Professor of Law

Professor of Law:

The lady gives him too much credit. It was not expertise in the law that led him to bait the Supreme Court before the unified Congress.

Instapunk is in despair.

Now, I tend to think Instapunk has been overwrought of late, but he's got a point here.

I want to know how the President says "Peace Corps" now.

Intellectual my ass.

Play Deguello

Play Deguello:

The end is nigh.

Press does not know economics

Press: Actually, We Haven't The Slightest Idea What's Up With The Economy

For several months, every time an unemployment report showed unemployment remaining high or going up, the press reported it as happening "unexpectedly." That suggests that the expectation was that unemployment would go down, right? I mean, we spent all this TARP and stimulus money.

Today, good news on unemployment: it seems to have declined slightly. What's the press' reaction? How unexpected!

Come on, guys. Just admit that you have no real expectations, because you haven't any idea at all what's going on. It's OK: we know. Just report the facts, and quit trying to act like you understand the facts. People who were paid millions of dollars a year to predict the course of the economy blew it; there's no reason you should be expected to act as an oracle here either. Just say, "Unemployment is now at X%, up/down Y% from the last report." We'll be OK with that.

Nashville

Nashville:

Looks like fun.



As much as I like a kilt, though, I'm not sure it's all that effective as a political ploy.

One of the things that the media is making a big deal about is that this is a for-profit movement. That shouldn't be considered a negative: it should scare the crap out of the existing political class.

This removes one of the main obstacles to success for conservatives: normally having a full-time job, they can devote very little time to politics. Even though they have money to support such a 'habit,' they can't leave off their job for a year every two years to help contest the face of Congress.

If it proves that you can make a profit fighting for small government, though, a whole lot more people are suddenly free to do that full time.

The scariest thing in the world for the political class ought to be a for-profit movement to reform the government. That means it is a movement that is genuinely sustainable: it won't run out of money, because it's making money.

Wallop The Cat

The Beatings Will Improve Morale:

According to my morning's email, Tartanic has agreed to come down to play in Georgia for the first time. Who is Tartanic, you ask? They're not the band that likes to beat on cats.

They're the band that likes to beat on knights. (At least, those with a sense of humor.)



Should be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, once the long winter is over and the spring has finally come. Ded Bob will be there, too.

Art & Duty

Art & Duty:

What do we make of a case like this? (H/t: Arts & Letters Daily.)

[Children's book author Remi] chose to spend the war in his German-occupied homeland, where he continued to work unmolested, thanks to longtime links to right-wing figures. The help of powerful collaborators enabled him to publish new adventures in spite of a severe wartime paper shortage. Most damningly, he accepted work with a Belgian newspaper, Le Soir, which had been confiscated by the authorities to serve as a propaganda organ. The German-controlled paper published, among other things, defenses of fascism and anti-Semitic screeds. Hergé’s cartoons provided a great boost to the paper’s popularity in the face of a boycott of its pages by many well-known Belgian writers and artists. Indeed, his role led the resistance, on the eve of the liberation, to brand him one of the forty leading journalist collaborators....

Even as a collaborator, Remi was relatively innocuous. His worst crime was going along where he ought to have resisted. He is a study not in the banality of evil but simply in the banality of the banal.

A citizen has a duty to defend his nation, but it's worth remembering how quickly the Belgian government collapsed. Indeed, the whole war gets one sentence in the Wikipedia article on Belgium: "The country was again invaded by Germany in 1940 during the Blitzkrieg offensive and occupied until its liberation in 1945 by the Allies." That's the whole war, right there, from the perspective of Belgium. Notice that the sentence is in the passive voice -- Belgium "was invaded... and occupied" until it 'was liberated.'

So, if the government collapses entirely, and there is now lawful army nor authority to which you might apply as a defender of your country, what really is your duty as a citizen? I think we might say that, in such cases, a man who is inclined to fight in the resistance might be praised for his courage -- but he is praiseworthy because he is doing more than his duty requires.

The laws of war, meanwhile, will not necessarily recognize him as a lawful combatant. Depending on his mode of fighting, he may be committing what are technically war crimes. Some of what the French resistance did was clearly against the laws of war, such as shooting soldiers while pretending to be civilians. We excuse this because they were Nazi soldiers, but the action is a war crime all the same. It undermines the principle of noncombatant immunity just as much when the French did it as when the Taliban does.

Finally, from the perspective of a Belgian, this was hardly the first time this had happened! The French and German governments had been invading each other since Napoleon's day. Joining the resistance to the German occupation, in any of these previous wars, was likely to lead only to French occupation instead of German. One can imagine a quiet-minded man, the sort who likes to sit and write children's books, for not feeling like he wanted to get killed over the ping-pong game of two poweful neighbors. 'Fine, let them fight each other if they must! I'll carry on with my books.'

All that would be fairly satisfying, if the Germany of the 1940s had not been Nazi Germany. Had it been simply a resurgent Imperial Germany, bent on reasserting German pride and claims, and revenging itself on France -- but not on extermination of peoples nor racist totalitarianism -- we could say that he had no further duty but to sit out the war. His country was caught between two powerful neighbors who were always fighting; there was no lawful army he might join, since his government had collapsed, and the resistance there was had chosen to fight in sometimes unlawful ways; and fighting against one of his country's neighbors would probably only lead to a new occupation by the other. Bad times, you might say, and let it go: except for the matter of evil.

A citizen needs only to defend his nation, but a gentleman has a duty to defend his civilization. Countries come and go, and governments; but evil is eternal, and we must always resist it. An artist, specially placed to be able to resist in powerful but subtle and nonviolent ways, is not excused from this duty. If anything, his power gives him a special duty.

Heh. Just Heh.

I have a couple friends like this guy.

It's good to have friends.

Shut Them Out

Shut Them Out:

The Politico reports:

President Obama's back is against the wall, so he's getting in touch with his inner Agnew, hitting the neo-nattering nabobs of cable and the net.

“If we could just -- excuse the press -- turn off the cameras," he told Democratic Senators at their annual retreat. "Turn off your CNN, your FOX, your MSNBC, your blogs, turn off this echo chamber … where the topic is politics. … We’ve got to get out of the echo chamber.

Why would this be so important to his agenda? Well, stories like this one.

With the developments in Illinois and Indiana over the past 24 hours, the Cook Political Report now carries 10 Democratic-held seats in their most competitive categories -- meaning, theoretically, that if Republicans ran the table (and lost none of their own toss up seats in Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio) they could get to 51 seats and the Senate majority.

Also this one, which demonstrates that a key myth that members of the Democratic Congress have been telling themselves is false: passing health care won't save them in November. That's got to be discouraging.

The fear that reality might scare people out of 'voting the right way' may not be all that's in play. Consider this poll, and confer it with this one from before the election.

What we see in every case is that Democrats, and also groups likely to vote democratic in disproportionate levels, have less actual knowledge about the world.

That may be a correlation, not a causation; but just in case, I can see why the President wouldn't want to take the chance!

Easy = True

Easy = True:

The Boston Globe has a story about how the brain handles difficulty. Short version: it's very suspicious of it.

A handful of scholars have already started to explore the ways that advertisers, educators, political campaigners, or anyone else in the business of persuasion can use these findings. And some of the implications are surprising. For example, to get people to think through a question, it may be best to present it less clearly. And to boost your self-confidence, you may want to set out to write a dauntingly long list of all the reasons why you’re a failure.

Our sensitivity to - and affinity for - fluency is an adaptive shortcut. According to psychologists, it helps us apportion limited mental resources in a world where lots of things clamor for our attention and we have to quickly figure out which are worth thinking about.

Most of the time, the shortcut works pretty well....

Our bias for the familiar, however, can be triggered in settings where there’s little purpose to it. In the 1960s, Zajonc did a series of experiments that uncovered what he dubbed the “mere exposure” effect: He found that, with stimuli ranging from nonsense words to abstract geometric patterns to images of faces to Chinese ideographs (the test subjects, being non-Chinese speakers, didn’t know what the ideographs meant), all it took to get people to say they liked certain ones more than others was to present them multiple times.

More recent work suggests that people assign all sorts of specific characteristics to things that feel familiar. Like beauty. Psychologists have identified what they call the “beauty-in-averageness” effect - when asked to identify the most attractive example of something, people tend to choose the most prototypical option. For example, when asked to identify the most appealing of a group of human faces, people choose the one that is a composite of all the others....

One thing that fools us, for example, is font. When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about. Schwarz and his former student Hyunjin Song have found that when people read about an exercise regimen or a recipe in a less legible font, they tend to rate the exercise regimen more difficult and the recipe more complicated than if they read about them in a clearer font.

This is part of why J. R. R. Tolkien has had such an outsized effect on culture versus, say, analytic philosophers like Williamson (below). Tolkien was no less intellectual. He knew deep things about the roots of languages, and the magic that underlies them.

What he could do was take that knowledge and present it as a story. It was easy to join the story, and easy to follow it; and at the end, you had gone where he wanted to take you.

This is important to remember.

Putnam's Example

Putnam's Example:

We've been discussing Williamson's epistemology in the comments to a post below. The book is actually available online, if any of you are interested in considering his ideas in a more in-depth way.

One of his examples reminds me of this whole spending/belt-tightening thing. Can you explain to me how it is that, having just said you were going to make hard choices and tighten the government belt, you've instead presented a budget of massively increased spending and debt?

"Putnam's example," captured on page 76, is just this sort of problem:

Professor X is found stark naked in the girls' dormitory at 12 midnight. Explanation: (?) He was stark naked in the girls' dormitory at midnight -ε, and he could neither leave the dormitory nor put on his clothes by midnight without exceeding the speed of light. But (covering law:) nothing (no professor, anyhow) can travel faster than light.

So, how did you promise belt-tightening but deliver an orgy? 'Well, we wrote out the budgetary bill, and we made the required number of photocopies, and then it was sent down in a van along with an escort to ensure that it arrived in an undisturbed form before the proper Congressional officials.'

Yes, indeed, professor, that does offer a complete explanation. Except...

Shorter than usual

Shorter Than Usual:

Didn't we just hear the President say that government needed to tighten it's belt?

Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.

That was just a few days ago, right? I mean, not even a week.

Released to Congress Monday morning, the president’s spending plan anticipates $5.08 trillion in deficits over the next five years and seems almost a cry for help in the face of what he sees as intransigent Republican opposition.

If it's a cry for help, it may be a cry for some other kind of help.

I can understand how you can believe two different, contradictory things. It can happen because there is no context that causes you to reflect on the fact tha these two principles you believe are actually in contradiction. It can also be an act of will: presumably at least some people who shoplift believe they are doing something wrong, but do it anyway because they put aside the sense of the wrongness in return for the immediate need or desire that they are gratifying. Doubtless you can both believe that it is wrong to drink to excess, and also "...believe I'll have another drink."

Still, this seems unusually abrubt and sharp. It's as if he said what he said in the hope that you wouldn't notice that he's doing what he's doing. It's the opposite of Clinton-style triangulation: instead of figuring out where the middle is and going there, you try to satisfy one side through speech, and the other side through action.

As long as the people you're trying to satisfy through speech don't realize you're playing them for suckers, that should work just fine. Only one problem: it's already too late to hope they won't realize.

The Sun, Moon, And Stars:

The Cherry Tree Carol - The Ba...

"...shall sail under thy feet."

CPR

New CPR Method:

I have to admit, since this came from DL Sly, that I didn't look it at first in the assumption that it was a joke of some sort. That proves not to be the case; it is a method of lifesaving, which sounds reasonable on its face.



Something to consider, that you might better do your duty to be prepared to help those in great need.

GHBC 24-33

Grim's Hall Book Club: Bendigo Shafter, Chapters 24-33

Two things happen at the beginning of this section that are of special interest. The first is the letters that Ben gets while he is on his cattle drive. The second is his conversation with Henry Stratton, whose function in the story is to give an outside perspective on the town.

The letters move the plot substantially, but the conversation with Stratton is an interesting one. Stratton is a man of experience, a "watcher" who does not get involved in local affairs but who is capable of handling himself. He gives a verdict on the town: he does not think it will survive, or that it ought to survive.

Ben's reaction is to say, "A mistake is really only a mistake if you persist in it." Stratton avows that is a "rather profound remark."

In spite of this, at least for the moment Ben seems ready to double down on the town. He enters the election for Marshall, wins it, and begins to clean up the bad element that has entered his town. He buys a printing press, and obtains a contract to cut logs for the railroad. They settle in for a second winter.

The section ends with him being attacked by a mountain lion during a hunt for meat, and the aftermath of that attack. He is continuing to read everything he can find -- including newspapers, which give him a grounding in the greater world around him, to go with the deep historical perspective he has begun to gain from Great Books.

He begins to consider not just reading but writing: to add to the store of wisdom, now that he has a few things to say.

Questions for discussion:

1) Do you think that the town is a mistake? How long should he persist in it, if it is? How would you know when to cut loose?

2) This is an interesting account of writing. We teach children today to write fairly early, but Ben is only just about to start. He has an extraordinary experience of the world to inform his writing, though: rescuing children from a snowstorm, building houses, hunting elk, fighting mountain lions, a cattle drive, and being marshal of a small town. Louis L'amour himself was like this too. He read stories and lived stories for a long time before he began to tell stories.

How important is having something to say to being a good writer? In educating our children, should we focus less on teaching them to write, and more on making sure they have experiences that give them something to write about?

Klaven/Culture

Fantasy v. Reality:

I thought this video had some good points. Especially about 'Our old pal, the sacred Earth.' Not that the earth isn't sacred.... just as much as we are.

On Love

On Love:

Our last discussion on Chaucer took an emphatic, and unexpected, turn in the comments. For that reason I'd like to refer to this piece from the Nation on the subject of love.

It mentions feminism, but I'm not at all interested in what the author has to say about that subject. I am interested in the debate with C. S. Lewis.

Lewis considered Ovid to have written the Ars Amatoria as an "amusement," an "ironically didactic" poem that "presupposes an audience to whom love is one of the minor peccadilloes of life, and the joke consists in treating it seriously." Nehring describes Ovid's work as a "first-century self-help book" as well as "the first dating book ever written," though she recognizes that the "rambunctious" Ovid was "forever making fun." She points not to Lewis but unnamed "modern-day editors" who consider the work a "'tongue-in-cheek' parody." She asserts that "Ovid takes his subject seriously," and whether or not he did, it seems worth noting what Lewis sees as the distinction between Ovid's perspective and the troubadours'. According to Lewis, the "conduct which Ovid recommends is felt to be shameful and absurd," but

the very same conduct which Ovid ironically recommended could be recommended seriously by the courtly tradition. To leap up on errands, to go through heat or cold, at the bidding of one's lady, or even of any lady, would seem but honourable and natural to a gentleman of the thirteenth century or even of the seventeenth century[.]

That love as we know it had been invented by these poets was important, Lewis argued, because that meant it was no product of human nature. What goes one way can go the other; and Lewis warned that love might not survive. There is reason to think we might be living at the end of its life even now.

"Real changes in human sentiment are very rare--there are perhaps three or four on record--but I believe that they occur, and that this is one of them," Lewis ventures. Earlier he reminds us that "it seems to us natural that love should be the commonest theme of serious imaginative literature: but a glance at classical antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for 'nature' is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end."

Sixty years later, in The End of the Novel of Love (1997), the critic Vivian Gornick argued that what Lewis prophesied had finally come to pass. When Gornick was a girl, she recalls, the whole world believed in love. This was the Bronx, New York City, sometime around World War II. The mothers had various advice for their daughters about the nature of love and its embodiments of greater or lesser disappointment, but whatever their admonishments, "love" itself was the creed, a simple operating principle in an unpredictable world. "It's just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man"; "Don't do like I did. Marry a man you love"; "You're smart, make something of yourself, but always remember, love is the most important thing in a woman's life."

When Gornick was a girl, love wasn't just meaningful--it was the quality that gave life meaning.

The author of the book being reviewed takes a substantial beating from her critic, and it seems she deserves much of it. Her ignorance of C. S. Lewis' argument, when she undertook to dress him down, is the sort of thing that merits an academic beating. (I read another such review recently, Francis Lee Utley's "Chaucer and Patristic Expressions," which reviews D. W. Robertson's A Preface to Chaucer. Utley remarks, "[O]ne is tempted to dismiss it simply as a strange hodgepodge of patristics and puzzle-solving, insulting to the community of scholars and, indeed, to the twentieth century itself." Well, and doubtless it was partly that; the question is whether the twentieth century merited the insult.)

Yet our critic is sympathetic to the author's basic view that modern relationships are not love at all, being bland and "safety-checked," and lacking the heroic quality. The critic ends by asking to be 'signed up' for such a cult of love as once ruled the West, and now survives only in certain echoes.

We should embrace love, she tells us, as ecstatic, risky, transgressive, unequal and perhaps violent. It is, she has said, a faith, a demon and a divine madness, but the suffering it induces may be the crucible in which we refine our souls.

That vision is just the one I endorse. Tom asked if I might be mad to do so. Well, indeed I might be. A man who follows love may well go mad -- it is one of the most regularly repeated features of the tales. That may be part of the point.

The critic is right to say that the vision wasn't Ovid's, but that it very much was the troubadour's. Lewis was right, I fear, to say that it was a vision that might die. Yet it need not die; it lies in our power to save it, if we dare.

Jim Webb

Jim Webb For President?

Back when he was first running for Senator, I supported Jim Webb. I admired him for his career of service and for his book Born Fighting, which offers a remarkable account of the contribution of the Scots-Irish to the United States of America.

Since his election, I've taken a lot of heat from those of you who didn't support him, and probably rightly so. He hasn't exactly been what I had hoped to see him become, which was a second Zell Miller: we had every reason to hope that he might likewise stand up for Jacksonian principles and the dignity of the conservative Democrat, but instead we've seen some very odd behavior. I don't have a good explanation for how a man of distinguished service, and an insightful author, should prove to be so apparently unstable and unreliable. He has done some good things in Washington, too, like his work on his G. I. bill, but I can't say that I'm as happy with him as I had hoped to be when I supported his candidacy.

So now word comes that the Senator from Virginia is bedeviling President Obama, and that suggests he may be interested in a primary challenge. My thoughts on this are these:

1) Sen. Webb, in spite of his strange behavior, might still represent an improvement. His patriotism and love of country are undeniable, and he would clearly support the nation's interests in foreign policy.

However,

2) His actions over the last few years suggest a certain instability that makes me wonder if he is genuinely fit for the office. Since he would have a full two terms to serve, whereas a re-elected Obama would have only one, there is a concern that his primary challenge might actually succeed.

If I still thought he was the man that I thought he was in 2006, I would be enthusiastic about his candidacy. Now, I'm not even sure if I feel it is a good idea to support him in a primary run against President Obama. Most likely I would, but I have strong reservations about doing so.

What do you think?

Really?

Really?

Wasn't this story in the Onion a few months ago?

The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday[.]

I thought this was a joke when I saw it. "Ha, ha! I get it! Obama thinks the government should be involved in everything! Sure seems that way, but..."

No, really. College football. It is apparently critical that the US Department of Justice spend time making sure there is an equitable outcome in the ranking of college football teams.

Pop quiz: Which Founding Father was it who said that Federal government would ensure just outcomes in every aspect of life?

Public Choices, Public Money

Money and Choice:

If I'm paying for something, I get to be in charge of how that thing is delivered. Right? Yes, if and only if I am in the market. Once government gets involved... no, they choose.

Consider the following clip, in which Reason's Nick Gillespie has a clash with a very energetic woman who is outraged that he doesn't want the government to step in between us and our kids.



Now, he makes a convincing argument that this is a very good reason to abolish socialized medicine as a concept, and find ways to phase out Medicare and Medicaid over time. Yet I'm not sure he's completely correct to say that the government will use control of the purse to force us to abandon unhealthy behaviors.

For example, what it came to our attention that someone drinks a lot of booze?

Maker's Mark whiskey, Courvoisier cognac, Johnny Walker Red scotch, Grey Goose vodka, E&J brandy, Bailey's Irish Crème, Bacardi Light rum, Jim Beam whiskey, Beefeater gin, Dewars scotch, Bombay Sapphire gin, Jack Daniels whiskey … and Corona beer.

But that single receipt makes up just part of the more than $101,000 taxpayers paid for "in-flight services" – including food and liquor, for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trips on Air Force jets over the last two years. That's almost $1,000 per week.

Now, not every penny of that grand-a-week is booze, but there's quite a lot of expensive stuff on that list. Who's paying for it? The government.

Does anyone think the government is going to step in and force Speaker Pelosi to, ah, cut back a bit?

Of course not. She's an important figure in the Inner Party. But surely the rest of us will receive similar treatment?

If I had time I'd write a near-future science fiction novel where all these government benefits prove to be un-cuttable. Rather than forcing us to adopt slimmer lifestyles, it's easier simply to start behaving like the Empire we're always accused of being: using our military might to force other nations to pay tribute to support our benefit programs here at home.