7.21.2006
moral weights
now this is a standard question in moral philosophy, one whose meaning has been explored by kant (no), the utilitarian (yes/maybe), and just about every uppity philosophy 101 student. it has many forms and variants (recently cropping up in organ harvesting - no pun intended), and is one of those things whose answers aren't really all that interesting, but whose justifications are the real substance.
so why the phil spew? because i think some people's weighting systems have gone a bit unbalanced and it is a good way to re-center them. from my dear conservative friend, on lebanon-israel:
conservative: part of me is scared shitless this is gonna escalate more than it has. but part of me, though, is sorta glad we're seeing the extremists emerge here
me: yeah, that one requires some explaining
conservative: at least now we know what we're really dealing with, ya know. before, it was the easy way of fixing the problem, hope a strong man who you can coerce or cajole fixes it for you. its like the argument you dems always make about s. america -- [stop] funding the contras, fix the underlying causes and the contras won't be needed. well, US foreign policy has for years favored the contras in the ME (ie arafat, assad, mubarak, prince __ of saud, etc) as opposed to fixing underlying causes.
now that we see what those underlying causes can result in we're a step closer to fixing the problem. is that completely cracked out? its like the argument against rent controls in cities if the signal of how valuable the property is doesn't get sent, then you will end up with less housing than you actually need.
this isn't just my friend - this is what the president thinks:
"The president believes that unless you address the root causes of the violence that has afflicted the Middle East, you cannot forge a lasting peace," said White House counselor Dan Bartlett. "He mourns the loss of every life. Yet out of this tragic development, he believes a moment of clarity has arrived."
but i started with the moral point. to even consider killing one to save ten, 'we' (philosophers, ordinary people) require a clear idea of what is lost and what is gained. the more vague, the more abstract the argument becomes (kill an undefined number now to potentially save more lifes in the future), the more we - rightly, i think - become unsettled. but in the fight between between israel and hezbollah (and by extension, lebanon), nobody has made even a vague case. to infer from actions, killing 306 to save 2 seems a bit unbalanced. accepting 'collateral damage', to kill others (hezbollah) isn't what i'd call a justification, either. as i understand it, this isn't a game of counterstrike, where there are only so many terrorists we need to kill. these groups are always recruiting, and - unlike us - i imagine this conflict only fills their ranks (see the guardian reports, above). just killing and destroying isn't an endgame. it is probably counterproductive. and it definitely won't build peace. i could ramble on, but i think this makes the point.
i'm not saying don't respond. i'm saying respond intelligently. think it through. philosophers may not agree on the answer (or even the question), but at a minimum a clear articulation is required. otherwise, it is running straight into misery. (there are, of course, additional benefits to clear statements in the field of public policy.)
[update: no, nevermind, my friend thinks this is all terrible and we need to address inequality in the region. see, now if everyone i know is being reasonable, why can't the international community just do the same?]
data makes me do the happy dance
but this is even more sexy, as a suggestion:
Time stability is an interesting problem. One way to do this is to fix nodes in location (or certain nodes). Alternatively, you could allow nodes to become more lethargic in movement according to how long they have been there. This seems like a good idea. Are you going for some form of animated representation?
[update 1]: ok, i heart datamining. this visualization method is pretty darn inspiring, and pretty straightforward to understand (compared to other methods i've read)
we start by giving some amount of money to some user (initiator) in LJ network telling him to evenly distribute it among his friends, then his friends are performing the same action among their friends and so on. Obviously, if these guys are the members of some clique it will not take too long until all of them have an equal amount of money (thanks to small-world property), meanwhile only some small part of the initial amount will leave this community. So the amount of money of a particular user defines his thermodynamic distance from the initiator. If we have two initiators - we can plot the figure like the one shown here.
[update 2]: don't run too far through the links. i accidentally made it to 'linked', a book that makes me angry. hulk angry
et tu, brute?
three laws safe
totally stealing the best sentence idea soon.
7.20.2006
you've spun yourself into immorality when...
...the reason the United States has been so slow in evacuating its citizens from Lebanon is that the public diplomacy (i.e., P.R.) issues raised by evacuating under Israeli assault are so complicated. Individuals within the State Department, I am told, have been reluctant to create an impression that the Israeli assault on Lebanon is as bad as it is or that civilian U.S. citizens are being threatened by U.S. ally Israel. If a conflict this severe had broken out in, say, Indonesia, the American embassy would have been shut down the next day and its personnel and families rapidly brought to safety. That's how things normally work. (See Laura Rozen on the evacuation from Albania here.) In this case, however, the diplomatic message sent by shutting down the U.S. embassy in the face of Israeli bombing would have contradicted the U.S. government message of support for the Israeli mission against Hezbollah terrorists, which, when added to the general concern within lower-level diplomatic circles about ever creating a Fall of Saigon-style visual for the news media, have led the Americans to be slower than they could have been about getting U.S. citizens out of harm's way.
[whee - reading the comments from above, someone cites the Lavon Affair. since when did reality become a Tom Clancy novel / episode of 24? (the comment also cites the USS Liberty Incident, but i can't make sense of that one.)]
[via shakespeare's sister]
patriarchy claims another
These are problems of emotion and hope and living, human problems, rather than a problem of whether she did something wrong or not. And this work may require you to think of the connections between your life up till now and your relationship with your wife; things that you consider unrelated may come up unexpectedly. You will need to make a good-faith effort to see how these things are related.
what purpose does this post serve on pandagon? i don't know more about feminism as a result of it. its not deep enough for that. this certainly isn't newsworthy. it isn't quite a parable. its a witch hunt. a chance for the faithful to stone someone, to affirm who they are. there really isn't enough here to assume (as some commenters do) that he's a jerk, and responses seem to be more about assumptions than anything else. its like a slightly skewed rorschach inkblot.
i know communities do this all the time. i have a sense of the psychological functions it serves. still, a little disheartening. at some point, it looks like we're defining ourselves and our goodness by who we exclude, rather than who we care for and the kindness we offer. i appologize if this post violates my own rules.
[full disclosure: this sounds like a trust/communication issue to me, with a whole debate being grafted onto that.]
this message brought to you by facts
CHEERS to breaking the spell. (via Raw Story) Congressman Gil Gutknecht (R-MN) on Iraq June 15:
"Members, now is not the time to go wobbly. Let's give victory a chance."
Congressman Gil Gutknecht on Iraq after actually visiting the place:
"The condition there is worse than I expected. I have to be perfectly candid: Baghdad is a serious problem. [...] Baghdad is worse today than it was three years ago. [...] We learned it's not safe to go anywhere outside of the Green Zone any part of the day. [...] All of the information we receive sometimes from the Pentagon and the State Department isn't always true. [...] What I think we need to do more is withdraw more Americans"
Welcome to the reality, kiddo. Ain't it a kick??
and this is exactly why the bush administration has to censor all the facts, and filter out the bad stuff. this is why the media's seeming inability to get behind the story, and do substantial analysis, this is why that matters. a congressman shouldn't have to go to iraq and see reality firsthand to get the facts.
7.12.2006
satire (the end of it)
so meeting us now is a bit like jumping in mid-conversation. without the history, none of it makes sense. this happens in all conversations, of course. wandering around town, i pick up bits and pieces of conversations, and its not uncommon to hear just the wrong thing at just the wrong moment, and really start to wonder. especially if you have strong expectations.
on a related note, reading through pharyngula today, i found out that one man's satire is another man's reality. i think there is actually much more going on here than is discussed. way back, i wrote an article on hell houses where i inappropriately cited a satirical site as a real hell house (i can't find the old article). the satire, to me, looked entirely believeable as authentic. it was just one step further than everything else i'd read. at this point, reading the real stuff about hell houses, i was too shocked. it looked like nothing was outside the realm of possible anymore. [i'll admit, i was also being a lazy writer and should have source checked the article - the fault really is mine, but even my editors and peer reviewers thought it was authentic, which says something about the universality of being blindsided by something so alien .]
i imagine something like this happened to this pete fellow at march together. a bit worse, since most of us know what the onion is. [side note: maybe he's too close to it, but why not say "honest mistake" and move on? (he didn't)]. i just wish the whole affair was a bit tempered. as-is, comments are like pointing at a train wreck and laughing.
but this just keeps happening. my college roommate and i have a longstanding debate about Maxim. i think its satire. i just can't read that junk at face value. he thinks its offensive. i read the articles and laugh, because they're preposterous from my point of view. i understand that people read them seriously, and i haven't got a clue what the editor thinks, but its not the material thats offensive (to me), its how people read it that bothers me. if everyone read it and laughed, i'd be quite content. (he thinks its inherently offensive, and that i'm not actually reading it and laughing, but that at some level it reinforces my latent sexist worldview - even though he accepts that i'm a feminist. its a complex argument, with a very different idea of thinking, as i understand him).
i can't claim to have insight from The Book (of erdos) that locks this one up, but pieces keep falling into place. in college, the super-self-involved theatre crowd became obsessed with the notion of "post-ironic". not being in the conversation (and thinking they were all pompous jerks anyway), i mocked the very idea of the term. but thinking it over, its a workable concept. more than a few people i know date the death of irony sometime around when henry kissinger was awarded the nobel peace prize. its not just that the joke can't be topped. we're just too shocked. most english classes shrug off swift's a modest proposal. today's cheers and jeers starts with a letter about the flag and i can imagine it stated earnestly. or this liberty with a cross statue, which is the sort of thing used to mock someone, not something they go and build themselves. same deal with the homosexuality conversation referenced below.
the size of the shock betrays the real cause. when the premises of perspectives radically differ, and when they've been developed in isolation from other conversations, satire is effecively DOA. i wonder what other forms of communication are killed too. (abrupt ending, i know, but this is an unwieldy post as-is)
----
two notes:
(1) the same is pretty much true of contemporary art. unless you trace the conversation the artisitic community is having with itself since WWI (debateable starting point) --> the present, it really looks like senseless garbage. 'postmodern' authors are in the same boat (i think).
(2) nothing about this means to say i don't think some premises belong exclusively to yahoos.
7.07.2006
lieberman's camp
[lieberman is] kind of like a train wreck that you shouldn't look at but that you stare at anyway. He went from being a decent, honorable senator (even though I disagreed with some of his positions) to someone who so valued "collegiality" that he sacrificed his principles in order to cozy up to the powerful to, now, someone who's desperately grasping to keep his power. It's almost Shakespearian.
i guess the general objection to this is that there aren't enough liberals to elect a president, so candidates have to be politically savvy. (and spawn a small army of consultants). in CT, of course, nobody can make that claim. the CT senators should be some of the most liberal in the country.
ny state supreme court ruling
First, the Legislature could rationally decide that, for the welfare of children, it is more important to promote stability, and to avoid instability, in opposite-sex than in same-sex relationships. Heterosexual intercourse has a natural tendency to lead to the birth of children; homosexual intercourse does not. Despite the advances of science, it mains true that the vast majority of children are born as a result of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman, and the Legislature could find that this will continue to be true. The Legislature could also find that such relationships are all too often casual or temporary. It could find that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born. It thus could choose to offer an inducement -- in the form of marriage and its attendant benefits -- to opposite-sex couples who make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other.
The Legislature could find that this rationale for marriage does not apply with comparable force to same-sex couples. These couples can become parents by adoption, or by artificial insemination or other technological marvels, but they do not become parents as a result of accident or impulse. The Legislature could find that unstable relationships between people of the opposite sex present a greater danger that children will be born into or grow up in unstable homes than is the case with same-sex couples, and thus that promoting stability in oppositesex relationships will help children more. This is one reason why the Legislature could rationally offer the benefits of marriage to opposite-sex couples only.
so if i understand this, they're saying:
(a) babies need stability
(b) straight-people-sex is the dominant means of procreation
(c) straight people sexual relationships are too casual
(d) to ensure stability for baby-making partnerships, the legislature established the institution of marriage
(e) this doesn't apply to gays because
(1) queer relationships don't make babies by accident
(2) if a gay couple has babies, its planned, and the relationship is already stable
going that way, i think, is a kind of scorched-earth victory. it certainly deprives marriage of meaning, if thats all it is. imagine if "Four Weddings and a Funeral" adopted this attitude to marriage. and by leaving aside the richness of marriage, the court opinion really fails to meaningfully enagage the debate. which is sad, because thats one of the primary functions of the courts.
you have to wonder about the level of scrutiny employed here. as determinations of fact by the legislature, they don't survive critical thinking. there are to many "but what about..." moments. but its not even that the NY leg said this, the court is inventing justifications. "the legislature could have found...". this is several layers below the weakest scrutiny in conlaw. its bad jurisprudence.
instead, one could imagine the court demanding the legislature give a justification for the law, one that passes at least intermediate scrutiny, forcing the legislature on the record, on the issue. my bet is this would inevitably open the way for court-remedy civil unions (i honestly don't understand objections to civil unions). and if we could get some thoughtful people to discuss this, honestly, i'd like to think a solution would present itself.
fair-minded words
I sense that you have a strong sense of justice...and I also sense that you are a fair minded person with a high regard for reason...Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded....You know that we enter times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve others...I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.
but responding to the letter, obama took down those words. and felt a certain sense of shame.
i have to say, i do too.
6.29.2006
gapminder
while i'm at it...
neat link on the monte carlo method
we all use it, i just need to store links: mathworld
possibly going on my sidebar: social science stat blog. too cool
6.08.2006
right wing humor
yesterday i'm in line for x-men III (for the second time) with a republican and a dem. we get to discussing john stewart ripping bill bennett apart on gay marriage. nothing bennet said made any sense - america stands for progress like no other nation has in history (yey), but we should outlaw gay marriage because nobody else has done it (huh?). bennet's worst argument was the comparison to polygamy. (since the question is really whether these are human relationships or mere fettishes).
so the republican starts arguing this raises the question whether you can marry your parrot. and the gay guy next to us jumps in, thinking this was a joke. sadly, while the argument is laughable, the sentiment is sincere.
so i got to wondering - do they have a sense of humor? to test, are these jokes? check it out.
anchor babies and toddlercide
legal follies
maybe its time to speak only via satire
5.26.2006
justification?
a small number of marines in western Iraq carried out extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians, Congressional, military and Pentagon officials said Thursday.is justified by this:
WASHINGTON, May 25 — President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, two leaders badly weakened by the continuing violence in Iraq, acknowledged major misjudgments in the execution of the Iraq war on Thursday night even while insisting that the election of a constitutional government in Baghdad justified their decision to go to war three years ago.i'm also willing to bet that the fact that our troops are overstretched, overworked, and underequipped can't help.
