links, he wrote of Daniel Davies portraying the two of us as "long-lost brothers." Davies did keep the complaint that I had not gone into nearly enough detail, and failed to offer a thousand word explanation of why I reject monetary theories of the trade cycle. I did not feel that would have been appropriate for The Volokh Conspiracy, and as I read Davies he concurred. Many of my Volokh readers wrote and said they liked getting a condensed guide to what one economist thinks, which is what I tried to provide.

More generally, I do not know of most of the reactions to my posts in the blogosphere. I was very pleased to see instapundit.com pick up some of my electricity posts. In any case I think readers of The Volokh Conspiracy want fresh and timely material rather than hearing academics bicker over the details of who misunderstood whom.

17: You have an amazingly complete D.C.-area Ethnic Dining Guide (which I only wish I had discovered while I was still in D.C.!) How do you figure out which ethnic restaurants to try? Do you work by word of mouth recommendations, do you simply go to any ethnic restaurant you haven't visited before, or do you have some other system?

I used to try all of them but now there are too many. Reader recommendations help, but if you have a good eye you can usually spot a good one just by looking at it. Look at the clientele and the menu and you will know.

18: You seem to have a deep interest in Amate painting. What exactly is Amate painting and where does your interest in it come from?

Amate painting is done on bark paper. Several Mexican villages, very rural and remote, specialize in this art form (the above link offers more details). I go every year, at least once, I have friends there plus I love the food and the locale, it is very high up in the mountains and has amazing cacti. The village has only 1500 people and there is nothing around for many hours, a real change of pace from my usual travels, which tend to be urban.

I believe I have the largest amate collection in the world, and a few years ago I helped the Smithsonian get some amates for their forthcoming American Indian Museum, soon to open on the Mall in DC. My house is full of art, including amate art, I can't imagine it any other way. This is a big part of my life. I have two "Mexican families" (not in the literal sense), I help them find customers in the United States, call them every week, and help them with expenses. See the link for photos of their works. I have a book on amate coming out from University of Michigan Press, called Amate for Sale: Indigenous Mexican Painters in Global Art Markets, it is a story of how globalization can support cultural diversity.

19: Do you read fiction, and what kind of fiction do you read?

I love to read fiction, most of all classics, which at this point means rereading. I'd like to read Norman Rush's Mortals soon. I'll be reading Njal's Saga a few more times, the Icelandic work, I'll be teaching it this coming spring in Law and Literature. Two novels from the last year stand out. Siri Hustved's What I Loved is written in a very moving and personal voice, very sad and tragic. Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White is a wonderful faux Victorian novel about a prostitute and her self-deceiving patron, both deep and a page-turner at the same time. My best reread was Moby Dick, soon will come Nabokov's Pale Fire.

20: What is the best Mexican or Latin-American restaurant you have been to north of the border?

Some of the taquerias in Houston and Chicago are very good, Los Angeles as well, though they are harder to find there because the city is so spread out. Frankly I prefer my own Mexican cooking. I've been to Mexico many times, and eaten the food of many grandmothers, and learned how to copy it to some extent. Plus I love to eat in the food stalls. Mexican regional cuisine, as sold in the "comedores populares" [popular eating places, or stalls], is my idea of food heaven. You can have amazing meals in a great setting for only a few dollars.

New York Times Watch:

Two recent New York Times articles have been getting lots of interesting responses from the blogosphere.

First is Catherine Orenstein's feminist critique of Sex and the City, ably refuted from two very different perspectives by Timothy Burke and Sara Butler.

Second is this piece on happiness research that has so far drawn comments from Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, and Stuart Buck.

Bloggers certainly seem to enjoy whining about the New York Times, but they might do well to consider that it's solid, debate-provoking pieces such as these, not the slant of the front-page stories, that make it the must-read paper for the educated elite.

Bobby Jindal for LA governor gains national attention:

As Professor Levy notes, Bobby Jindal was recently profiled in the National Review. Evidently, Prof. Levy and Mr. Jindal were classmates at Brown. Seeing a classmate run for office is apparently more disorienting than realizing that people of your age are now rookies in the NFL, or or that you are now older than the oldest current active player (my preferred way of dating myself). But fortunately for Prof. Levy, Mr. Jindal graduated the year before he did, so Prof. Levy's "class is still too young to have a governor out of it; and so it's no reflection on me or any of my immediate friends that we're not under consideration to lead a state and we haven't salvaged the finances of any major government program." Bobby Jindal and I both graduated from Baton Rouge High, although not together, for I am ten years younger than he. The teachers told stories of his academic success and pushed us to 'Be like Bobby.' This is what I'm expected to go on to do? Sheesh. And I guess the other half of the expectation is that, after you go off and get educated, you come back. The state's got my best wishes for its future success, but I don't know that I have the urge. Anyway...

Mr. Jindal earns my vote with his stance on universities alone (well, he would if I hadn't switched my registration to Illinois). He wants to raise admission standards at LSU, a change the faculty has desired for quite some time (and one which would hopefully decrease the enrollment), hardly a popular plan among many who like LSU, or at least like its sports. Faculty will also agree with Mr. Jindal's call "to stop our tradition of having the worst funded flagship research university (LSU) in the country." He wants to use current university strengths (such as the synchrotron at the Center for Advanced Microstructures and Design, I suppose) and create new ones (particularly cancer research) to attract commercial development in research parks, as worked in Austin and North Carolina. Yup, I'm for that. He also wants to provide a "Day One Guarantee," a program for workers modeled on the teacher guarantees (free retraining for any U. LA graduate who struggled in the classroom) -- "We should make the same promise to our state’s employers, promising them a highly skilled, trained workforce.  We should retrain for free any graduate that does not meet the needs of our employers." Nice, but how, Mr. Republican, do you plan to fund and run this? Whatever, I haven’t seen the details of the program, and all campaigns are allotted a certain quota of implausible promises, and this is one governor I feel I could trust not to screw over my schools. He also wants to raise teachers’ wages to a competitive level and institute a merit-based raises (the same teachers who told lore of Mr. Jindal also told us that if we had any brains, never enter teaching. If this works, maybe they’ll drop the warning).

He also seems to have a decent and strong health care plan that includes a constitutional amendment to protect both health care and education from cuts until the state budget deficit reaches a certain size. “Allow individual and small businesses to pool their purchasing power to secure lower rates on health insurance,” “sensible reforms in the medical liability system,” actuarial analysis all over the place,” “help seniors afford long-term care, before they spend themselves into bankruptcy” and help make their prescription drugs more affordable, keep (but reform) the charity hospitals like Earl K. Long, once one of the best around. . . .

Finally, Mr. Jindal is also campaigning on a strong defense of Louisiana faith and values. He and his wife are married under a covenant marriage; wants to "aggressively promote adoption as an alternative to abortion," "offer assistance to women facing crisis pregnancies," and "closely regulate abortion providers." Fine, I have no objections. He doesn't support physician-assisted suicide; well, that seems a fairly moot point. He also wants to "support the creation of educational programs to combat divorce," "promote Louisiana’s Covenant Marriage law," "enforce community decency laws and standards," and "support abstinence education programs." I'm more skeptical about the efficacy of these programs, and the fact that they're drawing closer in on advising people how to live their lives. Still, if community decency means delaying the jump, in introductions, to a first-name basis, and an end to 'prostitot' dressing by 13-yr-olds, at least in schools, then I'm for it (would that mine were the common definition of 'community decency'). At the end of the day, though, I don't think Mr. Jindal will really wreck anything with his faith-and-values program, and I sometimes like the atmosphere of a state that's more actively religious than areligious if it's not acting like a whited sepulcher (I'm not sure I can articulate these reasons, but they do stretch deeper than my grumblings that you can't find decent Friday seafood specials during Lent in Chicago).

Word is, at least, the word as passed to me through a friend telling of other Baton Rouge High graduates currently working on Mr. Jindal’s campaign, is that stands a substantial chance of winning. $20 bets are riding on it (Mr. Jindal opposes the expansion of gambling in state). May he win.

UPDATE: Sorry, I can't get blogger to quit adding random spaces in the link to economic development, which also discusses aid to universities. Go to A Bold New Vision for Louisiana to get Mr. Jindal's position on economic development, education, faith and values, coastal restoration, and healthcare.

Also, it's hard to find any of the sin and corruption that one expects in politics by poking around his donor list. Many individual donors, including a decent number with Indian names from across the nation; the Committee for the Preservation of Capitalism in Alexandria, VA and Business Affairs Research Program in Baton Rouge; and many health-related fields of fairly generic names, including Missouri's St. Louis Hills Urological Associates (huh?).

Brief Weekend Roundup:

Posts have been non-existent lately because I spent all of Saturday at a Scrabble tournament-- a few thoughts on that later once I've gotten some sleep. In the meantime, you should be reading:

Information about a new book by Robert A Heinlein (yes, the Heinlein)

Lawrence Solum's post on Miguel Estrada, if you haven't already.

This article by Jeffrey Rosen in the New York Times Magazine.

Later on this weekend two exciting things should be coming up-- the latest edition of our twenty questions feature, and my post on what to do about the Free Matthew Yglesias situation.

Tyler Cowen comments in his new blog on auctions:

The median lot at Sotheby's sells for $4,177, at Christie's South Kensington, a branch, the median lot sells for $2,259. More than ever before, collecting is no longer the exclusive province of the wealthy.

Cowen is right. Not only can the wealthy participate, so can the rich, affluent, moneyed, prosperous, well-heeled, and well-to-do!

Collecting could also be for us fresh-out-of-college types, if we were willing to blow between four and eight month's rent for a piece of furniture. Please understand that I'm not bitter about this. In fact, I hold out hope that at some point in the future I too will be able to contemplate a four digit price tag on a knickknack, and consider it a splurge rather than a joke. When that time comes around, I hope that I still have the perspective to call myself what I would be--wealthy.

Sad, Sad Day:

Chocolate as we know it is ending. Not that us Americans used to that dreadful imitation chocolate peddled in this country under the name of Hershey's ever had much chance to know chocolate in the first place...

Close to Home:

Indiana University professor Eric Rasmusen has had Indiana University ask him to move his weblog off of the IU server for reasons based on his content (link via The Curmudgeonly Clerk), if this IDS article is to be believed. Eugene Volokh explains why this is unconstitutional, Henry Farrell explains why he disagrees, and Eugene Volokh explains why he thinks Farrell is wrong.

I feel sort of obligated to throw in two cents of my own, but there aren't a lot of facts to work with here at the moment, especially given the quasi-voluntary nature of Rasmusen's move. If the facts are what Volokh and Farrell are assuming, then I think Eugene Volokh is absolutely right because of the similarities of this case to Rosenberger v. University of Virginia (but of course, the designated public forum doctrine is something of a morass). If I learn anything more substantive, I'll be sure to add it here.

[Disclosure: The author's post in no way reflects the view of his parents or his former employer. The former are professors at Indiana University, the latter is the public interest law firm that tried the Virginia case.]

UPDATE: Okay. I have some thoughts. The Henry Farrell post above now has an update replying to Volokh's posts. I don't find the reply particularly convincing, but actually I think the Farrell-Volokh arguments actually highlight a deeper unsolved (and unsolvable?) problem of the First Amendment public forum doctrine. Volokh and co. argue that the government (in the guise of IU) has created a public forum by letting professors post stuff on their web space, and thus they can't create a content-based rule for excluding people from the forum. The Farrells of the world argue that the government (in the guise of IU) has not created a public forum at all. It has rules on what you can post, after all, so it's not a true public forum.

But notice how both sides are begging the question. Volokh says that the forum is open, and therefore the rule is invalid. Farrell says that since there's a rule, the forum isn't open. This is a problem with the whole "designated public forum" doctrine. Nobody argues that the government could (say) create a rule about who can say bigoted things in the streets. This is because streets are traditionally considered a public forum. The question is when (if ever) things like a government-created/funded internet server become public fora, like streets. The only hope for solving this problem is the advice of previous caselaw.

Farrell says that:

This is rather different, as I see it, than an university policy that directly favours some newspapers while refusing to fund others. It seems to me that pre-existing University policy is that no-one should be using University servers to host a weblog that isn’t directly related to their work, let alone one that involves ‘bigoted or abusive material.’

The newspaper that Farrell is referring to is called Wide Awake, the winner in the case of Rosenberger v. UVA, which is probably the most relevant Supreme Court free speech case. Despite Farrell's attempt to distinguish the two situations via rhetroric, the cases at hand are actually quite similar. The University of Virginia in Rosenberger wasn't just randomly cracking down on some newspaper; it had adopted a policy, much like the one at issue here. This is from Justice Kennedy's opinion:

All CIOs may exist and operate at the University, but some are also entitled to apply for funds from the Student Activities Fund (SAF). Established and governed by University Guidelines, the purpose of the SAF is to support a broad range of extracurricular student activities that "are related to the educational purpose of the University." App. to Pet. for Cert. 61a. The SAF is based on the University's "recogni[tion] that the availability of a wide range of opportunities" for its students "tends to enhance the University environment." App. 26. The Guidelines require that it be administered "in a manner consistent with the educational purpose of the University, as well as with state and federal law." App. to Pet. for Cert. 61a. The SAF receives its money from a mandatory fee of $14 per semester assessed to each full-time student. The Student Council, elected by the students, has the initial authority to disburse the funds, but its actions are subject to review by a faculty body chaired by a designee of the Vice President for Student Affairs. Cf. id. at 63a-64a.

Some, but not all, CIOs may submit disbursement requests to the SAF. The Guidelines recognize 11 categories of student groups that may seek payment to third-party contractors because they "are related to the educational purpose of the University of Virginia." Id. at 61a-62a. One of these is "student news, information, opinion, entertainment, or academic communications media groups." Id. at 61a. The Guidelines also specify, however, that the costs of certain activities of CIOs that are otherwise eligible for funding will not be reimbursed by the SAF. The student activities which are excluded from SAF support are religious activities, philanthropic contributions and activities, political activities, activities that would jeopardize the University's tax exempt status, those which involve payment of honoraria or similar fees, or social entertainment or related expenses.

Farrell concedes that if it were the case that Rasmusen were being singled out for punishment, then the University would be in trouble. This is true. But even if the University tries to be even-handed in engaging in content-based discrimination, it might be in trouble. Kennedy also writes:

The dissent's assertion that no viewpoint discrimination occurs because the Guidelines discriminate against an entire class of viewpoints reflects an insupportable assumption that all debate is bipolar and that anti-religious speech is the only response to religious speech. Our understanding of the complex and multifaceted nature of public discourse has not embraced such a contrived description of the marketplace of ideas. If the topic of debate is, for example, racism, then exclusion of several views on that problem is just as offensive to the First Amendment as exclusion of only one. It is as objectionable to exclude both a theistic and an atheistic perspective on the debate as it is to exclude one, the other, or yet another political, economic, or social viewpoint. The dissent's declaration that debate is not skewed so long as multiple voices are silenced is simply wrong; the debate is skewed in multiple ways.

[Interestingly, the dissenting opinion in Rosenberger basically didn't argue with the First Amendment analysis very much, but instead argued that funding the newspaper at issue would violate the Establishment Clause].

So what was happening in Rosenberger was that the university had a policy that certain kinds of activities and not others were eligible to seek reimbursements from the student activities fund. The Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to have the kinds of activities determined by the content of the speech they engaged in.

Now, (if the facts that Farrell and Volokh are working with are true) the university has a policy that restricts how faculty members can use their government-provided computers. First there is a disagreement over what the policy actually prohibits. Is blogging "instruction"? Instruction of whom?

Second there is the argument of what the policy constitutionally could prohibit. This debate is messy because the area of law is messy. But I do think that Farrell's suggestion-- that the university can distinguish between the kind of commentary where a scholar's opinions are "unexamined" is wrong. Farrell writes:

Furthermore, just because I’m a professor doesn’t mean that every opinion I spout is part of my public service mission. There’s still a big difference between the (varied) matters that I can bring my scholarly expertise to bear on, and those matters where I’m merely spouting off unexamined opinions like everyone else. And the latter don’t form part of my scholarly mission. Rasmusen’s views on gay men are the latter rather than the former: he admits that he has no evidence and that he’s going on what ‘everyone knows.’ It’s hard to claim that this is part of any public service mission.

I cannot think of what rule the university could constitutionally have to determine which speakers were sufficiently "expert" to speak in a forum and which were not. The long tradition through many disciplines of "public intellectualism" should make this clear. Well, given that my main points are that designated-forum law is a mess, and what little precedent there is cuts more on Volokh's side than Farrell's, I suppose I've gone on long enough.

Tyler Cowen:

(Via Lawrence Solum): Fans of Tyler Cowen, as well those who like him but would rather see his posts away from the more legal adventures of the Volokh Conspiracy will all be happy to see Marginal Revolution, his new joint venture with Alex Tabarrok.

Dearth:

Hopefully my co-blogger Amy will continue to keep you entertained and informed for a while; I'm having trouble accessing the internet at home, so posts from me will be sparse to non-existent until we tackle that.

What Else You Should Be Reading Today:

Sara Butler (whom I welcome back to the blogosphere--she has been missed) on the history of marriage .

Virginia Postrel, who has been on a roll lately.

Why I am not a Texas Republican:

Ted Barlow over at Crooked Timber has posted excerpts from the 2000 Texas GOP platform, which are quite amusing in that sad, alarming sort of way. What I don't understand, though, is the sarcasm I detect in his demands that members of the Texas Republican party denounce this platform. I think this is an entirely reasonable demand to make, and should President Bush ever decide to do so, I might in turn reconsider my current decision not to support him. Absent such an action, it seems to me entirely reasonable to to cast my vote in the 2004 election for one of the other candidates for president.

Mr. Barlow, however, seems to think that this is illogical, given that in earlier posts he asserts that Cruz Bustamante's failure to denounce MEChA's platform should have no bearing on Californians' decision to elect him governer, and in this post draws an explicit parallel between the two situations. Does he believe that Americans should support Bush in spite of his support for extreme rightwing views? Or perhaps that we should oppose Bush, but only because he got bad grades at Yale?

In point of fact, I think there are more compelling reasons than a college affiliation with a group of slightly alarming extremists to oppose Bustamante (like his blatently tax-the-rich budget scheme), but I think the ideas and platforms a politician supports (or fails to oppose) are important, and should be the basis for one's decision to support or oppose. The alternative to me seems to be voting on the basis of nebulous concepts like leadership and likability, which is what got us Bush in the first place.

Everybody's Doing It.:

So now that Matt Reece has come out with a whole-hearted endorsement of Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, is it becoming trendy? I only hope so.

(Somebody) gets results.:

I previously experessed great discontent with Dear Prudence's discussion of whether one can ask for cash wedding gifts. Now she has a retraction:

I have not laid such an egg since the handicapped toilet imbroglio. For whatever reason, I was trying to be understanding and to validate the underlying logic of the future bride's argument. I do know, and have always known, that requests for cash at weddings are anathema to good taste and accepted etiquette. Readers tried to cushion the blow, however, by prefacing their messages with such remarks as: "I usually love and agree with your advice, but ..." "Your advice is usually terrific and delivered with wonderful zest, but ..." These kind phrases were followed by "No, Prudie! NOOOOO!!!!" "I cannot believe you are actually ADVOCATING people asking for cash in their WEDDING INVITATIONS." "A wedding is not a gift grab." "I have never written to an advice columnist before this, but your answer to "Bride-To-Be" was so terrible I had to comment." "This is nothing more than the woman shaking down her wedding guests for cash!" The word "tacky" appeared with some regularity.

There were also, you should know, letters from members of the Soprano family, so to speak, who complained that gifts of money are part of their tradition and they have never been comfortable with that custom being considered improper. Regionalism figured in, as well:

In this part of the country (downstate NY), cash gifts are the norm rather than the exception. I don't ever remember it not being this way. (I'm in my early 40s, so I've been to my share of weddings.) So maybe the rest of the country doesn't know that they're missing!

Because this is not an etiquette column, and I obviously am inclined toward making new protocols, there will be no more etiquette questions. We will return to infidelity, Internet porn, miserable mothers-in-law, hellish bosses, and jailbird boyfriends. Now back to business.

—Prudie, contritely

Thanks:

Many thanks to Radley Balko of The Agitator both for the link, and for adding us to his blogroll.

Out with a whisper:

George Hotelling had an interesting experiment going on (thanks to Isaac for the pointer). He posted on eBay auction the Devin Vasquez song "Double Dutch Bus," which he'd bought for 99 cents from Apple iTunes. In his posting, which is unfortunately no longer available, he specifically pointed the price for which he'd bought it, the store from which he bought it, and that it was in an AAC file format that made it a bit harder to transfer (he'd refund the purchase price if it didn't work, though). The apparently legitimate price people were willing to pay reached $15,000, which Mr. Hotelling claimed would be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (he asked bidders to contact him directly to confirm that they would pay if they won, in order to weed out legit offers from $99mil bids).

The point of all this? Apparently to test the doctrine of "first sale" [linked to by EtA, below]

A distinction not always recognized is that ownership of the physical item, such as a book or a CD, is not the same as owning the copyright to the work embodied in that item. Under the first sale doctrine, ownership of a physical copy of a copyrighted work, like a book, permits lending the item, reselling the item, disposing of the item, burning the item, and so forth, but it does not permit copying the item in its entirety. That is because the transfer of the physical copy does not include transfer of the copyright to the work. A transfer or assignment of copyright must be signed and in writing to be valid

So, how is this different from buying a CD at Virgin, deciding I don't like it much anymore, and selling it either to a second-hand CD store or through a direct classified ad like on Marketplace?

Ernie the Attorney tears into Mr. Hotelling for thinking that the iTunes purchase agreement and the eBay auction requirements permitted him to legally sell the song, and for recklessly challenging "digital rights management" (DRM).

True, "eBay prohibits the listing of items or products to be delivered electronically through the Internet," but as Mr. Hotelling points out, he ammended his offer to say that the song wouldn't be delivered via the Internet (burnt to cd, apparently). The iTunes Terms of Sale dictate, in what might be the relevant part, that

You shall be authorized to use the Product only for personal, non-commercial use.
You shall be authorized to use the Product on three Apple authorized computers.
You shall be entitled to burn and export Products solely for personal, non-commercial use.
Any burning or exporting capabilities are solely an accommodation to you and shall not constitute a grant or waiver (or other limitation or implication) of any rights of the copyright owners of any content, sound recording, underlying musical composition or artwork embodied in any Product.

Ok, granted, selling something on eBay does sound rather commercial. However, is a lot of this implicit when I buy a cd at Virgin--that is, that I'm not getting any sort of copyright privileges, that it's just for my own use and I'm not making an unreasonable number of personal copies? If it does all hold, then why would iTunes downloads and cds not be threated the same, relative to each other, as cds and cassettes are treated? [ok, an admitted lack of actual knowledge is going to cut this pondering short...feel free to jump in with expert interpretations of this doctrine]

The other interesting question which all of this raises is -- why would you pay $870 or $15,000 for a $0.99 song that apparently isn't even all that good? This seems to go far beyond just proving a point about a legal doctrine. My hunch is that it's a form of gambling (odd that that makes it sound more rational) where the odds of success are high and success is defined as not having to pay for the thing.

What You Should Be Reading Today:

Lawrence Solum of the Legal Theory Blog has a thoughtful and thorough post on Estrada's decision to withdraw his candidacy for an Appellate judgeship. Read it.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias (briefly freeing himself from the TAPPED hivemind) also has some thoughts.

Tapped Responds:

Hum. The Free Matthew Yglesias! campaign has its work cut out for it:

Will,

Welcome to Tapped. We consider it something of a matter of pride that Matt's
style and substance blend so well with what we already do. We're not sure why
it's so important for you to know exactly which posts are his, but we hope
you'll keep reading regardless. This is how we do it.

best,
Tapped

Heroinism, Revisited:

Twilight of the Idols offers (if the link is broken it's a Wednesday, September 3 post)some explanations for why heroin use should be grounds to fire a teacher.

In general, I think arguments for firing the teacher can be divided into three types:

1: Unfitness. If the teacher was actually *doing* something bad, mumbling incoherently, interrupting lessons every fifteen minutes to shoot up in the broom closet, dealing drugs to 8-year-olds, or something else equally terrible, then I would wholeheartedly support her removal. No problem there. It was just that the original article didn't actually mention any way that the heroin use impeded her performance. I'm not saying that it didn't, only that I would have liked to see that as the evidence, not the mere fact that she had heroin at school.

2: Symbolism. The argument, I think, is that drugs are bad and people who use drugs are bad role models for our children. But I don't think that merely engaging in unadmirable behavior should be enough to get a teacher canned. In particular, I don't think drug use is so obviously worse than running up lots of credit card debt or cracking one's knuckles that it should be a per se punishable offence. I recognize that I'm in an overwhelming majority on that view, of course.

3: Illegality. The teacher did something illegal, the argument goes, and she did at school. Therefore, she should be fired. Nick uses a version of this argument which I don't think he really believes:

It is presumably in a government's interest to enforce the laws that exist; why create the laws if they are not to be enforced? For example, imagine a totalitarian state with strict limitations on free speech. If a teacher at a state-run school in such a society were to espouse the virtues of free speech (whether in the classroom or outside of it), said speech which would almost assuredly break laws designed to limit free speech. It would seem natural for the teacher to be fired, because the teacher's lessons (or example) could imply to students that the government approves of such behavior. Similarly, in a society in which heroin usage is illegal, it seems only natural for a state-employed teacher who uses heroin to be fired.

This only points out the reason that state-run schools are bad themselves. The fact that teachers in schools are given at least a little personal and academic freedom is one of the virtues of our system, not one of its flaws. Incidentally if having state-run schools means that high school teachers are not allowed to suggest that the "obscenity exception" (or the "commercial speech exception") to the Constitution are bad, then count me out. Some Libertarians I know support a Constitutional Amendment for the separation of school and state. A policy like #3 would almost convince me.

Little Constitutions, Redux:

Apropos of my previous post about Student Organization Constitutions, loyal reader Chris Jones offers up the Constitutions that he has helped design at the University of Alberta (here and here).

These are very serious and complete pieces of work, the complete opposite of my more slapdash approach, which was to try to fit the entire thing on to one page (which worked).

Free Matthew Yglesias!:

Okay. So I thought I could just leave this issue as a footnote to my previous post, but I think maybe it deserves an entry of its own. Pursuant to his paying job, Matthew Yglesias's political posting will now be done at Tapped. Yglesias's commenters are pretty pissed off about this, and rightly so. Even though this is probably good for Matthew Yglesias, I'm not so sure it's good for the rest of us.

As the commenters point out, Yglesias's move is more troubling than Julian Sanchez's dual life at Hit and Run and his own weblog, largely because Tapped doesn't attribute their posts. Thus, people like me who think that the rest of Tapped is pretty much crap but that Matthew Yglesias is decidedly not-crap are put in a quandary. I don't think Yglesias has done anything wrong-- after all he's got a real job and life to attend to-- but I do think that the blogosphere will be impoverished by the move until and unless Tapped decides to add bylines to their posts. In the interim, assuming the Tapped leadership won't mind, Yglesias should clearly permalink each of his tapped posts from his main blog. If governed by any rational principle (and they might not be) Tapped surely won't complain about this because the links will probably increase the number of unique readers to visit the site (though it might conceivably decrease the number of total visits by repeat users).

If you're a Matthew Yglesias reader and would like to continue being one, write letters to Tapped at tapped@prospect.org. If you're lazy, feel free to copy and modify the text of my letter, included below:

Dear Powers-that-be,

You have recently brought Matthew Yglesias, a brilliant blogger, under your blogging auspices at Tapped. I thought this was going to be a wonderful thing. But when I came over to read the latest posts by Mr. Yglesias I found (to my distress) that I could not tell which posts were his and which were not. It seems to waste his celebrity not to attribute the posts of your authors.

I suspect you would increase your traffic dramatically if you could capitalize on the large and loyal readership of Matthew Yglesias, and I, for one, will not be a loyal Tapped reader if I can't easily tell which posts blong to Mr. Yglesias.

Thanks for your consideration,
Will Baude

Update: TAPPED Responds.

Cleaning House:

It's been too long since I've updated the old links on the side bar. On go Another Rice Grad, Alas, a Blog, the always entertaining Mildly Malevolent (Ed Cohn's blog) and of course Begging to Differ. If you don't read those blogs at least occasionally, give them a shot-- at least long enough to decide whether or not you agree with my judgment that they provide interesting stuff, especially stuff often not widely covered in the rest of the blogosphere (or at least the parts I otherwise read).

Note: The fact that all of those blogs have linked to me more than once in the not-too-distant past is not entirely a coincidence.

The real question is what to do about the Yglesias assimilation-- blogroll Tapped????

Coming Clean:

It's been a frivolous couple of days on this blog, but for those interested in continuing the frivolity, check out Rice Grad's post on tight-aggressive playing in Hold 'Em poker games. (The email he mentions was from me).

M.E.Ch.A.nations:

The Curmudgeonly Clerk weighs in on the M.E.Ch.A. controversy, and tosses out a link to the University of Chicago's M.E.Ch.A. chapter. The M.E.Ch.A. here has a reputation among RSO-types for being pretty scary and exclusionist. I've heard that it's basically impossible to even attend their meetings if they don't want you to. Reading their constitution, I see that they've devised a pretty interesting Catch-22, that I'm pretty surprised the university allows. Once upon a time we had a (scandal-ridden) student Supreme Court as part of our Student Government, but sadly no longer. At any rate, here are the relevant provisions of the U of C M.E.Ch.A. Constitution:

III, I, A. New membership shall be open only to students who are enrolled at the University of Chicago with at least a 1.75 G.P.A. regardless of race, national origin, creed, political affiliation, sex, sexual orientation, religion, age, handicap, or veteran's status, who are in general accord with the above-stated purposes.

III, I, B. Any individuals wishing to join, who have met the above criteria, must attend two consecutive meetings in order to obtain voting rights.

IV, I, C. Nonvoting individuals shall not be allowed in any M.E.Ch.A. meetingwhere M.E.Ch.A. business is being discussed unless sponsored by a voting member and approved by all voting members.

Now, it might be the case that the U.C. M.E.Ch.A. actually enforces these rules in a non-exclusionary way, scheduling enough consecutive non-business meetings that interested students have a chance to become members, or counting only those meetings to which one was permitted to attend when determining potential membership. I don't know. And it also shouldn't really bother me that this enforcement puts one at the discretion of the M.E.Ch.A. leadership, because the group also contains explicit mechanisms for expelling unwanted minorities:

D. Any member may present a motion for removal of any member at anyD[sic]. Any member may present a motion for removal of any member at any official meeting. At the following business meeting a 2/3 majority must approve the motion in order for the removal to take place.

Now, I realize this is just a student-written student-organization Constitution, not meant to be taken very seriously. But I do know that the generally unsubstantiated rumors that float around the Student Organization circle confirm this general sense of M.E.Ch.A. It could still be false, of course, (and if any of my readers at Chicago have information one way or the other I'd love to hear it).

And in the interests of full disclosure, feel free to criticize the Libertarian Society's Constitution, which I helped write.

Rape:

The Curmudgeonly Clerk turns his trademark detail to the Patrick O Kennedy case, which involves the question of whether the death penalty can/should be the penalty for the rape of a child. For more on the case in question, see Amanda's previous post here and my post over at Overlawyered.

Now, I wholeheartedly agree with the Curmudgeonly Clerk that Coker v. Georgia (the case that declared the death penalty "cruel and unusual" when used against mere rapists) was wrongly decided, and that the cruelty of the death penalty should not be based on the assumption of the Supreme Court (which is, incidentally, predominantly male) that rape is inherently less serious murder. The very existence of the English phrase "a fate worse than death" discredits the Court's too-glib assertion that:

Life is over for the victim of the murderer; for the rape victim, life may not be nearly so happy as it was, but it is not over and normally is not beyond repair.

So if a state, community, or other body authorized to make such law decides that rape is indeed a very serious crime, a fate as bad or worse than death, I think that the Court's determination otherwise is very, very, troublesome.

But I stop short of joining the Clerk's view that the Louisiana law is "an overly modest step in the right direction. " Even if one believes (as I do) that it's no crueller to impose the death penalty for rape than it is for murder (a separate issue I won't confront here) there are two due process reasons to worry about instituting the death penalty for rape.

The first is the nature of proof. Murder trials nearly always require one to produce an actual body, so that the only question at issue is "who did it?" and certain amounts of evidence are gathered of a largely physical nature, and so on. Eyewitness testimony can be very unreliable but can often get across the basic details. The trouble with many rape cases is that the determining facts are mistier. Since it's always illegal to kill people (barring a few exception circumstances) it's usually enough to establish that A killed B and there weren't any major countervailing circumstances. But since many, even most, sex is extremely legal it's not enough to establish that A had sex with B, one also has to establish that B did not consent, that A reasonably should have known B did not consent, and so on. Since people who have sex so rarely ask for clear consent, the issue can get messy. Dahlia Lithwick pointed out in Slate how steep penalties in rape can be troubling given the small quantities of proof that make a difference, if we repeal the Coker case, between life and death.

The second issue is the issue of selective prosecution. My understanding (and those who know should correct me if I'm wrong) is that rapes are generally underprosecuted, or at least prosecuted inconsistently. If this is so, the idea of having prosecutors decide who walks more-or-less free and who gets a death penalty pursued against them might bother a lot of citizens. The potential for racial bias in prosecution, etc. might become more dangerous. I'm not saying these issues aren't present in capital trials, I'm sure they are, but I think it wouldn't be completely misguided to think that these issues would be more problematic in the case of certain kinds of rape, especially "he said, she said" or date-rape.

So I think the intermediate solution is good. Leave egregious and aggravated rapes (like the alleged acts of Patrick O Kennedy) punishable by death and the mistier bounds of other sexual assault punished by lesser sentences. Now, it might be that this is what the Clerk has in mind, and if so, I wholeheartedly agree. If not, well, I think things would probably be improved if we treated different kinds of rapes differently-- where the act in question is pretty clearly criminal and non-consensual and the only issue is "who did it?" it should be dealt with very harshly. Where the act in question is fuzzier and a lot of it rests on a pair of competing testimonies about "what did he do?" a little more humility might be in order.

UPDATE: The Cumudgeonly Clerk responds with an update, asking:

Let us say that we have a case of "date-rape"—a term that trivializes the crime of rape by implying that those who manage to arrange a social outing and then force sexual contact upon their companion are somehow less culpable than a stranger might be—that is not, in Powell's callous terminology, "excessively brutal." And let's further suppose that a hidden camera captured the crime and leaves no doubt that the sex involved was non-consensual.

Does Baude envision such a case as being eligible for the death penalty? And, if not, isn't he really saying that rape per se is not egregious enough to merit the death penalty absent other circumstances? In other words, isn't Baude, more or less, arguing Justice Powell's position? That is, although he writes of rape's heinous toll with more sympathy than the Coker Court or Powell did, I think that Baude effectively reaches Powell's conclusion: rape alone is insufficient. This position strikes me as being incompatible with the position that rape can be "a fate worse than death," to borrow Baude's wording, unless one believes that rape is only "a fate worse than death" when it is accompanied by aggaravating circumstances.

I simply do not believe that a person need be beaten mercilessly in addition to being raped in order for it to result in irreparable harm.

As J. Alfred Prufrock said, that is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all. If a video camera catches a sex-act on tape and it is clear to all watching it that it is non-consensual, then I think that rape should be treated just as harshly as a "man in the bushes" type rape, etc. I don't hold to the Powell position that the brutality of the rape is at issue-- forced sexual intercourse is brutal in and of itself.

Instead, my hesitancy to punish rape with our most irreversible punishment stems from a worry about our ability to separate out the guilty from the not guilty. In cases where only the testimony of the victim spells the difference between innocence and guilt, I'm not sure it's wise to put death in the balance. In other words, where cameras or other evidence make it clear that rape occurred, my fears are allayed. I used the phrase "date-rape" as a too-casual shorthand for rape cases in which neither side disagrees that sex occurred, but there is disagreement about who consented to what and (this is where my shorthand was casual) where there is no physical or third-party evidence on either side. In those cases, which I suspect are relatively frequent (and probably drastically underreported) it would behoove us to be a little more humble, and avoid the irreversible choice of death.

So, "Does Baude envision such a case (as the one the Clerk cite above) as being eligible for the death penalty?" Absolutely.

Note: Nothing in this post should be taken as an endorsement general belief that the death penalty is a good idea in the first place. All of this is taking as given the existence of the death penalty for certain kinds of murder. Whether it makes sense to use execution as a punishment in the first place is a very difficult question that I don't pretend to have an answer to.

Evolving Etiquette:

By pure coincidence, Miss Manners' latest column directly deals with the question of the evolution of etiquette, so provides at least some answer to Amanda's question below.

Dear Miss Manners:

Have I lost step with the times? Is it now acceptable for fathers-to-be to attend baby showers? At showers I've attended and given in the past, the fathers-to-be arrived toward the end of the affair to lend a hand only.

Yes, you have lost step with the times, and you can't imagine how much fun Miss Manners has saying that. Every other question she gets that includes such an approach notes a change for the worse, with the plaintive fear that it might have entered mainstream etiquette. As if it is Miss Manners's job to dumb the field down to accommodate bad habits.

The fact that people have noticed that children, and prospective children, have fathers as well as mothers is indeed a change, but a good one. Miss Manners has no objection whatever to baby showers for both parents.

With Friends Like These...:

Sean Hackbarth at The American Mind also responds to Micha Ghertner's post on gift-giving, and Mr. Hackbarth generally claims to agree with my take that "gift-giving isn't very economic behavior." Great.

But Mr. Hackbarth goes on to accuse David Friedman (the economist who Mr. Ghertner cited) of "go(ing) down the path of economic theory cum mental masturbation." Well I don't agree with that at all. I do think Friedman's economic analysis of gift-giving is illuminating, and I do think that love can be logically (if not usefully) reduced to "preferences" and "utility," concepts that Mr. Hackbarth derides. Yes, some economists are over-analytical but I don't really think that David Friedman is one of them. So my dispute with Mr. Ghertner shouldn't be taken to construe support for any Friedman-bashing.

In other words, Mr. Hackbarth and I may be on the same page, but possibly of entirely different books.

Etiquette, changing::

In case you've missed it, Will's been discussing wedding etiquette below here and here (couples may not ask for $ instead of gifts). I agree with Will -- this law of etiquette stands firm. Still, for how much longer will it remain?

Wedding registries do not seem to have outgrown their use yet, even if there are more marriages between more mature people with well-outfitted apartments. An absence of Mr. Coffee and Brown Betty on the list probably indicates that the marrying couple either already has a sufficient number of coffee pots and tea pots (or that they're Mormon). But if that's the case, Amazon has a registry -- there's room for lots of fun there; who ever had enough books? [and Will thinks people don't get married for the gifts...don't tempt me now, this is the argument against eloping!] But will what's tacky remain what we proclaim it to be today? Is tackiness that's more or less fixed than morals, particularly if the economists have their way and convince us that gifts are a flagrantly inefficient waste?

Look at Emily Posts's Etiquette (1922) -- Mrs Manners does not command us to abide by all the recommendations of that book. For instance, on engagements:

  A young girl may not, even with her fiancé, lunch in a road house without a chaperon, or go on a journey that can by any possibility last over night. To go out with him in a small sail-boat sounds harmless enough, but might result in a questionable situation if they are becalmed, or if they are left helpless in a sudden fog. The Maine coast, for example, is particularly subject to fogs that often shut down without warning and no one going out on the water can tell whether he will be able to get back within a reasonable time or not. A man and a girl went out from Bar Harbor and did not get back until next day. Everyone knew the fog had come in as thick as pea-soup and that it was impossible to get home; but to the end of time her reputation will suffer for the experience.

In response, Mrs Manners recalls those Wedding Police, whose:

specialty was to declare whether each bride was "entitled" to wear a white wedding dress. And it didn't take much to be disqualified. The couple having been spotted in a parked car would be enough to put the question on the docket. Having been alone under a private roof for more than a few minutes was sufficient for a conviction. . . .
Society's change of morals did in the Wedding Police. . . .
Miss Manners confesses to having cheered on their demise. Her oft-stated position was that killjoys have no place at a wedding, and that the real vulgarity here was the notion that the color of the dress should advertise the history of the body it contained. (Besides, she had long since discovered how much mental and emotional effort one can save oneself by not much caring who is doing what with whom.)

So what's the fate of the wedding gift as average cost of an American wedding closes in on $20,000 a year and asking for cash gifts (for the honeymoon, for the mortgage) regretfully becomes more common? I'm not feeling very optimistic here. I predict that Mrs Manners will be the last of a dying breed, and I'll be behind her, as I show up at weddings with that unrequested mortar and pestle or Alexander Calder mobile replica.

Coping Mechanisms:

My dog, Fred, is ten years old and pretty much totally deaf. What amazes me are the number of coping mechanisms he's developed to deal with this (he likes to keep tabs on where people are in the house). He's moved his sleeping/resting spots, for example, to the chair in the living room that gives him the best vantage points of as many rooms and door as possible at once. Last night, when we returned home from a long-ish walk that left him very short for breath, he went and took a nap under a piece of furniture in the living room, which I'd never seen him do before, I think because he didn't want to be bothered until he was ready for duty, so to speak.

But today was the most striking. I went back into my room with the door closed, and opened the door to find him lying in front of my door, but with his back to it. I thought that was a funny choice, because he wouldn't be able to tell if the door opened (and he doesn't like having people sneak up on him). But then he got up and faced me before I had moved. At first I thought this was because he could smell me, but now I've figured out that it was because opening the door let a bunch of light fall into the hallway, which he can see and use as a cue.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Haircuts:

I link to this New York Times story on how everybody is getting all gussied up to go back to school only because it includes quotes and a picture of a student at Indiana University, which is about three blocks from my home:

Some were returning to high school, while others, like Lauren Hanono, were going back to college. In a day and a half, Ms. Hanono, 19, of Lawrence, N.Y., crammed in a hair coloring, a haircut, a manicure and body wax and an eyebrow wax. It's service she said she couldn't find in Bloomington, Ind., where she is a junior at Indiana University.

"It's like roughing it," said Ms. Hanono, a communications major.

I'm not actually positive Ms. Hanono is right that there are no eyebrow waxes here in Bloomington, but the point is taken.

UPDATE: I haven't tried these personally, but my understanding is that there is at least one and probably two places in Bloomington one can get an eyebrow wax. One is at the Mira Salon (Here under "hair and skin care") and the other at Mondo Delgado Salon & Spa.

UPDATE THE SECOND: An email to Ms. Hanono reveals that she wasn't quoted correctly by the Times reporter (surprise, surprise). She is indeed aware of the services available in Bloomington. This is, of course, a textbook case for how one should check people's quotes carefully if at all possible. Eugene Volokh makes this point frequently.

CampusWatch:

Volokh Conspirator David Bernstein thinks Daniel Pipes should be applauded for CampusWatch, the organization he set up to monitor the teaching of Middle-East Studies in American universities. I can only assume Bernstein's applause is because he hasn't read Jacob Levy(now a Volokh Conspirator himself)'s very sound criticisms of Campus Watch's methods. See Levy's posts here, here, here, here, and here.

UPDATE: Jacob Levy notes the same thing.

An Economist finds his limits:

Another blogger has (privately) asked me why I'm so concerned about wedding etiquette, and Micha Ghertner has a post asking:

I'm somewhat surprised at Will's reaction, considering that he comes from a law and economics background, and yet his argument here strikes me as highly sociological. Perhaps Will has been spending a bit too much time around some Critical Legal Theorists lately? (Kidding, I hope)

Before I go further, I guess I'd better confess that yes, my answer does have some elements of sociology in it. That's because I think etiquette is useful as a system of norms and rules that help to constrain human behavior, largely by convincing them of the existence of other and more beneficial eqilibrium solutions [for my post on Miss Manners, Game Theory, and this sort of equilibrium, check out my Saturday May 24th post at this link (permalinks for June and May are broken).]

In any case, what made me so annoyed about the Prudence/Bride-to-Be response was not actually the wanting of cash instead of gifts. I certainly understand that. It was the reference to gifts in the first place . Those who host a party should always be (or at least act) pleasantly surprised when their guests decide to give them a physical gift rather than reciprocally entertaining them instead. (Imagine the nasty shock if, instead of giving them a toaster, each of these people's guests responded by inviting them to another wedding reception as a gift.)

But all of this eventually leads to the question that Steven Landsburg and David Friedman (quoted by the Micha Ghertner post) ask: why give gifts instead of cash? David Friedman suggests that it could be paternalism (either benevolent or hostile), and Landsburg quotes Friedman as suggesting that we give gifts to show off the fact that we know the recipient well enough to be able to figure out the perfect gift without investing a great deal of time. All of these responses are interesting (and don't wholly miss the mark, in my opinion) but fail to consider the ultimate question that their responses bring about. If we all gave money instead of gifts, why would we give gifts at all?

After all, behind the veil of ignorance we all expect to have about as many celebration-worthy events in our lives-- marriages, Christmases, etc.-- as each other, so the money probably will come close to cancelling out in the end. This means that the giving of money could be useful for one of two reasons. One, it could form as a useful system of loans, under the theory that the newly-wed and the newly-graduated are generally strapped for cash, so this system of social norms would help them get some start-up cash under the understanding that they'll hand over the cash themselves later. (This doesn't explain why we give money to those who graduate from college but not those who have just enrolled in it, except insofar as we give it to people who have just graduated from high school, too. Nor does it explain Christmas, where we all give presents to each other at the same time. It also doesn't really explain why the poor give money to the rich, which they often do.) Two, it could be that the system of money works as an informal incentive structure. A society creates the norm of gift-giving to encourage people to get married and to go to school. If you get married you get the spoils, if you just shack up, you're on your own. Now this certainly might have an effect, and the economist in me hates to argue that it wouldn't, but from a purely anecdotal point of view, I simply don't know of anybody who got married or finished school for the marginal benefit of collecting small checks from relatives and distant friends. Some holidays, in fact, would have their gift-giving pretty much eliminated if all gifts were replaced with checks. Imagine getting together with your friends Christmas morning and having everybody hand everybody else $5. A stranger (and less effectual) practice I cannot imagine.

So why do we give these gifts at all? My answer is that this is where economists have gotten off track. The point of giving gifts is not simply in the fact that one makes the recipient better off. Gift-giving is important because it is symbolic, especially of being emotionally moved by a special occasion. It is for this reason that money fails to convey the message appropriately, partially because money has gotten a reputation as being a substance people deal with (or try to deal with) rather level-headedly. Gifts often convey messages in and of themselves (yule-logs, silver bands, crystal bowls) and they are also important because yes, as Steven Landsburg says, we have a complicated relationship with money. Gifts are useful because we can keep them to commemorate the giver; it's hard to tell the 20 that Aunt Margaret handed you from the 20 that Uncle Dick gave instead. In fact, the gifts that I have received that I most treasure now are all non-monetary-- a set of books, an O'Keeffe print, a planner, a corkscrew, etc (the enumeration of certain items in this list not intended to disparage other non-monetary items equally treasured by me). I've never asked widely, but I suspect this to be the case for a lot of people.

It may well be true that nobody knows my preferences as well as I do, but if that's so, why do they give me anything at all, instead of just telling me to keep my own gift and call it even? Gift-giving, I argue, simply isn't very economic behavior in the first place. As economic behavior it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Instead, it is an emotional behavior, designed to commemorate, to symbolize the fact that one has been moved, or that one simply saw the perfect thing while one was out and about, or to represent some sort of paternalism (isn't this why people so often give one another books that they've always wanted that person to read?).

Incidentally, I want to state my whole-hearted opposition to Micha's interim solution of gift certificates. These are the worst of both worlds, and manage to combine the most unfortunate aspects of cash (unimaginativeness, easily discernible price, forgettability) with the paternalism of gift giving. If one's not going to play along with the symbolism of gifts I've discussed (and one needn't) then one should just give cash and get it over with. In other words, symbolic gift-giving is great, but if you want to engage in straightforward economic gift-giving, at least try to keep the market as well-oiled as possible.

Ada-izing:

In literary news, "MR" is currently reading Ada (though I can't yet tell what he thinks of it). See posts here, here, here, here, and here. For my selected quotes from Ada, go here.

Shakedowns:

This is old news, but it bothers me anyway. Slate's Dear Prudence, on whether one is permitted to run a shake-down wedding:

Dear Prudence,
My fiance and I—neither of whom have been married before—are planning and paying for our wedding. Because we do not want a big, lavish ceremony (nor can we afford one) and because we have been to too many other ceremonies where the bridal shower, wedding gift, bachelor and bachelorette parties, etc. have amounted to a small fortune, we've decided to make things simple for ourselves and our guests. There will be no attendants or groomsmen, no showers or parties, no multiple-store gift registries. As we're in our late 20s and have lived on our own for several years, we already have enough household items and do not need more. Instead, we are planning to ask our guests to give monetary gifts rather than buying toasters or dishes. We have received some flak from our family about the lack of tradition. I know this is our day, and it is completely up to us how we want to celebrate it, but we would like an objective third party (you!) to give your opinion. Thank you very much.

—Bride-To-Be

Dear Bride,
Tradition is taking it in the neck these days, so don't get too worked up about the flak you're receiving. We are living at a time when a dog has served as "best man," couples tie the knot on Ferris wheels, and more than a few brides have waltzed down the aisle in maternity clothes. For better or for worse, we are making new traditions. To tell you the truth, your thinking is sound about needless presents and multiple parties. But because wedding gifts of cash are associated with the Sopranos, humor might soften the situation, especially since your wedding sounds like it's going to be a warm and informal affair. Perhaps enclose a note with your invitation saying, basically, what you wrote to Prudie. For example:

We're having no showers or parties and such.
We've got all our "stuff," so our needs are not much.
What we could use most (and it's one-size-fits-all)
Is the check of your choice … and no trip to the mall.

—Prudie, audaciously

Now, the first time I read that I thought that Prudie must be joking, but re-reading it, I don't think she is. Her claim seems to be that if pregnant brides are allowed then surely brides are allowed to demand cash from their guests. This strikes me as terribly impolite, terribly wrong, and wrong for the wrong reasons.

Firstly, the worst thing that ever happened to weddings was the birth of the notion that "this is our day, and it is completely up to us how we want to celebrate it." Just because one has chosen to give an expensive party in one's own honor does not relieve one of the usual obligation to be a host and treat one's guests as guests. Anything does not go at a wedding. A Ferris wheel?-- maybe. Maternity clothes?-- Absolutely (because inquiring into the sex-life of the bride is far more impolite than the bride having one). A dog as a best man?-- I'll have to be convinced. But a Godfather-style shakedown? No.

But why are the hosts of a party forbidden to explain that the gifts which they simply know everybody else will be moved to give them are useless? Two reasons. Firstly, because it's just darn presumptious. The fiction of the wedding is that the bride and groom are so moved with generosity inspired by their newfound love that they wish to entertain and rejoice with their 200 closest friends (or 20 or 2000). These guests are then moved themselves, and some of them choose to commemorate the occasion to the bride and groom, with a gift that they find affordable and appropriate, whether it is cash, a hand-knit sweater, a set of fine china, or a down-payment on a house. Saying "cash only" implies that the gifts were pretty much assured, and you don't trust your friends to give you anything that you actually want. [A Slate frayster suggests writing "no gifts", but even "no gifts" is a terrible thing to write because it implies you were expecting everybody to be moved to gift-giving in the first place. Plus it creates that terrible situation where half of the people there ignore your warning and give you gifts anyway, and the other half, which mistakenly took you at your word, now feel like cheap chumps.]

In any case, another disadvantage of asking for a check in the "size of your choice" is that it allows you to directly compare how much all of your friends and relatives are willing to spend on you. Buying friendship is a disgusting enough practice. It's not made any better when it's reduced to an all-pay auction.

The Prudence theory seems to be that if the wedding is warm and informal and you make a little rhyme about it, you can get away with this sort of thing. And maybe the people coming to this wedding will be such good-hearted, good-humored folks that they'll put up with this. But one would hope that your closest friends and family know that you have a toaster-oven and don't want another, or at the very least know who to ask. What's particularly terrible about this pre-announced policy is that the only people it is likely to affect-- the people who were planning to give you stuff you have no use or desire for-- are the very people so distantly connected to you that you have no right to presume their going to give you a gift at all, or to boss them around about how to do it.

Incidentally, life holds hope for the toaster-laden and cash-starved. It seems to me they have two polite choices. 1: To refuse to register anyplace or to express any preference about gifts at all and hope that everybody will be so frustrated trying to find them something nice that they will give up and write checks. 2: To pick a store that has a very permissive return or store-credit policy, and register there, and then return all of their wedding gifts by the armload. If either of these seem painfully mercenary, it is only because there's a limit to how well you can dress up the practice of holding a party in your honor and then charging admission.

APSA Blogging, Part 1-- Just War Theory:

I'm still trying to get settled here in New York, but blogging should commence shortly. I just spent a few days at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting and attended a number of good panels, so I'll try to add a bit to the blogspheric response.

Waldron, Arneson, Estlund, and Luban on just war theory:

Larry Solum has already blogged about this, giving a much better summary than I ever could (written, astonishly, in real time!) so I'll simply add a few comments. If you care enough to read this, you care enough to read his summary first. Go on, I'll wait.

David Estlund:

Estlund's question is whether a (volunteer) soldier ought to fight in a war he deems to be unjust. His tentative conclusion is that the soldier should apply an "honest mistake" standard--so long as the decision to fight the unjust war was arrived at both honestly and competently, the solder should obey. This assertion immediately made me wonder about an inverse formulation--if the decision to fight a just war was arrived at in a way that would fail the "honest mistake" standard (dishonestly or incompetently), should the soldier fight? If, for example, a war could be justified as a humanitarian intervention, but was dishonestly or incompetently declared under a doctrine of preventative war, is the soldier who fights it in the wrong? My intuition is "no," but does this give governments too much slack? At any rate, great presentation, fascinating questions.

David Lupan:

Two of Lupan's main points seemed both important and plausible: that Walzer's conception of self-determination is implausibly thin ("It's like saying I have a right to health care if I can win it in a karate tournament"), and that preventative war can be assimilated into the preemptive strike category so long as the probability is extraordinarily high. Here he suggests that the "rogue state" designation might indeed have use, as those states that do meet this high probabilistic threshold. But then he lost me, saying that while wars of self-defense can be fought collectively, preemptive strikes and preventative wars against rogue states can only be made by the threatened parties; Israel or Iran, therefore, might have been able to fight a just preventative war against Iraq, but not the US or Britain. Denying this, Lupan argues, would make preventative wars too common.

I agree that it's important to limit the preventative war justification in order to avoid the "I shot him in self-defense to prevent him from shooting me in self-defense" sort of scenario. But I'm not so sure that Lupan's "threatened party only" clause adequately deals with the reality of asymmetric power. Say Country A is developing weapons of mass destruction, has a large and defensively fortified army, and meets all the requirements of being a dangerous rogue state likely to attack innocent Country B. Country B, being a peace-loving nation and an ally of rich and powerful Superpower C, has only a small military force--much too small and defensively constituted to be able to carry out an effective offensive war against A. Now, if B were attacked by A, on Lupan's view, C could join in. Does it really make sense to forbid B from designating C as its agent for the purposes of waging an otherwise-just preventative war?

I'm not sure the slope is really slippery enough to justify this, and I'm not sure if Lupan is looking at both sides of the cost-benefit equation. It's not as if C will automatically go along with whatever B wants; C must, after all, make its own calculation about whether or not it wants to lose blood and treasure over someone else's problem. But let's assume that the Cs of the world are rather hot-tempered, and that we will get more wars with this sort of norm. There's still the second-order effects to consider: what result would such a norm have on arms races? So long as the Bs of the world know they can count on their tough buddy Cs, they have little incentive to acquire the offensive capability required to handle the As; the As of the world, similarly, will be less eager to make menacing noises at the Bs. And the wars that come will be more likely to be 2nd Gulf War-style smackdowns than bloody Iran-v.-Iraq-style multi-year struggles. So even if we have, say, 50% more wars, if each war is only 2/3s as "bad," it's not so obvious we're worse off.

All of which could simply be taken as an enthusiastic murmur of assent to Lupan's own acknowledged caveat that perhaps when thinking about just war theory one needs to take very seriously the difficulties posed to general laws by inequalities of power. I heartily concur with Larry Solum that both paper and presentation were excellent.

Jeremy Waldron:

I thought Waldron's presentation, which looked at the problems that moral disagreement poses for just war theory, was one of the most engaging; perhaps because I find these problems so big, I have little to add to Solum's summary. I will say this: Waldron's concern that the legal and moral norm-shaping community be careful, in attempting to forge chains that conform more closely to ius ad bellum, not to upset the delicate consesus about ius in bello struck me as absolutely central. I think the combination of technological progress and radical power asymmetries makes attention to fighting wars justly much more important than a focus on fighting just wars, and, to put it bluntly, I see a consensus on the former eroding (read: equivocation regarding terrorism) much faster than I see progress on the latter.

Richard Arneson:

All of which leads into Richard Arneson's presentation, which takes on directly the question "Is [deliberate flouting of noncombatant immunity, 'terrorism' a la Walzer] always morally wrong?" Arneson, working deontologically, answers resoundingly in the negative, which quite frankly is enough to make me think that setting aside consequentialist critiques and working from parallels to wrongful trespass and road rage is not the way to go with thinking about the morality of war. I'll state right up front that this topic is too big and too important for flippant remarks by grad students who are still 12 hours away from starting classes, but, that said, here's my intuition on this:

A- Killing people is pretty awful, if perhaps unavoidable; the less it approximates self-defense, the worse it is. B- If we can create stable norms that minimize the amount of not-even-close-to-self-defense killing that goes on, we probably should, even at the risk of philosophical incoherence. C- Non-combatant immunity norms seem to have been, historically, reasonably effective tools; we can see evidence throughout history, as Walzer reminds us, that many real armies in real life actually do attempt to reduce non-combatant casualities, even at costs to important missions. Not always, not as much as we'd like, but norms matter. D- Given all this, let's please not undermine them.

That said, Arneson's presentation was made with admirable clarity and cogency, and he had a wonderful line in "I'm obligated to do some independent checking before obeying my wife and killing the neighbors."

That's all for today--I'll write more soon about the wonderful panel on the role of character in judicial selection I attended.

Also soon to come: commentary on upcoming oral arguments in Swedenburg v. Kelly, the winery-shipping case; reactions to Phillipe Pettit's presentation of "Akrasia, Collective and Individual" at the NYU Colloquium in Law, Philosophy and Political Theory. I don't know about you, but I'm psyched.

Return:

Greetings all, I am back from my week-long blogging stint at Overlawyered. Thanks to all the readers and linkers who noticed the trip, and also to those who helped make our last month our most traffic-heavy month here ever. Incidentally, if you haven't gotten enough of Matthew Yglesias below, a little conversation about the interview is starting over in his comments section.

20 Questions Round Five:

I bring you all the latest in our series of 20 Questions for interesting bloggers. This time we've taken a trip to the left wing of the blogosphere. I give you Matthew Yglesias.

1: Why did you start blogging?

It all started back in January 2002. I had a serious girlfriend at the time and she was heading off to Oxford for a semester and so I was looking for a hobby that would take up some of my free time. I'd been reading some weblogs -- Marshall, Sullivan, Kaus, InstaPundit, Matt Welch, Jeff Jarvis -- for a while and I thought I'd give it a try. At any rate, I had a job lined up for the summer working on a campaign here in New York, but about a week before finals the candidate got some bad news from her doctor and dropped out of the race for health reasons, leaving me pretty high and dry. That gave me lots of time to blog and the site's popularity started taking off. Then at the end of October 2002, my term as Editor-in-Chief of The Harvard Independent came to an end and I started pouring a lot of my journalistic energy into the site.

2: So, umm, without meaning to ask a dumb question, why Harvard?

It's a kind of funny story. The summer before my senior year in high school I was living with a family in Russia and my host-sister asked me what I was going to do when I graduated. I named a few schools I was considering and she said to me "eet seems to me zat you are smart boy, and eef I vas smart boy and I leeved in ze vest, I vould luf to go to ze great Garvard Ooneeversity." That was pretty much the first time I thought about it seriously, but I went up in the fall to pay a visit, stayed with a friend of mine, liked what I saw, and applied. Then I got in and I went, because, basically, I figured that no one had ever really screwed up their life by going to Harvard so why not.

3: Does Harvard have serious grade inflation? Does it matter?

Certainly the average grades Harvard is handing out today are higher than the average grades they were handing out forty years ago. At the same time, the admissions process is much more competitive than it used to be, and the student body is drawn from a much wider segment of the population, so there's reason to think that the quality of the work being done has improved. In addition, computers and the like make doing research and writing papers much better. I can't really say how things compare to other schools, but the consensus seems to be that Harvard is more inflated than, say, Chicago and I have no reason to dispute that. Of course, there's tremendous variation from department-to-department and professor to professor at every institution and Harvard's no exception. It definitely seems to me that I wrote some papers that got As that weren't very good, but at the same time I wrote some papers that I felt were excellent and the graders felt otherwise.

As to whether it's a problem, I wrote an article on this subject a while ago and I thought the best people to ask were the admissions personnel at the sort of professional schools that graduates of the top colleges go to. pretty much everyone I asked agreed that there wasn't really a _problem_ in the sense that they had a hard time distinguishing the excellent students from the merely good ones. They were well aware that standards varied from place-to-place (though they declined to go into detail) and said they had a good grasp on what every students grades indicated. Maybe they're wrong, but they seem about as expert as anyone in this subject.

4: University of Chicago students have a complicated relationship with Harvard, but I've always wondered if that relationship was symmetric at all. What do Harvard students think of the University of Chicago? Do they think of it at all?

I'd say it's pretty assymetrical. Harvard people are pretty self-absorbed and if they think about other schools at all it's probably focused on Yale and the other places in the Boston area, MIT and Wellesley in particular. During the winter a lot of people, especially from the west coast, express some regret that they're not at Stanford and I've seen a few Canadians wearing shirts that say "Harvard: The McGill of the South" which I think is pretty funny.

Personally, I think more about Chicago than most. A very good friend of mine since Kindergarten just graduated from there. Moreover, despite Dave Winer's efforts, Chicago definitely seems to be the blogging powerhouse of the academic world. I visited Chicago when I was applying to college, liked it a lot, and very possibly would have gone if I hadn't gotten into Harvard. We hear every once in a while that you guys are actually getting the better education since you work harder, and I think people are normally inclined to think that you would have to work even harder if you had to compete with the students we have. As to whether there's any truth to any of this, I really couldn't say.

5: Your Comments section definitely seems to be the blogosphere-place-to-be, with numerous regular posters on all sides. What do you think makes your comments section so popular, and how should a blog decide whether to add comments or not? Crooked Timber has them, but the Volokh Conspiracy does not.

It's hard to know exactly how to account for the popularity of the comments section. Obviously, I'd like to claim credit for it myself, but in reality I don't think I have much to do with it. I try to maintain a fair-minded tone in my posts, which helps, but it's not sufficient. Ultimately, I just lucked into a good group of commenters and so far the community seems to be self-sustaining. As for whether a blog should have comments, I'd say that it would be worth it for any site to try it out for a little while. A good comments section can be a real asset to a blog. Of course, if it doesn't turn into something that the host is happy with, he should get rid of it, but I don't think there's any way to tell in advance.

6. For some reason, Libertarians are vastly over-represented in the blogosphere. To what degree do you think the left is accurately represented among blogs? Which factions are left out and which dominate?

It seems to me that the fundamental fact is that weblogs represent a pretty upscale demographic slice of the United States. Bloggers are, or so it seems to me, better-educated and wealthier than the population as whole. On the right, this manifests itself in more libertarians and fewer social conservatives than you see in the real world. On the left, there's a similar demographic skew. The Democratic Party base consists largely of African-Americans, Hispanics, women, and union members, but liberal blogs tend (there are, of course, lots of exceptions) to be run by white, male, professionals. It's a little hard to know what the ideological results of this are because the left is out of power so everyone's pretty focused on exposing the evils of the Republicans. I bet that if and when you see a Democratic administration you'll start seeing more fractures among people on the left, both in the country at large and in the blogosphere, then it'll be easier to make a comparison.

7. Have you considered taking over TAPped, now that you're going to be working at The American Prospect. Frankly, your blog is a lot better than theirs.

I reject the premise here. Tapped is one of my favorite blogs and I'd like to see both voices continuing out there.

8. You've recently made a pledge-drive at your blog. Now that you're working as a writer, is there some minimum income or readership your blog will have to generate for you to keep it going?

I'd probably stop writing if people stopped reading me, but otherwise, no, there's no necessary minimum. I would say, though, that the blog will probably be getting somewhat less attention from me in the future than it has for the past several months, since I'll have other responsibilities. Fundamentally, though, I blog because I enjoy it and I don't see that stopping.

9: In your archives there's a mysterious deleted post titled "Finals" whose text reads only "deleted by special request." Obviously, if you deleted it you probably won't tell us what it used to say, but could you, you know, obliquely hint at it a little?

It was actually a link to a final exam question for a communications course. The question dealt with weblogs and mentioned my site, which is why I linked to it. The instructor asked me to take it down since the test was still ongoing (or maybe hadn't started yet -- can't remember exactly) so I deleted it.

10: What's the best case to be made against Logical Positivism-- the claim that a statement is meaningful only if it is empirical or tautological?

Hm. Probably the clearest objection is that the verification principle (a statement is meaningful if and only if it is either verifiable or tautological -- that's how I was taught to define positivism) is, itself, neither verifiable nor tautological. In defense of positivism, I think one could say that the verification principle is tautological. It does, after all, follow analytically from itself. This leads us to what I think is a better objection, namely Quine's argument from meaning holism which tells us that it doesn't make sense to talk about the verifiability (or analyticity) of a given statement in isolation. The meanings of the terms employed in any given statement are determined, in part, by what other statements the speaker accepts. Quine, of course, had a lot of affinities with positivism and my sense is that most philosophers today accept neither positivism nor Quine's neopositivism, but I'm pretty much a Quinean myself so I think the holism objection is good.

11: Are there a priori synthetic propositions?

Well, people certainly assert a lot of synthetic propositions based on what look to me to be a priori considerations, but I assume you mean to be asking about true a priori propositions. Seriously, though, I think this is the wrong way to think about things. Kant believed, if I recall correctly, that mathematics and morality provided us with examples of a priori synthetic knowledge. And perhaps they do. Still, I think the right question to be asking about, say, morality is not "is this synthetic a priori?" but rather "what are the ontological commitments of moral discourse?" Similarly, with math we want to know what the consequences of embracing anti-realism would be for mathematical practice and whether or not that's an acceptable price to pay.

12: Does serious philosophy have any role to play in practical politics?

Well, to the extent that philosophy involves learning valid forms of reasoning and teaches you to avoid equivocation and platitudes when making your arguments, then it obviously does. As to whether specific philosophical arguments have a bearing on philosophical practice, then I would say probably not. One exception may be the abortion debate where people seem to have different ideas about the nature of the human person. Even here, though, I doubt that many people are actually being convinced by sound metaphysical arguments. One might think that political philosophy would have grave implications for politics, but I rather doubt it. It seems to me that people probably adopt philosophies because those philosophies accord with the political inclinations they already had, more often than changing their political beliefs in response to a philosophical argument. The other thing is that when voting you need to choose between two rather crudely-defined alternatives so there's really no room for the kind of nuance you find in a philosophical debate. Was Al Gore advocating some kind of Rawlsian liberalism or did he have a more consequentialist take -- who knows? At any rate, I certainly don't know.

13: What is the biggest liability Wesley Clark would have as a presidential candidate?

For one thing, he has very little name recognition outside of real junkie circles. Then there's the fact that he has no natural base of support in the primaries, no natural constituency. His ability on the stump, in political debates, and as a fundraiser is all totally unproven, though he does seem to me to be good on TV. His lack of domestic experience could be a liability or it could prove to be an asset, since he won't have a track record people can nit-pick. Basically, though, I think his viability as a candidate would rest on his actual abilities as a campaigner -- the raw material is pretty much all there. At the end of the day, though, I don't like to try and prognosticate by reading the tea leaves. One of the great virtues of the primary system is that you get to see whether or not the candidate is a good campaigner before you decide whether or not you want to nominate him.

14: Broadly speaking, where do your personal beliefs diverge from the Democratic party line?

I'm not so sure what the "Democratic party line" is any more, but I do have my differences. One thing is that I've grown very skeptical of the efficacy of the state of gun regulation in America. I'm also less enthusiastic about a lot of environmentalist initiatives than are many liberals, though union types tend to agree with me about this. Clean air and clean water are things I'm all for, but stuff about endangered species, the rainforest, pristine wetlands, etc. don't seem like compelling reasons to restrict economic development to me. So that's where I'm to the right of the Democrats. I'm probably to the left of all the current candidates for president in terms of establishing a real universal health care system, but I suspect that in their heart-of-hearts they agree with me and are just trying to be politically realistic. I'm also pretty disappointed in the way poverty has just dropped off the agenda for many Democrats. Now that AFDC's not a political hot button any more, a lot of them just don't seem to care. There are some other topics on which the Democrats have pretty diverse views, but I think I'm probably out of the mainstream. Certainly, I'm a lot less hostile to Ariel Sharon than the bulk of my readers seem to be. I have some doubts about many of the affirmative action programs the government runs, though I also have doubts about the motives of people who seem to feel that one of the biggest challenges facing the United States is that black people have things too good.

Of course there's also the vexed issue of foreign policy, where the Democrats hardly have a party line at all from which one could dissent. I would say that I do dissent, however, from the current program of incoherence that the party seems to be running with. More fundamentally, far too many Democratic officeholders seem to be approaching foreign policy as purely a question of political positioning and not giving enough thought to the substance of it. I thought that the foreign policy of Clinton's second term was very good and my assumption is that any Democratic administration beginning in 2005 would employ a lot of the Clinton-era personnel and, therefore, would do a good job in office. Nevertheless, swing voters aren't going to have that kind of faith in the Democratic foreign policy establishment and are going to want to hear something that makes sense from the candidates and so far no one's really providing that. Dean's gotten in lots of good hits on Bush, but has a very vague positive program. At the other extreme Lieberman joins Dean in at least sounding sincere in his convictions. The others are in a pretty sorry state. All-in-all it's not a situation I'm happy with.

15: What do you think of our drug laws? What would the drug laws be under your ideal regime?

I can't specify an ideal regime. For one thing, I'm not an expert on this and I just don't know enough. For another thing, I don't think anyone knows enough, because the data simply isn't there. One thing I will say is that I don't take the libertarian line that we all have a god-given right to smoke crack that the government must never interfere with. It's essentially a problem of opportunity costs -- if the government had infinite resources at its disposal, dedicating some of those resources to investigating, locating, arresting, trying, and imprisoning ecstasy dealers and manufacturers might make sense. Back in the real world, though, if you look at the marginal value of investing another dollar in MDMA control and compare it to the marginal value of investing that dollar in prenatal care, I think you'll see that from any reasonable account of the public good it makes a lot more sense to invest in prenatal care.

So from within that framework, the one thing I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence is that we ought to legalize marijuana, probably combined with some very strict rules on how the product can be marketed. Even from a pure drug control point-of-view it would just make a lot more sense to take the resources currently devoted to enforcing the marijuana laws (keeping in mind that this includes the cost of imprisoning the convicts) and dedicating it to enforcing laws against other drugs. The tax revenues that could be garnered from a legal marijuana industry would, moreover, be significant. Some other considerations militating in favor of marijuana legalization are that the current regime has some truly perverse consequences. When I was a kid it was pretty hard to buy beer and really difficult to get hard liquor. Buying pot, though, was simple -- drug dealers don't check ID since they're already criminals. Not that America's alcohol regulations are a great model of efficacy (or good sense) but the marijuana laws are a joke, at least in New York City where I grew up. Relatedly, having a law on the books that is only rarely enforced (most murders lead to arrests, whereas the proportion of pot purchases that end this way is truly trivial) creates a culture of lawlessness that's no good for anyone. Lastly, conditions in prisons (gangs and such) are such that sending a nonviolent drug consumer or even a small time dealer up the river are likely to make him a worse crook when he comes out than he was went he went in.

As for hard drugs, marijuana legalization would give us some data about price and increased usage that, after several years, might help us evaluate the situation better. Within the framework of criminalization, I think there's a lot that should be done in terms of moving law enforcement resources away from trying to nab small time dealers and seize product and toward trying to control the secondary effects -- violent crimes -- that are associated with the drug industry. My understanding is that police forces that involve a lot of separate squads (narcotics here, vice there, homocide here) are less effective overall than forces where the primary subdivisions are geographical and all the officers in a given precinct work together with their community to understand the nature of the specific problems in the area and focus on addressing them. Conditions are going to vary a lot from place to place, so it's hard to speak in general terms, but certainly my new hometown of Washington, DC could use a lower murder rate a lot more than stricter enforcement of drug prohibition.

16: So what should we do about health care?

Here you need to draw a distinction between what I would do if I were building a health care system from scratch, and what changes I think should be made in the existing system. If I were starting from scratch, and particularly if I were a dictator, I would implement something along the lines of the UK's much-maligned NHS. The main complaint with the NHS is that it doesn't deliver a very good product, and it's true that the quality of care in the UK is worse than in the other comparably-wealthy nations. On the other hand, it's only worse by a very small margin, and it's cheaper on a per capita basis by a pretty enormous margin. Overall, I think the first world over invests in health care compared to education and basic infrastructure (roads, parks, power lines, etc.) and the fact that the British government covers all its citizens fairly well for around half the per capita cost that the American government (to say nothing of private expenditures) spends is, I think, pretty impressive.

Back in the real world, though, that's just never going to happen. Nor do we seem to be at a point where the public is ready for a single-payer system as in Canada (Britain has a single-provider system, which is very different, though the tendency in America is to paper over the distinction). So given those realities, I think the imperative is to improve health care for children. Howard Dean has proposed expanding Medicaid to cover everyone under the age of 25 and some of the other candidates have similar proposals. I think that's a very good idea. Covering children is very cheap since young people usually don't have serious health care needs, and are temperamentally disinclined to seek out health care. At the same time, you can actually save a lot of money by treating young people because healthy young adults are more productive than sick ones, and by treating people early you avoid needing to give them expensive acute care in the emergency rooms.

A related issue is prenatal care, which I mentioned before. There's almost nothing a country can do to boost life expectancy more than providing quality prenatal care and I'd certainly like to see funding on this score boosted. My understanding is that, in fact, most more people can get free care of this sort but there are a lot of hurdles placed in the path of getting since, ultimately, it's in the interest of state governments to encourage people not to claim the services to which they're entitled. There's a lot of variation on this score state-to-state in terms of eligibility, information, etc. since Medicaid is basically operated at the state and local level, and ideally I'd like to see the whole prenatal operation standardized, improved, expanded, and publicized. The cost-benefit ratio of that stuff is simply enormous.

The other big topic du jour is Medicare, which I can't get into in any detail. One thing I would say is that the proposals the GOP is pushing right now just don't make much sense. Bush doesn't have the guts to follow conservatives principles and refuse to bow to the political pressure for a drug benefit, but at the same time doesn't want to invest any money in making one work. Even worse, you just don't have a lot of people who care about health policy on the right, just as most people who care about military policy wind up gravitating away from the Democrats. What you do have on the right is a pretty cozy relationship with lobbyists for the pharmaceutical companies and the HMOs, so you're getting proposals driven by lobbyists, political opportunism, pork-barrelling from the rural Senators, and pretty much everything under the sun except a desire for good policy. At the end of the day, though, we're going to have to raise taxes to pay for Medicare and I think the payroll tax is a very unfair kind of tax, so in my dreams I'd like to see Medicare taken out of that framework and financed by a progressive income tax like everything else.

17: Right-wingers seem to dominate news radio while liberals seem to have more influnce over television. Can you think of where this polraization may have come from? Is there somethnig about each medium that better suits that side?

I really don't know much about it. For one thing, I find the whole media bias debate a bit tedious. I think Eric Alterman had it right when he said that conservative commentary on this issue is more about working the refs than it is about serious analysis, but I think you could probably say the same thing about the now-blossoming school of leftwing bias watchers. For another thing, I've never really listened to talk radio, either the rightwing kind or NPR. My impression is that people listen to the radio when they're in their cars, but I don't drive. I'm not big on TV news, either, unless something's on live. I watch Meet The Press if I'm up in time, and I think Russert's approach is pretty wrongheaded, but I don't see any clear ideological content to his weird gotcha games.

18: What does Matt Yglesias look for in a woman?

I think the more relevant question may be what sort of woman is looking for a Matt Yglesias. I seem to always wind up dating vegans, which doesn't work all that well with my food-consumption patters. I dunno if that means I'm really looking for a carnivore or if vegans are my type or maybe I should compromise and find a vegetarian and we can go cheese shopping together. Seriously, though, it's pretty hard to say. Like all single people, the one thing my previous relationships have all had in common is failure, so I clearly don't really know what I'm doing.

19: Did/do you ever consider going to philosophy graduate school?

It's certainly something I've thought about. A lot of people in grad school or working in academia seem to assume that because they think my blog is good that my academic work is also good. Personally, I'm not so sure. Back at school philosophy was always very much a second priority behind working on the paper, especially for my year as News Editor and the following year as Editor-in-Chief. For about twelve months there I was working 40+ hours a week down at the office and doing my coursework in my spare time. I found that to be a pretty congenial state of affairs which indicates to me that academic philosophy isn't the place for me. Another thing I would say is that certain philosophical positions are more conducive to productive philosophizing than others. If you take a Kantian view of morality then there's all sorts of interesting things you can say about political theory. If you're a consequentialist like me, though, pretty much all you can do is re-write Reasons and Persons since you think the real answers to the policy questions are known by economists and psychologists and sociologists not philosophers. Similarly, if you take up certain kinds of psycho-physical dualism then you can write cool Chalmers-style books about consciousness, but a functionalist like me just winds up saying "ask a cognitive scientist" or else getting into irresolvable old arguments with the opposition. If the US ever goes totalitarian, though, and I don't have the courage to join the resistance, there are a lot of deeply unethical experiments in consciousness research that I'd like to help design involving causing deliberate brain damage to large numbers of people.

None of this is to say, though, that I wouldn't like to know more philosophy, particularly areas like Philosophy of Science that I haven't had much opportunity to study. Still, I doubt I could wind up making any really interesting contributions. I'm more interested in trying to be persuasive than in crossing every last "t" of a hyper-rigorous analytic argument (or, worse, pointing out the uncrossed "t"s in the arguments of others), so I think journalism is a good place for me. If I do wind up back in grad school, I'd probably try and see if the political scientists or the public policy people would have me, since there work is more along the lines of my current interests.

20: Do you read fiction? If so, what sort of fiction do you read?

I do read some fiction, though not as much as I'd like. My favorites are the Russians -- Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, obviously -- but also some earlier figures like Gogol and Lermontov (A Hero of Our Time is, I think, one of the most unfortunately overlooked books out there) as well as twentieth century guys like Bulgakov and Andrei Bely. I also like Milan Kundera and Philip Roth a great deal. In terms of Americans (well Roth, of course, is an American, but I think of him as being more in the Eastern European tradition, perhaps without any real basis), I have mixed reactions to all the guys I've read. Hemingway's In Our Time is one my favorites, but I hated The Sun Also Rises. The Great Gatsby is, well, great and The Beautiful And Damned is quite good too, but Tender Is The Night really didn't do it for me. Moby Dick is like a great novel and two terrible ones rolled into one.

I used to read a lot of genre fiction -- sci-fi, Tom Clancy, Steven King -- but not so much any more. I checked out a few SF titles during finals this spring, but writers I'd liked in the past -- Orson Scott Card, William Gibson -- seemed to have lost their appeal. I find Anne Rice's vampire books strangely compelling. Unfortunately, she leaves a lot of good thematic material and interesting metafictional stuff buried beneath a lot of repetitive hackery driven, I assume, by the commercial need to be productive.

Postrelling:

Good news for Virginia Postrel fans. She has a very interesting article in today's New York Times magazine on height, and Amazon has begun shipping copies of her long-awaited book.