Thoughts on the Asterisk

Want to add my two cents on the asterisk question. The hard part is keeping straight exactly what the asterisk is being applied to. Is it the home run record? Is it the claim that Bonds is one of the greatest ever? Is it his claim to being Hall-of-Fame worthy?

Jeff Maynes is exactly right that comparing players of different eras is often an act in futility, although as Hanno is fond of saying, you can compare apples to oranges...they're both round, they're both fruit... Baseball is baseball (deep tautology), but that doesn't mean the game isn't different in important but non-essential ways. The 90s and early 00s just happen to be different in a big, let's say, an unnaturally suddenly very BIG way.

If someone gets ahead by cheating, then they generally are not to be considered one of the legendary players since it was not his skill that made him what he was. But what is to count as cheating? It cannot simply be breaking the rules. Sometimes, as in fouls late in the game in basketball when losing by a small amount, breaking the rules is necessary for playing the game well. Then what is it?

The conflict about Barry Bonds is the conflict we have between two definitions of cheating. On the one hand, cheating is when you do something that brings an increase in performance without a similar increase in effort or skill. Corking a bat, for example, allows one to hit the ball farther without being stronger or any more skilled at hitting. It is in this way that we consider performance enhancing drugs to be cheating. Shots that would have been long fly balls to the warning track are now suddenly back a few rows in the stands. Jeff Maynes notes the sudden jump in numbers and there's little doubt that some of that is attributable to more than hard work in the batting cage and weight room in the off-season.

On the other hand, the other definition is acting counter to what Fred D'Agostino calls the "ethos of the game." Every game has a set of unspoken rules. Those unspoken rules tell you a number of things including when it is acceptable to break a spoken rule. Contrary to what your mother told you, sometimes "because everyone else is doing it" does make it ok. Games, especially organized leagues, run according to a social contract that is as important than the rules of play, and you can be technically following the rules of the game and break the contract (hitting too hard in a friendly touch football game) or breaking the rules but following the contract (everyone is entitled to the occasional mulligan).

In the 90s, the players, the owners, the fans, everyone who was a party to the social contract governing Major League Baseball was more than happy with McGuire and Sosa pounding the ball out of the yard at unprecedented rates. I was in Baltimore when lead off hitter Brady Anderson suddenly hit 50 dingers after it looked like he sat on the air hose at a gas station or accidentally found some of Popeye's spinach. Fans paid more to come to the games to watch more long balls, owners paid higher salaries to those hitting them, and players knew that everyone else is doing it. Juicing was part of the ethos of the game.

Of course, a game's ethos may violate a larger sense of fair play and that's why we try to clean up baseball, professional cycling, Olympic swimming, track and field,... But Bonds was one of the best of his generation, playing as that generation did. So we are left with the dilemma of having something that was cheating in that it derived superior results without superior effort or skill and something that was not cheating because it was within the bounds of the ethos of the game at the time. The tension comes about when we try to compare the achievement across time, a question that is always problematic, but made more so now that we feel the need to adjust down their numbers in order to make them really comparable. The question of the asterisk is two questions: (1) by what factor do we need to modify the numbers to make a fair comparison, and (2) how much responsibility can we lay on an individual for playing according to the unspoken rules of the time which we now hold to be unsportsmanlike, but which we were happily a party to when the homers were flying.

Thanks!

Vacations are wonderful, but it's always nice to be home again, sleeping in your own bed, writing on your own blog,...

I want to thank my guest-bloggeers Confused, Maybe Not, Jeff Maynes, Confused, Maybe Not, C. Ewing, Lil'Bro, and Confused, Maybe, Not for their time, insight, and for bringing a little class to this joint. At least for a while. Thanks friends.

Now, back to the normal abnormal.

Kool-Aid on a hot day

posted by confused, maybe not

Barry and 756

Posted by confused, maybe not

At LGM http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2007/08/756-hold-askterisk.html, Scott Lemieux writes:

"756, Hold the Asterisk
Yglesias proclaims all-time HR leader Barry Bonds "the greatest offensive player in the history of baseball." I don't actually think that this is true. Ruth and Williams, as you can see, have decisively higher EQAs, and I think any good offensive metric will show the same thing. You can still make a case for Bonds -- because of Ruth's first career as a pitcher and Williams's military service, Bonds has a longer career, and his 02-04 peak is almost certainly the highest level of offensive performance ever reached. But overall, I still have to rank Bonds slightly below Ruth and Williams as a hitter. (Bonds was certainly a better all-around player than Williams, and clearly remains behind Ruth, given that the latter was at least comparable offersively and also a great pitcher.) Of course, the other case for Bonds is that because it's harder to dominate modern baseball than baseball in the 20s or 40s he should be moved ahead. I can't argue with that; at some level, these discussions rest on unfalsifiable assumptions about the quality of play. But in terms of dominance of their era, I would still rank Bonds slightly behind Ruth and Williams. "


Asterisk? Legitimate?

Any thoughts?

Sparky

Sparky

Philosoopher from catastrophe: Franz Rosenzweig, 1886-1929

Posted by confused, maybe not

I first heard Franz Rosenzweig’s name while sitting on a bus next to the philosopher, Emil Fackenheim.http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1059938,00.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Fackenheim. Asking all types of questions about Hegel and Buber, Fackenheim interrupted me and said, “….if you want to read someone really great, read Franz Rosenzweig.” I thought, how can he be great if I haven’t heard of him? But I was in Fackenheim’s class, respected him, and wanted to be smart. Rosenzweig was impenetrable. I kept reading, though, and by the time I arrived at graduate school and was turned on to the later Wittgenstein, I was like, wait, I’ve heard some of this before. Returning to Rosenzweig, the parallels between the two were striking, especially regarding speech and epistemology. (Rosenzweig’s theory of speech is probably closer to Austin’s.) The same thing happened when I was exposed to Derrida (not in the comp. lit sense, but philosophically), I was like, wait, I’ve seen this before. I was then introduced to Levinas, which brought causality to the Derridian connection. As For Wittgenstein, who knows. Hilary Putnam suggests in the preface to Rosenzweing’s Understanding the Sick and The Healthy that the later Wittgenstein may have been influenced by Rosenzweig. Interestingly, although they did not know each other, WW I brought Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein to logger heads with the tradition of philosophy, even though they were products of two very different traditions. Like many in 20th century European dialogic and Jewish philosophy, I feel a debt to Rosenzweig. I assume you all know Wittgenstein’s story, to whom I also feel a debt, so today I introduce you to Franz Rosenzweig’s general critique of Western philosophy.

While fighting on the Balkan front in the Spring of 1916, Franz Rosenzweig and his Catholic friend Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy who was fighting on the Western front, (and later became a Dartmouth professor) http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED290194&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_accno&accno=ED290194), began a correspondence in which they discussed Jesus as the Christ from a Jewish and Christian perspective. (Their correspondence was later published by Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity.) Their first letters were polite, tame, and boring, so they began to write their honest opinions about the matter. It was nasty at times, but they concluded when one speaks from one’s standpoint, never pretending to speak objectively, but “prejudicially,” one learns more. This theme is throughout the work of Rosenzweig. He wrote:

"I really believe that a Philosophy, to be adequate, must rise out of thinking that
is done from the personal standpoint of the thinker. To achieve being objective,
the thinker must proceed boldly from his own subjective situation. The single
condition imposed upon us by objectivity is that we survey the entire horizon;
but we are not obliged to make this survey from any position other than the one
in which we are, nor are we obliged to make it from no position at all. Our eyes are,
indeed, only our own eyes; yet it would be folly to imagine we must pluck them out
in order to see straight."

Rosenzweig grew increasingly disdainful towards western philosophy, most notably Hegel’s work, while studying and fighting at the front, where he wrote his major work, The Star of Redemption. Rosenzweig’s work both addressed and challenged Greek and Hellenic philosophy from his Hebraic standpoint. In a letter to Rosenstock-Huessy, he wrote: “The conceptualizing human being, that great and most enduring achievement of the Greeks, enduring because it remained without antithesis in itself (even the “ideas” themselves already found their negation in antiquity itself)-this “theoretic man” has now at last cesse de regner. The poetical mind now has to do everything¸ even think; the conceptualizing mind is no longer part of the human soul.” By poetical mind, Rosenzweig was talking about the poetic creativity of the prophets in the Bible. In the trenches, philosophy was of no help in addressing his fears or concerns for human life, or his concern for his own life. It was as if Rosenzweig called the philosopher for help, but the philosopher did not respond. Fearing death, Rosenzweig wanted nothing more than to remain alive. If philosophers did not address his fear of death, it followed that philosophy did not address his most primal desire, to live. He found it irresponsible, writing:

"Why should Philosophy be concerned if the fear of death knows nothing
of such a dichotomy between body and soul, if it roars ME! ME! ME! if it
wants nothing to do with relegating fear onto a mere ‘body’? Let man creep
like a worm into the folds of the naked earth before the fast – approaching
volleys of a blind death from which there is no appeal, let him sense there,
forcibly, inexorably, what he otherwise never senses: that his I would be
but an it if it died, let him therefore cry his very I out with every cry that is
still in his throat against Him from who there is no appeal, from whom such
unthinkable annihilation threatens – for all this dire necessity Philosophy has
only its vacuous smile. With index finger outstretched, it directs the creature,
whose limbs are quivering with terror for its this-worldly existence, to a Beyond
of which it doesn’t care to know anything at all. For man does not really want to
escape any kind of fetter, he wants to remain, he wants to live. "

Rosenzweig moves beyond the philosophical impulse to conceptualize humans; the impulse to reduce humans into studied objects in which one seeks the essence of the human/object. The poet exposes that the self-conceptualizing man – “the theoretic man” (as Rosenzweig wrote) – now no longer reigns over us. Unlike the “theoretic man,” Rosenzweig’s poetic prophet does not reign over people, but takes responsibility for others, reminding people of their responsibility for one another.

Leaping out of the trenches of World War I and disallowing anyone from calling him a philosopher, Rosenzweig made an exodus from the Academy in the same vein that Levinas (decades later) said to Derrida, “Basically you reproach me for taking the Greek logos in the same way one takes a bus, in order to get off.” Rosenzweig’s disillusionment was manifest in rejecting his University position after the War, which he explained in a letter to Friedrich Meinecke:

"The one thing I wish to make clear is that [philosophy] no longer holds the
center of my attention…. The man who wrote The Star of Redemption…is
of a very different caliber from the author of Hegel and the State [A work by
Rosenzweig]. Yet when all is said and done, the new book is only – a book. I
don’t attach any undue importance to it. The small – at times exceedingly small –
thing called [by Goethe] “demand of the day” which is made upon me in my
position at Frankfurt, I mean…the struggles with people and conditions, have
now become the core of my existence…Now I only inquire when I find myself
inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars… [T]he questions
asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me. "

Right after the war, Rosenzweig started the Lehrhaus, a free Jewish school in Frankfurt, Germany. Theodore Adorno attended classes at the Lehrhaus, where he found Eric Fromm, heard lectures from Walter Benjamin (who said Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption is one of two books one should read in one’s life), Martin Buber, Leo Strauss (yep, the very neo-con idol from the Univ. of Chicago), Gershom Scholem, Nahum Glatzer, and other leading Jewish intellectuals. This school was filled with many thinkers working philosophies from Judaism that tried to resist their perception of nationalism and their perception of western philosophy’s totalizing impulse to know, conceptualize and categorize; that which subordinates persons to theories of ideology and knowledge. Philosophy stood accused of being like a “blob” trying to absorb or freeze everything into knowledge, or as Rosenzweig said, “essence.” Trying to expose the limitations of philosophical “language-games,” he argued that the telos of traditional Hellenic-Philosophy was the philosophical search for essence(s). He explained:

"The true concern of the philosopher is with the “essence,” the “essential”
being of his[her] subjects.” The philosopher is caught up in the tension
between appearance and reality, never trusting what reality appears to be;
'the philosopher asks: what then actually is? He welcomes any answer that
does not destroy the value and meaning of this single question.' The answer
to the question “what actually is” is the essence, which is – most of the time –
a lifeless, abstract idea. “Remove this immovable question and the lifeless
subject, artificially detached, must inevitably disappear."

In Rosenzweig’s horizon, most philosophers were “selficating” in the market place of ideas, an “egotistical”, abstract world making life into mere thoughts without gestures. Rosenzweig’s other, one who breathes and has a name, is not paralyzed by the pursuit for essence.

"That which has a name of its own can no longer be a thing [essence], no
longer everyman’s affair. It is incapable of utter absorption into the category
for their can be no category for it to belong to; it is its own category. Nor does
it still have its place in the world, its moment in occurrence. Rather it carries
its here and now with it. Wherever it is, there is a midpoint and wherever it
opens its mouth, there is a beginning.
…thinking is always a solitary business, even when it is done in common by
several who philosophize together. For even then, the other is only raising
the objections I should raise myself, and this is the reason why the great
majority of philosophic dialogues-including most of Plato’s – are so tedious.
In actual conversation something happens. "

In his work, Understanding the Sick and The Healthy, Rosenzweig – anticipating the later Wittgenstein - has the philosopher infirmed by uncertainty in a hospital. The doctor in the narrative is trying to help the sick, solitary philosopher move beyond thinking in uncertain abstractions and essences and return to life, not merely philosophical life, but to disclosures that manifest concrete deeds that exceed any idea of such a deed. In other words, for Rosenzweig, getting out of the search for essence means the philosopher has to leap into life, a sort of backward Kierkegardian leap of faith, into that where one’s actions exceed one’s ideas – at least to the point where the philosopher must verify his or her theories in everyday life.

"Everyone should philosophize at some time in his [or her] life, and look around
from his own vantage point. But such a survey is not an end in itself. The book
is no goal, even a provisional one. Rather than sustaining itself, or being
sustained by others of its kind, it must itself be “verified.” This verification takes place in the course of everyday life. "

In everyday life, and everyday discussion, the philosopher will find that life or reality”, writes Rosenzweig, “is” unessential.

In the early 1920’s, Rosenzweig was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig’s disease. Yet, he continued to write with the aide of his wife, Edith Hahn. She would recite the alphabet “until he indicated for her to stop, continuing until she could guess the word or phrase he intended (or, at other times, Rosenzweig would point to the letter on the plate of his typewriter).Rosenzweig's final attempt to communicate his thought, via the laborious typewriter-alphabet method, consisted in the partial sentence: ‘And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep, the point of all points for which there—‘. The writing was interrupted by his doctor, with whom he had a short discussion using the same method. When the doctor left, Rosenzweig did not wish to continue with the writing, and he died in the night [December 10th, 1929 at the age of 43], the sentence left unfinished.” (Wickipedia)

Here Come Da Judgement

Brothers, Sisters, and Transgendered Comedists Everywhere,

Whilst Brother Steve enjoys the tranquility that accompanies an 8-hour drive with two small children, it has been bestowed upon me, a mere student of the Comedist arts and sciences to speak to you today.

As religions go, you have to admire the big ones for their ability to develop iconic images. The pits of hell have been portrayed by a wide variety of artists, and yet they all seem to look the same. So many versions of any religious stories will conjure the identical image, even though the image is far from that painted by the initial text. And what’s more interesting is that many of these scenes have been popularized, normalized, secularized and then played out over and over in comic sketches, scenes and jokes. Comedists have to not only respect other religions, but also thank them for their contributions to the greater Comedist good.

One of my favorite secularized images is that of the judgment unto heaven and the ever so popular pearly gates. This image, more than most, has been so frequently immortalized in comic strips and jokes. How many lawyers have been purported to approach St. Peter only to be turned away for the most comical of reasons?

A lawyer dies and approaches the pearly gates of heaven. St. Peter looks in his book and is amazed. “Congratulations,” he says. “You are the oldest man ever to come to heaven. No, wait, those are your billable hours.”

How many jokes lead to the punch line with “Hey, how come he got that in heaven, and I only get this?”

A preacher is killed in a car wreck while riding in a cab. The preacher and the cabbie approach St. Peter and both are escorted in. They are given the full tour and then are led to an immaculate palace with all the luxuries one could ever desire. St. Peter turns to the cabbie and says, “Welcome to heaven, this luxurious mansion is yours.” The cabbie is delighted and immediately starts jumping on the furniture and making himself at home. The preacher is led away and can hardly contain himself with the anticipation of what must await him, a man of God. At last they arrive at a rundown, ramshackle tenement. “And here, father, is your house.” The preacher is taken aback and asks St. Peter how it is that after he devoted his entire life to the church that he is given such humble surroundings while the coarse and shady cabbie received an estate? “Preacher,” he said, “Here in heaven we go by results. You gave your sermons every week, and preached the gospel, but when people got into his cab, they prayed.”

And how often do you get to poke fun at the very figures of the religion with their own imagery?

3 ministers and their wives were just coming back from a convention when they were involved in a terrible car crash and were tragically killed. All 3 couples stood in line waiting to get into heaven. As they approached, St Peter opened the book of Judgment and said to the first man, “I can see that you were a good man, but you had one problem. You lusted after alcohol your entire life. You never drank, but your lust was so strong that you would never marry until you met a girl named Sherry. I’m sorry, but you can't come in.” The second minister approached St Peter and was told, “you were a good man also, but it says here that you lusted after money and your lust was so strong that you would not marry until you met a girl named Penny. I’m sorry, but you cannot come in either.” After hearing this, the third minister turned to his wife and said: “Come on Fanny, let’s leave.”

So what’s your favorite story of ole St. Pete? The Pope, the President and the toilet repairman may have walked into a bar together, but what happened when they all arrived at the pearly gates? Your donations are greatly appreciated.

May the Gracie of Allen be with you,

(Are you sleeping) Brother Paul

do men get pregnant?

Posted by confused, maybe not

I had a recent (fun) argument with an ex-girlfriend. We were talking when a male friend approached and announced that he and his wife were pregnant. After a brief stop and chat, he left and I said,

Me: “I hate it when men say, ‘We’re pregnant.’ Men are not pregnant. They’re having a baby with a pregnant woman.”

Ex: You’re missing the point. Men don't always take responsibility for having a baby and saying, ‘We’re pregnant’ is an expression of responsibility.”

Me: “Then do I get to say, “We’re having our period, our cramps are killing us, etc.?” Or, “Honey, don’t forget to pick up some tampons, we’re about to have our period?”

Ex: “Shut up.”

Me: “But men aren’t pregnant. We get to watch.”

Zuzu, (http://www.kindlypogmothoin.com/) put it differently and a bit more incisively at Lawyers, Gun$ and Money http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/ when commenting on an Ohio bill that (if passed) will require women to obtain written permission from the father when choosing to have an abortion http://feministing.com/archives/007480.html.

“…you had no role between your ejaculation and the child's birth. The entire pregnancy took place within your wife's body. Sorry that offends you, but that's the way biology works….The child, incidentally, who results from the sperm that the father leaves inside the mother's body. It's not a mystery how these things happen. Yet men who refuse to wear condoms because they interfere with their experience swear up and down they never meant for her to get pregnant and therefore shouldn't be responsible for the child that rather predictably results from depositing sperm inside a woman's vagina. That the person to whom the sperm was given did something with it that the donor didn't like does not mean that he's not responsible for the outcome. So a man who complains about child support would be well advised to consider the male-controlled contraception options available to him, or at least stick to blow jobs.Which, incidentally, is not the same argument as "she should have kept her legs shut." It's a "be careful where you let your sperm go" argument.If some guy is going to colonize my body for his reproductive use when I have been quite clear that I intend to terminate, he damn well better be willing to foot the entire bill for putting me through that. As explained above, however, a woman electing to continue a pregnancy after she has been given sperm involves no colonization of anyone else's body. Unless you're advocating the right of a man who doesn't want to become a father to force a woman to undergo an abortion.”

Any thoughts?

After Virtue but Before Friday

Hello boys, girls, ladies and gentlemen; persons and poultry; sundry and assorted apes of all types, shapes, sizes; and yes, hello to you there, the dodecahedron in the corner sipping the Mai Tai. It's time for the Friday edition (posted a day early) of, "Those who love wisdom, and the women who love them", and oh, boy, do we not have a doozy, a dozy or even a dozer for you today.

O.K., my comedist quota aside, this is a post in the tradition of, "Bullshit or Not?", where I post a little quotation for you, and you tell me in as few or as many words as you like, whether you believe it is bullshit or not. Feel free to explain, complain, even restrain (though that's not recommended), but please, do not be (overly) profane.

From Alasdair MacIntyre, and his book After Virtue (I bet you didn't see that one coming):

"Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action."

I've been running up against this very idea again and again. I think we ought not get bogged down in the word "action" here, since it seems obvious the sort of action being discussed.

So, bullshit or not?

Contributed by C. Ewing. Although, technically, this is the G-man's blog; so all hate mail should be directed his way.

Comedy and Convention

Posted by jeff.maynes, 8.2.07.

In tribute to the blogger, Steve, I offer this reflection on humor and language. It all began with some thoughts on fruit cake jokes (after a recent Comics Curmudgeon entry). In initial drafts of this post, I considered doing a brief tour of various theories of meaning to explore whether the term “fruit cake” exhibited a semantic or pragmatic ambiguity, or neither. Then I decided that it was getting out of control, and perhaps not that interesting anyway. So I returned where I started, fruit cake jokes, and the realization that I have never heard a good one (though the faithful comedists in the audience might be able to find one).

This theological (at least around these parts) insight has led me to the central question of this short reflection. What is the role of convention in humor? I'll consider a couple of ways to think about jokes and their relationship to convention, and see what these different approaches can tell us about the dearth of funny fruit cake jokes.

So the first way to go might be to suppose that jokes are essentially nonconventional. Instead, they operate similar to Grice's notion of conversational implicature. Grice noticed that a lot of the things that we communicate are not part of what we say in any meaningful sense. That is, there are things we communicate that do not contribute to the truth conditions of sentences which include those terms. Rather than saying these things, we implicate them. These implications can be either conventional or nonconventional. Conventional implicature is a limited class, including the famous “but” / “and” distinction. Grice points out that the truth conditions of both “but” and “and” are the same as the conjunction operator, but that “but” conventionally (it is part of the meaning of the term) implicates a contrast between the first and second conjuncts.

The second type of implicature, and the one that Grice devotes the most attention to, is nonconventional. Whenever we converse with someone else, we typically follow the cooperative principle. This principle basically states that we act in a way to maximize the effectiveness of information transfer, and can be fully worked out in a series of maxims (for example, only give as much information as needed, speak the truth, etc.). Not only do we, as a matter of course, follow the cooperative principle, we presume that others do as well. So when our conversation partner flagrantly violates one of the maxims of the principle we interpret their utterance in such a way that makes their utterance conform to the maxims, rather than in the conventional way. Perhaps Grice's most famous example is a hypothetical (I hope) letter of recommendation. The letter is short, and merely says “This student has excellent handwriting.” The conventional meaning of the utterance is that the student has excellent handwriting. Since this information is neither sufficient for nor relevant to a letter of recommendation, the reader will infer that the speaker actually is communicating the fact that the student does not have any other noteworthy attributes.

This model is, generally speaking, rather adaptable to humor. Plenty of jokes trade on misdirection and ambiguity by highlighting a conventional interpretation and then violating it. (I have here equivocated on the notion of a convention. My point is that Grice's point can be used on analogy with this different notion of convention, which I will further clarify below, in my discussion of Lewis on convention). Is this the right way to think of fruit cake jokes? One might suppose that it is. Fruit cakes are, after all, food and are quite edible. Implying that the characteristic hardness of the cakes makes them inedible allows for jokes in which they are used in a number of circumstances not befitting of food (e.g., a doorstop). The conventional meaning of “fruit cake” does not include the description “inedible” and instead we infer that the speaker intends us to apply this description to fruit cakes in order to make sense of the joke.

Is this right for fruit cake jokes? I suspect that it is not. As I noted at the outset, this reflection was inspired by a post on the Comics Curmudgeon blog (a comedic delight). Josh, the owner of that blog, remarked in reaction to a particularly inane B.C. that he wasn't sure whether anyone actually knows what a fruit cake is anymore. The place the term is most often used is in jokes. Has the role the term “fruit cake” plays become conventional? Has “inedible” even become a semantic feature of the term? Let's look at one way to cash out the notion of a convention.

David Lewis gives us one of the most useful frameworks for thinking about conventions, particularly since his criteria applies both to linguistic and non-linguistic conventions. Lewis argues (the “Languages and Language” formulation) that a regularity R is a convention for some population P if and only if it satisfies the following six conditions: (1) everyone conforms to R, (2) everyone in P believes that everyone else conforms to R, (3) belief (2) constitutes a reason to conform to R, (4) the members of P have a “general preference” that the rest conform to R, (5) there could be another regularity that satisfied these conditions and (6) this is all common knowledge (or potentially so).

What can we make of fruit cake jokes in light of this definition? Let us suppose that the regularity in question is 'the term 'fruit cake' can be used in place the name of some hard, inedible object for humorous effect.' How does this stand up to Lewis' criteria? Surely we do not use the term “fruit cake” as synonymous for “hard object” and we do not all make fruit cake jokes. What I will suggest, however, is that the widespread usage of “fruit cake” in place of the name of an inedible object has had semantic consequences. However this cashed out, in whatever theory of meaning you prefer, the term “fruit cake” (or “fruit cake'” which is homonymous with “fruit cake”) means something along the lines of “inedibly hard pastry.” All of us conform to this meaning of the term both in making fruit cake jokes and in understanding the utterances of others. This is a result of a shift in the predominant usage of the term from a kind term used to refer to fruit cakes to a joke term.

The rest of the conditions follow rather simply if we make this move. Believing that the meaning of “fruit cake” implies R is a good reason for conforming to R. Our general interest in communication accounts for (4), and (5) is a mere arbitrariness condition. Condition (6) also seems to present no challenge.

What is the outcome of this walk through Lewis and convention? Namely the hypothesis that the reason jokes like fruit cake jokes become so poor is precisely because the conventions governing the usage of the term have come to include the joke. Unlike other jokes, fruit cake jokes no longer implicate the punchline, they say it. The result is the passing of a joke.

[Now, of course, I have not done enough to show that there is a legitimate semantic ambiguity. Showing any such thing would require a number of assumptions about a theory of meaning, etc. As a result, the conclusion of this blog entry is no more than a fun guess.]

RAPHAL LEMKIN, GENOCIDE AND DARFUR

Posted by confused, maybe not , 8/1/07

Dr. RAPHAEL LEMKIN
Dr. Raphael Lemkin was horrified by the Armenian genocide, and was virtually broken when his family was murdered in Nazi concentration camps. But Dr. Lemkin’s concern for human life resurrected him into a force for human rights. Coining the term genocide, helping draft the treaty that became international law, the genocide convention, Dr. Lemkin spent a decade and a half relentlessly lobbying (to the annoyance of many) for the passage of the genocide convention. He succeeded with the UN, but the United States would not pass it until the Reagan administration. Dr. Lemkin died penniless on August 28th, 1959 “of a heart attack in the public relations office of Milton H. Blow on Park Avenue, his blazer leaking papers at the seams.” The New York Times memorialized him:

"Diplomats of this and other nations who used to feel a certain concern
when they saw the slightly stooped figure of Dr. Raphael Lemkin
approaching them in the corridors of the United Nations need not be
uneasy anymore. They will not have to think up explanations for a
failure to ratify the genocide convention for which Dr. Lemkin worked so
patiently and so unselfishly for a decade and a half…. Death in action was
his final argument – a final word to our own State Department, which has
feared that an agreement not to kill would infringe upon our sovereignty."

“Seven People attended Lemkin’s funeral.”
(Taken from Samantha Powers Pulitzer prize winning book, “A PROLBEM FROM HELL: AMERICA and the AGE OF GENOCIDE.” Page 78.)

Although he’s dead, Dr. Lemkin’s lips are moved when we fight genocide. His work has given us a moral and legal frame through which to understand murderous horrors perpetrated by leaders against ethnic, racial, religious, or political groups. Yet, one would be hard pressed to find a case where genocide was stopped by the signatories of the genocide convention, with the exception of Kosovo. In many respects this is the partial fault of us, citizens, as the following example shows.

Former Colorado Representative Patricia Schroeder showed a candid moment for a politician when asked about the genocide in Rwanda. She commented that congressional legislation to help the Gorillas of Rwanda (during the genocide) was inspired by letters to congressional offices on behalf of the Gorillas. Letters were not received demanding action on behalf of humans being murdered. Thus, nothing was (legislatively) done for the Rwandans snared in the genocide. Former Illinois Senator Paul Simon said, “If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about RWNDA, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different.” (Powers, pages 374-377.)

Their point is that citizens are a catalyst for governmental action or inaction. Though, citizens did not have as much access to the events in Rwanda as we have to global happenings today. Information generally came from government officials and journalists that were not in Rwanda. The internet has changed this.

IS IT GENOCIDE?

The ability for those in genocidal regions to text message, call, record events with cell-phones, upload photos and videos onto the net - provide journalists, NGOs, government agencies and people like you and me beyond genocide virtual access to genocidal regions. Google allows one to survey lands (from satellite photos) where genocide is inflicted. You can literally see the burned out villages in Darfur. This is remarkable. Historically, governments like the United States used to say, as in WWII, “We are aware of concentration camps, but we are unable to confirm reports of mass murder.”

Determining that genocide was taking place required one to go to the region, which rarely happened; perpetrators of genocide normally did not allow outsiders to view the murdering. In addition, fact finders needed to find refugees, record their stories and find collaborating stories to verify them. This was more difficult than one might imagine. One, most victims (witnesses) had been murdered. Two, getting to the refugees was not always easy, and refugees sometimes exaggerated events and conveyed events they did not personally witness. Historically, medical check ups for refugees sometimes showed traces of genocide, especially when chemicals were used. But depending on the interests of the medical professionals, bodily signs of suffering genocide were sometimes attributed to environmental causes that had nothing to do with genocide, such as when U.S. medical experts examined Kurds who were gassed, but survived and escaped Sadaam Hussein’s chemical assault. The misdirection of genocidal evidence happened for a variety of reasons. Two of which were: Outsiders had a hard time believing genocide was occurring. Victims’ stories were often beyond the listener’s ability to imagine. Two, sometimes outside countries had a vested interest in denying that genocide was taking place, such as the U.S. response to Sadaam Hussein’s genocide against the Kurds and the U.S. responses to Bosnia and Rwanda. When mass murder is defined as genocide, signatories of the genocide convention are legally bound to try and stop it. When it is not in a countries interest to stop the genocide, the leaders of the country will often dispute the claim of genocide by complicating the issue. For example, during the Bosnian Genocide, former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher responded to questions of genocide in Bosnia with the following:

Secretary Christopher: “With respect to genocide, the definition of genocide is a fairly technical definition. Let me just get it for you here….. I would say that some of the acts that have been committed by various parties in Bosnia, principally by the Serbians, could constitute genocide under the 1948 convention, if their purpose was to
Destroy the religious or ethnic group in whole or in part. And that seems to me to be
a standard that may well have been reached n some of the aspects of Bosnia. Certainly some of the conduct there is tantamount to genocide.” ( Powers, page 319.)

Secretary Christopher’s use of “could constitute genocide” suggests that more facts are needed to determine if it is genocide. Furthermore, his use of “tantamount” also complicates the issue. Tantamount may mean the equivalent to, but it does not mean exactly the same. Christopher did not deny the obvious horrors, but he obfuscated or sidestepped defining the horrors as genocide to avoid legally binding the U.S. to a course of action. Leaders will work to make sure the horror is framed in ways that cater to the countries interest, which are often valid. We see this in the following exchange between former Indiana Representative McCloskey and former Secretary of State Christopher.

Rep. McCloskey: “… when the history books are written, we cannot say that we allowed genocide because health care was a priority. We cannot say that we allowed genocide because the American people were more concerned with domestic issues. History will record, Mr. Secretary, that this happened on our watch, on your watch, that you and the [Clinton] administration could and should have done more. I plead to you, there are hundreds of thousands of people that can still die…. I plead for you and the administration to make a more aggressive – to take a more aggressive interest in this.”

Secretary Christopher: “At rock bottom, you would be willing to put hundreds of thousands of American troops into Bosnia to compel a settlement satisfactory to the Bosnian government. I would not do so…. I do not believe we should put hundreds of thousands of troops into Bosnia to compel a settlement. I’d go on to say, Mr. McCloskey, that it seems to me that your very strong feelings on this subject have
affected adversely your judgment.”

Each has framed the issue differently. McCloskey's tours of the region had rightly convinced him that hundreds of thousands of people were going to die. Serbian run concentration camps were soon discovered in the region. Christopher framed the atrocities as a multi-ethnic conflict in need of a settlement that should not overly favor the Bosnians. Today, such exchanges would hopefully be complicated by the abundance of evidence from wireless technology. With this technology, one might think that responses to genocide would be faster; maybe they are, but not quick enough for those murdered and about to be murdered.

DARFUR

Genocide is presently being sponsored in Darfur by a Sudanese government that receives a great deal of its genocidal hardware from Sudanese oil buying China. Approximately two to four hundred thousand people have been murdered in Darfur and two million have been ethnically cleaned out of the region since 2003. Planes that attack or bear arms for the genocide are often painted white to look like UN planes, which confuses civilians and relief workers on the ground.

President Bush and the U.S. congress are leading the international response to this horror. The U.S. has done more for the victims of Darfur than any other country, which is disheartening, for we’re hardly doing anything. But here’s what we are doing. The United States has donated close to a billion dollars in aide; I believe the U.S. is the first country to acknowledge this as genocide, which makes it an issue for international law. Furthermore, in October of 2006, congress passed the “Darfur Peace and Accountability Act” that was signed by President Bush. This act calls for sanctions on individuals and governments responsible for the genocide in Sudan and authorizes funds for peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts. On June 5, 2007 Congress passed House Resolution 422, which calls on China to end its support for the Sudanese government and to cut commercial ties with it. This resolution passed 410-0. But notice that it only calls on China to do this, which means nothing is going to happen. And as of yesterday, the threat of sanctions is off the table. The UN Security Council approved sending 26,000 peace keepers from the African Union and the United Nations into Darfur. This force will not attack those committing violence, but will be positioned to protect humanitarian workers and civilians from attack. The peace keepers will monitor the use of illegal weapons, but are not mandated to apprehend and dispose of such weapons. Sadly, the force will not be complete until October. The resolution also removes the threat of sanctions.

It should come as no surprise that the Security Council, in which China is one of five permanent members with veto power, approved a sanction free resolution that sends 26,000 peace keeping soldiers who are authorized to do little more than watch, and even that’s two months away. On the other hand, fighting guerilla based genocide would most likely spell disaster for the 26,000 troops. Let’s hope the presence of the peace keepers brings enough exposure to stop the murdering. If it doesn’t, and in the mean time, what should we do?


STOPPING GENOCIDE

Stopping genocide is complex and difficult. Countries often explain they cannot stop an active genocide for a number of reasons. One, countries are sovereign entities and are accordingly free to exercise domestic policies. (For example, the UN would legally be unable to send troops to Sudan if the Sudanese government did not agree to host them and also agree on what the peace keepers can and cannot do.) Countries that commit genocide often argue they are fighting an insurrection, which is sometimes true, as is the case in Sudan, but most of the victims are not part of an insurrection. In such cases, a government holds an entire people accountable for the actions of a few, arguing one cannot tell the difference between insurrectionists and civilians. (For example, such arguments were made in the following genocides; the U.S. and the Native populations, Turkey and the Armenians, Iraq and the Kurds, Serbia and the Bosnian/Kosovo Muslims, etc.) Two, proof is needed that genocide is taking place. Up until recently, proof was hard to come by. Three, if it is determined to be taking place and troops are brought in to both protect and ensure that supplies get to the refugees, these troops need to be protected, which means committing many more troops, and perhaps committing to war. (E.G. Somalia in the early nineties, although there was no government to hold accountable in Somalia, so it may be too different to compare.) A ‘no fly zone’ is an alternative to ground troops.

One lesson learned before the Unites States’ second major war with Iraq was that when there was a no fly zone, Shia and Kurdish populations were far more secure, and Hussein’s genocidal actions toward both groups stopped. No fly zones are difficult, though. One cannot determine how long one must exercise them. They are expensive and cost the lives of many soldiers enforcing them. On the other hand, as I write this, hundreds of people are being murdered in Darfur and by the 14th of August up to five thousand people will be dead from exposure to genocide. A no fly zone would most likely be more effective at stopping the genocide than the 26,000 peace keepers who will not fully arrive until October and who are empowered to do very little, not to mention ground troops may be more at risk than those enforcing a no fly zone.

What do you think we should do? Should we have a back up plan? What happens to Darfur’s populace from now to October? What happens if the peace keepers prove ineffective at stopping the genocide? Should we assert that if peace keepers are unable to immediately stop the genocide, we will sanction China, impose stronger sanctions against Sudan, and set up a no fly zone? What about Europe’s role? Do we push the Europeans who have done very little to do more and perhaps prepare to enact a no fly zone, or prepare to use NATO for one? If the European’s balk, should the U.S. set one up?

On a final note, I have a request. On behalf of someone in Darfur, take twenty minutes and e-mail your federally elected officials and President Bush. (Believe it or not, you will receive a snail mail response thanking you for your concern.) Express your concern and if you desire stronger actions, ask them to do more, such as protest the removal of sanctions from the UN resolution, sanction China, and call more attention to this horror by sending Secretary Rice to the region.

Guest Posts

I'll be spending the next week in the land of Ben and Jerry's, that beautiful state Senator Bernie calls home and where Howard Dean is known as moderate to conservative. During that time, some of the regulars around the joint have agreed to guest post. I expect all of you to show them the same disrespect you have for me and know that I've given them free reign to try to be provocative, insightful, funny, and to piss off the pathologically self-righteous wherever they may be found.

Why You Can't Depoliticize Abortion

Scott over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money has an interesting amplification of Dana's post on the futility of the calls to depoliticize abortion. Both are worth a read, but there is a crucial point missing from both of these, which I discussed here, that warrants rehashing.

Dana's point is a pragmatic one.

"I dream about a world in which women's health choices are de-politicized, but alas, I don't live in one. So until I do, it's something I'll be looking out for in every election. Conservatives certainly are."

Abortion has always been politicized, she argues, and as such those like Will Saletan who call for a negotiated third way are really advising Democrats that we would be better off bringing a knife to a political gun fight.

Scott argues that the depoliticization is impossible because abortion satisfies two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for an issue to be necessarily political:

We've already been through this with respect to the Iraq War, but you can't "de-politicize" an issue that is a) salient, and b) on which substantial groups of people have fundamentally incommensurable views.

The Iraq analogy is a good one, but for a reason that neither Scott nor Dana address.

It is not merely because there are deeply held, mutually exclusive viewpoints on an issue as salient as reproductive rights that we possess our bifurcated political situation. To understand what is happening it is crucial to see that there is a slickly designed equivocation in our political discussions. There is a difference between abortion and *ABORTION*. Our discourse concerns *ABORTION* and has little if anything to do with abortion. *ABORTION* is a wholly political animal. To depoliticize *ABORTION* would be tantamount to creating Steven Wright's famed "dehydrated water." What is crucial to understand, but missed by many, is that *ABORTION* has eaten abortion such that any time we think we're talking about abortion, we have no choice but to descend into the terms of *ABORTION* and this was done intentionally.

If it were possible to decouple them and to have a conversation about abortion, then views like Saletan's in which we act in such a way to minimize the number of unwanted pregnancies would provide us with hope of being able to bridge the cultural divide and come to policy changes that would better the world and the lives of those in it. He can't figure out why pro-lifers aren't in favor of common sense measures like funding contraception. If they really are so deeply committed to making sure abortions do not occur, then surely they would be strongly in favor of any policy that would allow us to avoid the precondition for the possibility of an abortion. What makes Saletan's discussion so naive that you want to pat him on the head and buy him an ice cream cone is that the silly boy thinks that when he hears people talking about *ABORTION*, he thinks they are really talking about abortion.

*ABORTION* is a front, a shill issue, for those who are pushing a radical Evangelical Christian theocratic agenda. Those leading the charge against *ABORTION* are not interested in pragmatic policy options to that would bring about fewer abortions, they are interested in Christianizing American law, culture, and politics. Pragmatism is every bit as much an enemy to them as opposing ideology. It isn't a question of helping women avoid unfortunate and undesired circumstances for them. *ABORTION* is the leading edge, the public face of their righteous crusade between absolute good and anyone who disagrees with them. They do not merely want to decrease the number of abortions, they want to make sure that unmarried people don't have sex, they want to make sure that abortions are made illegal and punishable by law, they want their Dominionist worldview and the policies that they see as springing from it to be unassailably instantiated.

Why use *ABORTION* for this? This requires understanding one of the most effective conservative rhetorical gambits of the last couple decades, what we can call the "cage and frame" strategy. Framing, as discussed by linguist George Lakoff, is the act of setting the parameters for discussion by choosing the language of the debate. What Lakoff shows is that words are not just "Hello, my name is" stickers that we put on things, they come with ways of seeing the world packed into them. Selecting certain words instead of others limits the discussion by putting certain topics on the table and others off the table. Both sides have done this in their choice of designators. "Pro-choice" frames the issue in terms of liberty and who wants to oppose freedoms to choose? "Pro-life" frames the issue in terms of the life or death of a fetus and who wants to be pro-death? The selection of the name is designed not only to designate which side one is on, but also to elevate (in a fallacious question-begging fashion) one part of the complex of inter-related moral issues in this incredibly difficult ethical question.

But what we see is more than framing. We see another trick which I term "caging" in which one takes a series of related issues that you do not want acted upon and then selects a small single issue to pull attention way from all the rest. Like magicians who will do something flamboyant and fascinating with their left hand to keep you from seeing what they are doing with their right hand, the idea is to make one insignificant issue the focus of all attention in order to make sure that all other related issues are ignored. As long as there is a raucous passionate debate around that issue and it is made to seem of paramount importance, then the assumption by most listeners is that a fair and open debate on all issues is taking place and no one will notice what you are doing with regard to the other issues.

In this way, women's rights have been caged by abortion. All the time, effort, and money that could be going into furthering women's rights on a number of fronts are sucked into the abortion fight. Not only that, but how to cage the issue is determined by what issue is easiest to frame when let out of the cage. If conservatives chose to openly fight against voting rights or equal pay for equal work legislation, it would put them clearly on the side of immoral support of injustice and they would lose quickly and decisively. But by caging women's rights and only letting abortion out of the cage, any possible advances on the women's rights front are stopped in their tracks and pro-lifers can portray themselves as the defenders of families and innocent life, not the opponents of women's rights.

In the same way, civil rights issues have been caged with only affirmative action set outside the cage. We can bring the civil rights charge to a halt by focusing all attention only on hiring in a small set of cases. Again, this is made more effective when the caging is combined with framing -- affirmative action is only to be addressed in terms of quotas. In this way, the advancement of civil rights legislation not only stops, but those stopping it do so by portraying themselves as opposing discrimination.

Gay rights? Cage questions about hate crimes, workplace discrimination, housing discrimination,... only let out marriage. Then frame it in terms of "protecting the family." Cage and frame.

You cage all but the issue that is easiest for you to frame and for this reason, abortion was selected. The murder of innocent babies by promiscuous fornicators to protect their hedonistic lifestyle was seen as the perfect high-ground from which to attack the Fort Sumter of contemporary secular American politics. And it was in this role that abortion became *ABORTION*. When we talk about about reproductive rights, we are fighting a proxy battle. Yes, protecting reproductive rights is important, but that is not really what is happening here. *ABORTION* is not just about abortion, a salient issue on which substantial groups of people have fundamentally incommensurable views. No, *ABORTION* is the "Battle of the Bulg(ing Belly)" in the culture wars. It is their recruiting mechanism, their rallying cry, the place they've chosen to make their definitive stand. If they can't win substantial battles on that hill, on the most easily framable ground there is, their movement withers.

Abortion cannot be depoliticized because one of the most important political developments of the late 20th/early 21st century developments in American politics --the movement that began with Goldwater's defeat and Nixon's Southern strategy, moved through Gingrich's Contract with America and its sponsorship by the Christian Coalition, and reached its high water mark with Bush's re-election -- has staked its very existence on making sure that abortion is inseparable from *ABORTION*. As such, you can't depoliticize abortion without depoliticizing *ABORTION*. And you can't depoliticize *ABORTION* without depoliticizing politics itself. But that, of course, would be like dehydrating water.

Bullshit or Not: Hitchens Edition

There's an old sketch film called Amazon Women on the Moon and one of the bits is a parody of the old Leonard Nimoy show, "In Search Of..." called, "Bullshit or Not?" with the tagline "Bullshit or not? You decide." So I've stolen it for what is seeming to be a fairly regular series of posts.

This week, it's a passage from Christopher Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian:

One is sometimes asked "by what right" one presumes to offer judgement. Quo warranto? is a very old and very justified question. But the right and warrant of an individual critic does not need to be demonstrated in the same way as that of a holder of power. It is in most ways its own justification. That is why so many irritating dissidents have been described by their enemies as "self-appointed." (Once again, you see, the surreptitious suggestion of elitism and arrogance.) "Self-appointed" suits me fine. Nobody asked me to do this and it would not be the same thing I do if they had asked me. I can't be fired anymore than I can be promoted. I am happy in the ranks of the self-employed. If I am stupid or in poor form, nobody suffers but me. To the question, Who do you think you are? I can return the calm response: Who wants to know?

When I am asked, my response tends to be "a thinking person who cares."

And that is what interests me in this passage. What are the criteria for being a legitimate critic? Is the bar really lower on the critic than it is on the person being criticized? If you criticize without having a positive alternative, a better way that you are proposing, are you just throwing stones? If and/or when Hitchens is stupid, in poor form, or drunk, is it really true that only he suffers? Does the bad critic really hurt no one else? Is criticism self-justifying on Enlightenment grounds, wherein testing claims by subjecting them to the most rigorous scrutiny is a necessary condition for finding truth? Or is someone who is merely a critic doing something less noble? We certainly treat being judgmental as contrary to etiquette in contemporary culture. Is this a problem or a solution?

As usual, feel free to leave responses ranging from a single word to a worked out dissertation. So, bullshit or not? You decide.

Comedist Theology

Brothers, Sisters, and Transgendered Comedists Everywhere,

For those who are new to the Playground, weekends are dedicated to Comedism, the new religion. It's been a while since we've looked at the basic tents of the faith,so this weekend we'll do a little housekeeping.

As so many religions do, this one began with an epiphany. I was teaching an evening ethics class at a community college and we were discussing the difference between ethical precepts and social mores. A student in the front row raised his hand and asked me, "Steve, what are mores?" I looked him straight in the eye and replied, "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore." Bathed in the groans of pun induced pain, I instantly understood that set ups that perfect don't just happen. That could not have been a random humorous occurrence...no, that was Divine Comedic Intervention, it had to be the work of the Cosmic Comic.

And so I came to realize that it was my job to spread the gospel of Comedism.

Other religions may have Gods that are all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful, but our God is funnier than their God.

The structure is similar to that of the Judeo-Christian picture. Life is a test, when you die, your soul ascends to the pearly gates...in front of which is The Book. Behind The Book is Saint Shecky who tells you of your eternal judgment. You get only so many set ups in your few years on Earth and for every punchline you deliver, that is one mark in your favor. The "that's amore" line, one in the plus column for me. But if you miss one...

A year after the ethics class, I was out for a walk. As I ambled along, a couple walked past me. The man looked at me with a strange puzzled look on his face. He said to me, "Didn't we just see you with a dog?" I said, "No. You must have me confused with someone else." As they walked away, I realized the correct answer was, "Excuse me. That was my wife." I had lost a Divine set up. So much the worse for my comic soul.

If you make more than you miss, you are admitted into comedy heaven where you sit at the right hand of Groucho. If you miss more than you make, you go to comedy hell where it is very hot and all the drinks are in dribble glasses. If you come out even, it is comedy purgatory for you, where you have to watch nothing but re-runs of Three's Company for all eternity.

Our sacred text is, of course, the Comedist Manifesto and it is being revealed bit by bit each year on our holiest day of the year, April 1. You can read the first two installments here and here.

We fully believe in gay marriage because it would be wrong to deprive one tenth of humanity of being able to tell mother-in-law jokes and because "Take my civilly-united, legally recognized, domestic partner, please" just really screws up the timing.

Best of all, friends, because Comedism is a young religion if you join now, as one of the early adopters, you are all but guaranteed sainthood. Leave a sufficient number of comments that are funny enough, bam, you're a disciple. Think about it, to go anywhere in the more established religious corporations, you need to be Mother Teresa or Pat Robertson and, let's face it, the wardrobe options either way are not what you would call optimal. All you need to do to join is say you did.

People ask me whether this new religion is a joke. I tell them, of course it is; it wouldn't be holy if it wasn't.

We end today with this classic:

A preacher is buying a parrot.

"Are you sure it doesn't scream, yell, or swear?" asked the preacher.

"Oh absolutely. It's a religious parrot," the storekeeper assures him.

"Do you see those strings on his legs? When you pull the right one, he recites the lord's prayer, and when you pull on the left he recites the 23rd Psalm."

"Wonderful!" says the preacher, "but what happens if you pull both strings?"

"I fall off my perch, you moron!" screeched the parrot

Other churches ask for monetary donations, we pass the plate for jokes. Leave your contribution in the comments and say five "hail Grouchos."

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

On Ward Churchill and Fat Friends

Two seemingly unrelated stories from academicland that can be connected in an interesting way. First is the news that Ward Churchill has been fired by the board of regents at the University of Colorado for plagiarism and other acts of scholarly misconduct. Second is a article in the New England Journal of Medicine that one's chances of becoming obese increase by 57% if someone close to you socially also becomes obese.

Ward Churchill is the scholar of Native American studies who came to national prominence when his comment that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were chicken coming home to roost and that those in the Twin Towers were "little Eichmanns." These comments served as red meat for conservatives who clamored for his dismissal. When first amendment and academic freedom concerns stood in the way, his academic research was combed for actionable incidents and enough were found to bring about the current result.

Are there actually serious incidents of plagiarism and misrepresentation of sources? No clue. But to say that Ward Churchill was not fired for his comments is like saying that Einstein did not receive the Nobel Prize for his theory of relativity or that Socrates was executed for being an atheist. Those may be the official explanations and surely Einstein's work on quantum mechanics was impressive and Socrates' religious views were unorthodox, but let's be real.

The fact is that it was the Eichmann comment that was the truly operative causal factor here. Of course, it was completely misunderstood. Any German reference in contemporary American political discourse is instantly taken as an ad hominem attack. Calling someone a Nazi, Hitler, or Goebbels is meant as a rhetorical nuclear option -- it brands the other person as factually wrong, morally insufferable, insufficiently rational, and so hostile to open discussion that they cannot be taken seriously. These utterances are meant to end the conversation rather than contribute meaningfully to it.

And so when Churchill invoked the name Eichmann, Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureaucrat seized by Israeli special forces in Argentina and tried in Israel, the general interpretation of what he was saying was that the victims in New York were evil Nazis and deserved to die. And since they were just average citizens, it follows that Churchill is equating contemporary America with Nazi Germany and saying that all average Joes are morally equivalent to anti-Semitic mass murderers and therefore to be hated. He is a classic example of those darn liberals who hate America -- see, he thinks we're all Nazis.

Of course, that was not what he was saying at all. The reference was to Hannah Arendt's work Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which the German Jewish philosopher reported from the trial that her preconceptions of him were completely inaccurate. There was no raving anti-Semitic madman, there was no overt hatred or irrationality, not even a real attachment to National Socialist doctrine. Instead, there was just a normal guy looking for a promotion. She coined the term, "the banality of evil," for this sense that the system itself could become so incredibly morally bankrupt and evil can become so thoroughly ensconced into the fabric of daily life that one could live a plain life, be a middle manager just going to the office and doing your job pushing papers, holding the elevator for someone and the door for others, being polite, picking up the tab for lunch, and yet all the while be contributing to the most horrible of horrors. When those in power have created a corrupt system, doing evil doesn't require tying young women to train tracks while fondling your handlebar moustache and laughing maniacally; in fact, it is often observationally identical to just living day to day life. So much so, that you can isolate yourself in the minutia of your life and not pay attention to the larger project you are contributing to.

In the same way, Churchill contended, those in the Towers were just going about their lives, but their jobs contributed to a global economic system which entrenched unfairness in wealth and power. And, he was arguing, this imbalance was a factor in causing people to be desperate enough to embrace terrorism. Is the globalized economy morally equivalent to the final solution? Can the genocides in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Sudan be linked to the distribution of wealth and power and then be compared to the death camps of WWII? Are the forced labor camps of the Nazi war effort commensurate with the sweat shops of the Marianas Islands and Asia or the forced labor of Chinese prisoners making goods for Western markets? Dunno, but the idea here is clearly to contribute to a debate and not shut it down by branding Americans as Nazis as held by those in the neo-McCarthyist camp of pre-Katrina America.

There is no doubt Churchill's head is a trophy of the conservative wall, but what he was doing was dangerous to conservatism in a much more subtle way than they realize. the danger he posed was in his argument for a systemic approach to social questions, instead of an atomistic one. Conservatives love "personal responsibility" rhetoric because it limits the scope of discourse in a fashion that removes social factors from the table. Instead of there being social problems that we need to address with policy solutions, instead, we just blame individuals, a few bad apples.

That is what is so interesting about the obesity report. Instead of looking at genetic predisposition, diet, exercise regimens or anything else that focuses on the atomic individual, the question became "how do environmental factors affect people?"

Their analysis was unique, Christakis said, because it moved beyond a simple analysis of one person and his or her social contacts, and instead examined an entire social network at once, looking at how a friend's friends' friends, or a spouse's siblings' friends, could have an influence on a person's weight. The effects, Christakis said, "highlight the importance of a spreading process, a kind of social contagion, that spreads through the network."

These researchers, like Churchill, are saying let's look at the interconnectedness if we really want to understand why unfortunate things like terrorist attacks and public health epidemics occur.

We must be careful not to fall into the trap of false dilemma and say effects are all individual or all sociological, it is not black and white. Individual choices are choices, but then again, they are deeply influenced by our environment. What we perceive as normal -- even if we are wrong about how normal something is -- has an incredible effect on what we belief, what we do, and how we react. We can choose to deviate from social norms, but it is true -- and this is the first axiom of advertising -- that there is an incredible pull from perceived normality, both internal and external. From the youngest ages, those who are different are picked on, there is incredible pressure to conform and this is internalized. When the environment around us changes, we absorb the change. Look at fashion, especially decades old fashion. you look at the pictures and think, "How could you possibly think it was a good idea to look like that?"

If we want to make this a better world, we need to take the social aspects seriously. But, of course, the fear is that it will only to lead to more "Churchillings":

It also might mean that the way to avoid becoming fat is to avoid having fat friends.

That is not the message they meant to convey, say the study investigators, Christakis and his colleague James Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego. You don't want to lose a friend who becomes obese, Christakis said. Friends are good for your overall health, he explains.

So why not make friends with a thin person, he suggests, and let the thin person's behavior influence you and your obese friend?

That answer does not satisfy obesity researchers like Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.

"I think there's a great risk here in blaming obese people even more for things that are caused by a terrible environment," Brownell said.

Instead of understanding the role of the intense power of normalizing obesity, obese people will be picked out as "the cause" and deserving of blame for the unhealthiness of others. The danger is that we will again shrink down the scope of discussion to "personal responsibility" and miss the point. So there is a lesson to be taken away from these two episodes about how to think about complex problems. That being said, never ever refer to those suffering from obesity as "big fat Eichmanns." Trust me, the results ain't gonna be pretty.

This Ain't Watergate

In All the President's Men (one of TheWife's favorite films -- it got us through these last six years), there's a scene where Ben Bradlee is fed up with the fact that sources will not go on the record about the goings on in the Nixon White House. He angrily says,

Goddammit, when is somebody going to go on the record in this story? You guys are about to write a story that says the former Attorney General, the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in this country, is a crook! Just be sure you're right.

Those were tough days, back when you had to investigate to determine whether the Attorney General was a criminal.

These days, he'll look you in the eye and perjure himself...repeatedly, if you ask him nicely...or not so nicely..in fact, it seems like he'll do it you ask him just about anything.

So, this is a guy who took an agency, the Department of Justice, that is supposed to be non-partisan in order to ensure that the law is enforced fairly, to make sure that the nation has confidence that prosecution is based on evidence and not politics and fired en masse eight U.S. Attorneys -- one of whom was to be replaced by Karl Rove's assistant.

When asked about it under oath, he lied about it saying that the firings were for job effectiveness, not politics.

Then it came out that the fired prosecutors had stellar records, but were not in the words of one of his assistants in a memo "loyal Bushies," where loyalty meant pursuing false charges of voter fraud in minority heavy districts or vigorously bringing trumped up charges against Democratic candidates in closely contested districts.

So he argued that the firings were in fact for job effectiveness because they serve at the pleasure of the President and not doing what the President wants -- even if he wants it for political reasons -- is to be ineffective. So it wasn't political, it was just political. I mean if it was problematically political, then there would be fingerprints from the political part o the White House and he testified under oath that there were no such traces.

When his assistant Monica Goodling was called to testify in front of Congress about the matter, Gonzales had a meeting with her. Can you say witness tampering?

He testified under oath that the White House's political arm had no role in the firings. But now, Josh Bolton and Harriet Meiers -- muscles in the White House's political arm -- have been called to testify, but have been ordered not to by the President in violation of Congressional subpoenas.

This is a guy who when legal council for the President went to the Department of Justice to seek an ok for warrantless wiretapping. Under oath, he said there was no serious disagreement about its Constitutional legality within the administration.

But then the acting Attorney General, James Comey, said, huh? I absolutely said no frickin' way. In other words, Gonzales lied under oath about it.

But it gets weirder. Comey was acting Attorney General because the real Attorney General John Ashcroft was undergoing surgery to remove his gallbladder because he clearly had an overabundance of gall. When Comey refused to sign off, Gonzales paid a midnight visit to John Ashcroft in the hospital in order to get him to rubber stamp it while Ashcroft was under sedation.

When confronted about this, he tried to justify it. Sure, the Attorney General had transferred his powers while in a drug induced haze, Gonzales agreed, but he could just take them back whenever he wanted...even if really stoned. There are no rules against it, he argued. And besides, that wasn't what I went there to talk about. Or, so he says now.

But, of course, that was a lie...under oath and when caught in this one, he tried another lie. Trying to maintain that there was no dissent about the warrantless eavesdropping, he denied that he briefed Congressional leaders on the complete disapproval of the acting Attorney General. Then the briefed Congressional leaders called him a liar...as did the pesky notes of the meeting.

He testified in front of Congress that the USAPATRIOT Act had never given rise to any abuses of civil rights, all the time knowing it was false. When the report he had been given outlining such an abuse was made public, Gonzales was caught in yet another lie.

I guess the Bush administration finally learned the real lesson of Watergate, "it's not the crime, it's the cover up that'll get you in the end." So, they simply don't cover it up, committing crimes right out there in the open, clearly, blatantly, for all to see. No cover up. No digging. There's no glory for young investigative reporters if all they do is point out the obvious. It's not news if everyone knows it.

The Attorney General, the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the country, is a crook, we're sure we're right, and he's more than happy to go on the record in this story. This ain't Watergate, it's a whole lot weirder.

Are Philosophy Blogs For Philosophy?

I don't know if you are like this, but things tend to bounce around in my head for a while in search of something to latch onto and occasionally several of them come together to have a convention. Four of these things have joined forces and seem worth reflecting upon.

One has been this post by Helmut over at phronesisiacal in which he thinks about Peter Levine's discussion about the usefulness of political philosophy. Helmut writes,

philosophy ought to be and can be more than a set of intellectual puzzles. Teaching philosophy is one thing - among other things, we want students to exercise and develop their minds, become analytical thinkers and decent people, to explore how we say things and what experience is about, and so on. Philosophical puzzles are sometimes a good way of contributing to that. They just become amusement, however...many philosophers confuse the difficulty and complexity of the puzzles with an inherent merit to philosophy when it is human experience in its difficulty and complexity that lends philosophy any merit it has.

The rest is worth reading, but I've been wanting to comment upon this idea that philosophy is, as Confused, Maybe Not is frequently fond of putting it, "just a puzzle-fuck," the linguistic/conceptual equivalent of trying to figure out what's going on in an Escher print. But, of course, it would be worrisome if we tried to equate that sort of activity with analyzing the Zapruder film for evidence of a second gunman.

The second is the departing of a playground playfriend who was a regular for quite a while in discussions. This is not unusual. People come and go all the time in the blogosphere. Games are a blast for a while, but life is busy and there are many other playgrounds. But this one seems to have left because of dissatisfaction with my sloppiness in analysis here. Philosophy done well has a number of virtues and one of them is clarity and precision, something I will freely admit much of my public on-line work does not display to a level commensurate with what I consider my best professional writing. This is intentional for a couple of reasons: (1) writing philosophy well is extremely difficult and time consuming and I would not be able to post daily or get anything else in life done if I were to try to write "proper philosophy" here and (2) I view the playground as a more informal venue like a dinner party than a professional conference in which I am less trying to "do" philosophy than to spark interesting discussions and I find that most people only respond when they think they've found an error in what you are saying and so sloppiness here in some sense is a plus.

The third is this "surgeon general's warning" that Thinking Girl has found necessary to put up over at her place.

PLEASE NOTE: This is NOT a Feminism 101 blog. This is Feminism Intermediate-Advanced. Visit the Feminism page for more information about MY feminism.

Feminist bloggers are the foreign language professors of the web -- language profs are lit scholars, experts in the context and rich meanings of fascinating texts, yet much of what they get to do is to conjugate the verb "to be" in front of rooms full of students who refuse to do the work and resent having to be there in the first place. They are authorities in a field whose insights and intricacies fascinate them, but which they never get to share because they are always dragged back to square one by people with attitudes. And so it is with feminist bloggers who are steeped in a vibrant interdisciplinary endeavor, but who are inevitably reduced to beating back the same old unschooled nonsense time after time in the comments to wonderful posts.

The fourth was driving in this morning listening to the BBC and hearing A. C. Grayling, prestigious philosopher from the University of London, reviewing the Simpsons Movie. It was fascinating hearing a philosopher put in a place that simultaneously seemed absolutely intuitive and utterly peculiar. I, myself, just edited a volume reflecting on philosophical issues and an aspect of popular culture, yet to hear a respected philosopher as a go-to guy for cultural criticism and hearing playful and insightful conversation from one of our own made me slightly giddy.

So all of these came together in the question, "Are philosophy blogs for philosophy?" Some certainly try to be. There are some really interesting blogs written by hard working philosophers (and I include in this group undergrad and grad students) who are putting up posts about technical issues. They write interesting posts about modal semantics, the concept-dependence of qualia, and set theoretical discussions of internal and external logical relations. Some of these are well-read, others not so much. A lot of these are folks who are working on papers trying to get early feedback on moves critical to their arguments. Between journals (and refereeing requests), professional conferences (and refereeing requests), list-serves for academic types in my sub and sub-subfield, and correspondences with other scholars, I get my fill of "the game" so I feel no need to play it here in front of everyone.

In fact, I'll admit my mixed feelings about public philosophy. On the one hand, it is worrisome that we don't let people see us at work often enough. People have intuitive senses of what a physicist, a psychologist, a letter carrier, a line chef, or a basketball player do at work. But it is not infrequent, even from students, that I'll get asked "But what exactly is it that you do other than teach?" People don't have a sense of what philosophy is and showing them philosophers at work is seemingly the only solution.

On the other hand, it is an odd game. When people watch lacrosse for the first time, you can see startled looks. Everything moves very fast, play starts and stops with players leaving the field for seemingly no good reason. They know there is an internal logic to what's going on, but damn if they get it. Philosophy is like that, except that instead of it being "someone else's game," people feel a sense of possession of philosophy because on sleepless nights (when not watching bad infomercials, Rutger Hauer movies, or Andy Griffith reruns on tv) they too think hard about the deeper questions of life, the universe, and everything. "These philosophers aren't high priests, they don't have special, magical routes to truth and insight that make them wiser than me. Who are they to lay claim to these questions, forcing me out of the place to find meaning in life?"

This sense of indignation only gets deeper when they see the sort of questions that philosophers work on. Usually greeted with a disdainful "huh?" the things that get philosophers all worked up seem incredibly trivial or utterly inscrutable. How could the important questions lead to such pointless wastes of brain power? This may very well be a legitimate concern.

Some then weigh in with "common sense" replies that irritate "the pros" because they get annoyed at having to go back to day two of their intro class to explain why the seemingly obvious counter-example the novice brings up with a sense of arrogance (look, I'll show these stupid philosophers why they are so wrong) is easily defeated leaving a question whose answer was debated in the 4th century B.C. and whose great-great-great-great-great-grandchild of a debate is the one that the pro is trying to discuss, only with a clever little twist he or she is proud of.

My own non-confrontational approach to this problem is to avoid talking a lot of philosophy here. Let me do something philosophers love to do, draw a distinction. There is a difference between doing philosophy and talking philosophically. I think that philosophers are important voices in areas other than philosophy (for example, look back a few years at the Dover intelligent design kerfuffle), although - or, indeed, because - their contributions will necessarily be informed by the content and methodologies of philosophy. Philosophers going back to Plato and Descartes have had an inflated sense of philosophy as the foundation for all other rational belief that is simply false, but the insights of the puzzle-masters playing their (our) insular games do sometimes have insights and ramifications that make major differences. I think that philosophers' voices need to be heard on the issues of the day, not as authorities to be deferred to, but as significant contributors to the discourse. That is what I love about this playground. I know that we have a mix of voices including pros and interesting insightful minds who have not been corrupted by academic philosophy negotiating contentious questions. Surely, it's not the only model for philosophy blogs, but I think it's one that is worth having.

So there. That's all I got today.

Is Human Excellence the Mark of Mental Illness?

Last week's Chronicle of Higher Ed featured a trio of articles on followers of Ayn Rand. In one of them, an organization fronted by the bank BB&T's CEO is bribing philosophy departments with large barrels of cash if they will add a position for a pro-Rand member. It has set me to thinking.

You see, when you get on an airplane for a cross-country flight as a philosopher, you would much rather be seated next to the person who suffers from intense airsickness the entire way than the white guy who turns and says, "Oh, I'm kind of a philosopher, too. I LOVE Ayn Rand." Turns out that those little headphones they sell to listen to the in-flight movie are insufficient to strangle such an individual and the airline magazines do not produce papercuts deep enough to slice your wrists.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you take the writings of Nietzsche and remove everything insightful, interesting, and funny, what's left are the writings of Ayn Rand. these works are a narcotic to the upper-middle class white male of above average means and intelligence because it simultaneously meets two needs:

(1) Ego-stroking

Your comfortable place in society is a result of your being a more fit human who is the model of what the species should look like. You can sublimate the insecurity you feel about whether you will remain in your little bubble of contentment because the mere fact that you are there now is (unfalsifiable and tautological) proof that you are a superior human specimen who is realizing the excellence that the rest could achieve if they were not dragged down by those inferior welfare cases. You are where others want to be because you are who they strive to be...even if you can't get laid.

(2) Rationalization for Not Being an Empathetic Individual

Not caring about the less-fortunate when you have so much more than you need might be thought to be morally problematic. Those gosh darn bleeding hearts are always prattling on about how we should consider the needy and help those who are less fortunate. But I don't want to. Yet, holding my hands over my ears and loudly proclaiming, "LALALALALALALA," somehow seems insufficiently intellectual. I don't just want "I can't hear you," I need "I shouldn't hear you." But if I mix two parts social Darwinism with one part attacks on strawmen of Communism, I have the solution. I'm left with the idea that caring about others is actually going to harm others. If only I think about nothing but myself, I'm doing the best for everyone else because the rest will become better. My selfishness is the tide that raises all boats, so it would be immoral of me to be moral. Hence, I can relax and be a jerk who never helps anyone because only jerks never help anyone truly help anyone.

But while this may be a psychological explanation for the appeal, there is still the central doctrine itself which stands apart from its proponents. The view contends that human society ought to be oriented in such a way as to maximize the production of great individuals and that concern for all only causes, in a zero-sum game, the weak to be elevated at the expense of the great, an effect that evolutionarily has disastrous consequences for the species as a whole. The pivot of this view, of course, is this notion of great individuals of human excellence.

The notion is reminiscent of Aristotle who held that within each member of a species is a potentiality, the ultimate figure of that species, and through its lifespan each individual is acting to actualize that potential. The great ones are those who come closest to full actualization, who come closest to becoming the embodiment of the perfect being. Excellence, the line goes, is a mark of attaining a higher level of human perfection and the more people we have of higher levels of perfection, the more they will serve as models for even higher perfection to follow.

But the fly in the ointment here is whether it actually is true that excellent people are, in fact, better people. Let me put forward the possibility that those who achieve excellence are the last ones we would want to serve as models of lives well-lived.

Let me posit that humans are multi-faceted and that all people will have a range of projects and relationships. We are all being pulled in many directions at the same time. Excellence in any of these areas requires focus that will necessarily detract from our excellence in other areas. There is example after example of great political leaders who are terrible parents, great athletes who are horrible spouses, great academics who are pathetic teachers, great figure skaters and tennis players who are sorry excuses for teenagers. Excellence, rising above the crowd, requires a mixture of talent and determination. The determination means that there will be other parts of life that fail to receive the attention they need to help the individual flourish. Excellence in one area seems to have deleterious effects in others, meaning that this naive picture of human excellence that the Randians hold is worrisome. Indeed, it seems not to be evolutionary at all, but rather harken back to the old religious pre-Darwinian notion of the Great Chain of Being. Could it be that these objectivists are much more religious than they let on?

This leads to the next question, which is where this single-minded drive to excel in an area of life comes from. What would lead you to neglect central parts of your life in the name of excellence? I wonder how much of this disregard on the part of those we consider truly great is actually the result of mental illness or at least extremely deep-seated insecurity. I remember an interview with Lance Alworth, the hall of fame wide receiver for the San Diego Chargers, who said that the thing that always drove him was a memory of his father advising him with the old chestnut, "No matter how good you are, there's always someone better." Apparently missing the point that the lesson to be learned from the aphorism is to always be humble, Alworth was so irritated by his father's insistence that he would never be the absolute best that he was constantly driven to make sure he was. At all times, it was of paramount importance to him that he prove his father wrong. Maybe it's me, but this seems more than a little pathological...and, I would contend, not particularly unusual. Those who are so driven often have something that is driving them.

To be more than good, but truly great requires sacrifice that would make most normal (and I would argue, rational) people say, "No, thank you." I posit that "love of the game," whether the game is football, academic scholarship, attaining political power, seeking social change, or whatever else one might engage in, will only get you to really good. To become great requires more and that more requires the willingness to step away from that which would make your life, writ large, well lived.

Am I glad that there are those who have made such irrational choices -- doctors who work all night and day to develop life-saving measures, civil rights activists who gave their bodies and lives in leading the charge for equality, artists who suffered to create great beauty? Yeah, I am. But while I am glad there are such people, I am also glad I am not one. Their works should be admired, but I am not sure they should be. Let me argue from a cliche...I'll assert as a premise, "jack of all trades, master of none," and conclude that the masters don't know jack.

If these Rand lovers want idols, they should not look at excellence, but at well-rounded competence. Of course, that would mean their heroes would not be heroic and so they couldn't set themselves up as superior, and that they would have to care about folks other than themselves since success in inter-personal relationships would become one measure of human achievement. But then, what do I know? I'm just a bleeding heart, mediocre philosopher who will never achieve greatness because he has too much fun playing around.