Readability

Colors and Readability:

Grim's Hall has been around since 2003. In those nearly eight years, I suspect my eyes have gotten worse. This web site seemed easy to read when I started doing it; but more and more I have trouble reading it because of the light-text-on-dark-color scheme.

I thought I would try this alternative scheme for a bit to see if it's easier to read. I apologize for the change, as no one likes changes.

Let me know what you think. As always, I'm open to suggestions.

ERA

ERA:

I am looking for reports of Justice Scalia's remarks that cite the never-ratified 'Equal Rights Amendment' (ERA). Here's what Scalia said:

In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?

Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. ... But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that's fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don't need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. You don't like the death penalty anymore, that's fine. You want a right to abortion? There's nothing in the Constitution about that. But that doesn't mean you cannot prohibit it. Persuade your fellow citizens it's a good idea and pass a law. That's what democracy is all about. It's not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.

Here's what the ERA said:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Obviously the 14th Amendment was followed by the 19th. Therefore, in the early 20th century, the 14th's equal protection clause clearly was not taken to have the force to set aside the power of the law to distinguish between men and women.

I have noticed that both the Washington Post and the New York Times have published opinion pieces that cite 'a slew of rulings since 1971' that interpret the 14th as protecting against sex discrimination. That's fine, but the question acknowledged the existence of that tradition: it was asking whether the tradition was mistaken as a point of Constitutional interpretation.

Meanwhile, the ERA was passed by Congress in 1972. The ratification debate progressed through the several states, with 35 states voting for ratification (although some rescinded their ratification: based on the 14th Amendment's own ratification process, though, I think the precedent is that Congress can accept or reject a state's right to change its mind at Congress' own pleasure).

What I take from all this is that:

1) Scalia was right about the original intent of the 14th.

2) In spite of the competing judicial tradition starting in 1971, even feminist activists believed in 1972 that the Constitution needed to be amended on just this point.

3) Thus, it is right for an originalist to say that the Constitution does not currently prohibit discrimination based on sex.

That is entirely different from the question of whether the Constitution should prohibit discrimination based on sex. I think it should, with a Constitutional exception for the military -- we've discussed why I think the military is a special case re: civil rights often enough that I won't rehearse it again at this time.

The remedy here is not to pretend that the ERA had actually been ratified; nor is it to pretend that it was never needed. It's to put the thing back up again. I think the left is correct to argue that society's thoughts and feelings have changed on this subject quite a bit over the last forty years. Probably there would be no problem about passing and ratifying the amendment (or a variation of it) today.

That's the right approach to this problem. A Supreme Court that is judged competent to create rights with a wave of its hand can wave those same rights away. That isn't what the Court is for, as Scalia correctly asserts.

The Ur-Road Trip

The Ur-Road Trip

I'm coming up for air briefly while the people for whom I've been madly writing a brief finally look at it before we get it ready to file next Monday. Between this unaccustomed spurt of paying work and the rigors of the holidays, I've scarcely had time to draw a breath for many weeks.

In the meantime, my husband sent me this story, linked by Instapundit or someone, about the first private cross-country jaunt in a self-propelled vehicle. In 1888, Bertha Benz of Mannheim, Germany, sneaked out of the house with her two teenaged boys to pay a visit to her sister and new niece 65 miles away in the Black Forest. Why sneaked? Her husband assumed she would be taking the usual train, but she'd decided to test-drive his new-fangled Patent Motorwagen (yes, that Benz): a 200-lb. steel vehicle that produced 2/3 of a horsepower at 250 rpm from a one-cylinder engine. (For some reason, it delights me to read that the German for "Imperial," as in "Imperial Patent Office," is "Kaiserlich" -- meaning "super-kingly.")

This model had a fuel tank, a dashboard, and brakes. It didn't have what you'd call off-road tires, having been driven only on city streets to that point. Ms. Benz prudently stuck to the hard old Roman Roads when she could, especially the Via Montana or "Mountain Road" once she left her home in the Neckar River Valley. She refueled at drugstores. Late-nineteenth-century Germany had a oil industry, which produced mostly kerosene, but also threw off by-products including a substance called "ligroin," traditionally used as a stain cleaner. The drugstore where she stopped now boasts of being the world's first self-serve filling station.

The travelers had some trouble on steep grades and had to ask a farmer to push them over one pass. When she got home, Ms. Benz asked her husband to install a second set of reduction gears so the engine could keep running at an efficient speed while the car slowed down. So was born the stick-shift.

Literature

Why Literature?

The point is raised regarding the new... ah... "translation" of Mark Twain. What is the point of literature?

For example, does the point include conveying a vision to your audience? If it does, is there some obligation on future scholars not to obscure that vision? Mark Twain -- who has come in for criticism here on other grounds -- did extraordinary work in exposing the ugliness of racial hatred. How bold should we be in walking away from what he gave us, to soothe our sensibilities? It was offending racial sensibilities that he intended all along: and we should not forget how powerful, and how good, was the effect.

Abduction

Glorious Abduction:

UPDATE:

And if we're doing this sort of thing tonight, I don't think I've ever referenced the greatest of all of these:

Fornication

Morale:

I suspect this is the sort of thing we'll look back on with regret.

Phil dead

Philosophy is Dead. Long Live Philosophy!

Dr. John Haldane notes with amusement the statement by Dr. Stephen Hawking and company that 'philosophy is dead.' It accompanies their own departure from empirically-verifiable facts, and into metaphysics. In other words, they're doing philosophy: and not very well.

My favorite part of this assertion is that it follows the form: 'The "argument for God from the magnificent design of the universe" is dead, because there is no need for design. This is because the universe is the kind of thing that can create itself and bring forth life spontaneously.'

That's quite a design!

Psalm 7

Psalm 7:

So, since some of you were interested in this, here's the first thing that really catches my attention in the book. Psalm 7 says:

...si reddidi retribuentibus mihi malum et dimisi hostes meos vacuos
persequatur inimicus animam meam et adprehendat et conculcet in terra vitam meam et gloriam meam in pulverem conlocet semper.

...if I have requited my friend with evil or plundered my enemy without cause, let the enemy pursue me and take me, and let him trample my life to the dust. (RSV)

So here's the question this engenders in my mind: are we meant to believe that it's OK to plunder one's enemy as long as there is due cause? That's a license I did not expect.

28,000 Dead in England

28,000 Dead in England:

And on a single day.

George Goodwin, who has written a book on Towton to coincide with the battle’s 550th anniversary in 2011, reckons as many as 75,000 men, perhaps 10% of the country’s fighting-age population, took the field that day.

They had been dragged into conflict in various ways. Lacking a standing army, the royal claimants called on magnates and issued “commissions of array” to officers in the shires to raise men. Great lords on either side had followings known as “affinities”, comprising people on formal retainers as well as those under less rigid obligations. These soldiers would have been among the more experienced and better-equipped fighters that day (foreign mercenaries were there, too). Alongside them were people lower down the social pyramid, who may have been obliged to practise archery at the weekend as part of the village posse but were not as well trained. Among this confusion of soldiers and weaponry, almost certainly on the losing Lancastrian side, was Towton 25.

The archaeologists have done some impressive work on the site. They mention having learned something from the recent work at the Little Bighorn. If you're interested in reading about that research, this article is relevant, though I think it is not the same effort.

There was another English find recently covered by Smithosonian magazine, this one of a Viking mass grave in England. It is thought to be linked to the St. Brice's Day massacre of 1002, when Aethelred the Unraed proved he was ready enough.

Psalms

The Book of Psalms:

I will be reading the Book of Psalms this month; I am to read five a day, so that we can get through the whole book in one month.

While we've been talking about religious issues more lately, probably because of the holiday season, this is not a religious blog per se. As such, I don't intend to blog the Psalms (and anyway, far wiser men have written far more interesting things about it that you should read instead). However, I thought I'd mention the project so that any of you who wanted to do so could read along. If it's something people are interested in doing, I don't mind to host discussions of some of the more resonant psalms.

I Have Got To Get Me One Of These

I Have Got To Get Me One Of These

I ran across this on Power Line http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/028038.php . Follow the this video link, also; John was unable to embed that one.

Also, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAsDi5UZ0Ao&feature=player_embedded

There are a number of things Corliss could do to streamline his suit so as to achieve higher speeds.

Aside from that, though, I need to do this. His rush is to magnify his experience of the speed by staying close to the obstacles. My rush would be the flying itself, so I'd be looking for whatever updrafts I could maximize the lift from to fly for greater endurance. But I have to fly that crack in Switzerland, too (some call it a canyon: it's a crack). In either case, this takes great shoulder and thigh strength and endurance.

Eric Hines

Going to Kill

"As I Was Going To Kill and All..."

Happy new year.

You know who sucks?

You Know Who Sucks?

Modern-day Olympic crew teams, that's who.

Hard

It's So Hard:

...to understand the Constitution. After all, being 'over a hundred years old' (and indeed over two hundred) it's practically ancient.



We are all wasting our time, ladies and gentlemen. Thank goodness our wise companions on the Left were there to save us. I suspend all further activities of prying into ancient or medieval history and philosophy; why, some of that was a thousand years ago, or even more!

From now on, we shall stick to the things we can see in front of us. Let us commence the study of this beer glass. Hm, empty: we shall have to fill it, in half an hour or so when the clock is right for that kind of thing.

You see? Practical benefits flow at once, as soon as we leave off these foolish pursuits and turn our attention to the moment.

Brain Science

Politics and Brain Size:

Conservatives have bigger brains... well, at least, the primitive parts of the brain are bigger.

Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala - a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion while their political opponents from the opposite end of the spectrum had thicker anterior cingulates.

So, conservatives are primitive and emotional, and... wait a minute, didn't we read something else about the amygdala this week?

So what does the amygdala actually do? "[It's] strongly connected with almost every other structure in brain. In the past, people assumed it was really important for fear. Then they discovered it was actually important for all emotions. And it's also important for social interaction and face recognition," Barrett says. "The amygdala's job in general is to signal to the rest of brain when something that you're faced with is uncertain. For example, if you don't know who someone is, and you are trying to identify them, whether it is a friend or a foe, the amygdala is probably playing a role in helping you to perform all of those tasks."

That actually fits perfectly with existing research, showing that conservatives are more likely to perceive threats. This suggests why that might be true. It also suggests a direct physical unity between the adaptive quality of threat recognition and humanity's preferred method for dealing with threats. How do you deal with threats? You form a stronger troop: either a bigger one, or one with more complicated bonding structures to hold it together in the face of danger.

Marriage

The Benefits of Marriage:

Is this what you would expect to hear?

Compared with those in the early sex group, those who waited until marriage:

* Rated relationship stability as 22 percent higher
* Rated relationship satisfaction as 20 percent higher
* Rated sexual quality as 15 percent better
* Rated communication as 12 percent better

Win Some, Lose Some

Win Some, Lose Some:

Proven: dogs are very, very smart!

A border collie called Chaser has been taught the names of 1022 items - more than any other animal. She can also categorise them according to function and shape, something children learn to do around the age of 3.

Some dogs, that is.

Swords Point

From the Sword's Point:

Did you ever wonder what these guard-changes look like from the sword's point of view? One of the Swedish groups tried it out.



A commenter at YouTube remarks, "In Soviet Russia, sword controls you!"

Faith and Reason 2

Faith & Reason, Part II:

Continuing with this interesting article, we find another set of arguments. He began by explaining that he believes monotheism is a reaction to Greek philosophy, especially to the idea of Thales that there are natural laws that can reliably explain things. This created a borderland between the natural and the supernatural that had never been there before:

This extraordinarily powerful idea was, in fact, entirely unprecedented. For thousands of years before Thales, humanity encountered only one undifferentiated world, a world still inhabited today by some, it is true, though their numbers are dwindling. They’re the ones not included in us. In this holistic world, matter and spirit are the same: people, places, objects, and events merge and mingle with the gods, goddesses, spirits, and demons who animate them. We saw a vivid example of this outlook during the solar eclipse over Asia in July 2009, when some local authorities closed schools and urged pregnant women to stay indoors to avoid ill effects as the evil spirit swallowed the Sun god.

The epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, reflect the oral traditions of this sort of world. These poems established the classical Greek religious pantheon, in which the gods gleam brightly in the sunlight and the sea, rumble through the land as earthquakes, and darken the sky with clouds or eclipses. When Odysseus incurs the enmity of Poseidon, the sea god rouses himself in a terrible storm and wrecks Odysseus’ ship. Odysseus spies land, but Poseidon’s waves cast him violently up against the sharp rocks before hurling him back out to sea. With the help of his ally Athena, goddess of wisdom, Odysseus gathers his wits enough to swim along the shore, desperately looking for a place to land. Exhausted, at last he comes to “the mouth of a sweet-running river” that offers shelter from the rocks and wind. Odysseus prays directly to the river: “Hear me, Lord, whoever you are,” he addresses the river, asking it—or rather asking him—to grant Odysseus sanctuary from Poseidon, the sea. And the river “stayed his current, stopped the waves breaking, and made all quiet in front of him.”

This new idea, Thales' idea, creates the border that separates the seen from the unseen. Before the unseen and the seen were assumed to be in the same space, but now we know there are some natural laws that are at work in the world, and they produce reliable results. Reason lets us understand these laws.

The problem, the author asserts -- I hope that our friend Joe is about to read this part of the article, which I believe he will love -- is that this reliability on the part of natural law destabilizes the powerful in society. They react by throwing up a religious structure that does something new: it doesn't merely beseech, but requires declarations of faith. By "faith," he means here 'fidelity to the conceptual structure of the religion.'

He suggests that this was an important psychological hedge to the certainty that reason offered. We needed faith to assure us that we didn't understand.

[T]he key concept in faith seems to be the assurance that nature’s regularity is illusory—precisely how being less important than the assurance itself. That’s the opposite of the case with explanation, which is, of course, all about “precisely how.” From this perspective, the phrase “secular explanation” begins to seem suspiciously redundant. Explanation and secularism may actually take in the same territory.

Where reason finds regularity in nature, faith extols miracles that overturn that regularity. In place of skepticism, faith exalts credulity.

This seems to me to be precisely wrong. We can see why by looking again at Avicenna, whose account of emanation offers a very clear and rational explanation for the structure of the universe. Avicenna doesn't ask us to believe that we can't understand how the universe works: he wants us to believe that we understand exactly how it works, even where we can't see it.

Avicenna turns not to faith but to reason to assert that we can't predict things accurately -- and not because of a psychological need, but because of actual observations. If the world was ordered in imitation of a perfectly rational Necessary Existent, why would there be evil? There shouldn't be, right? Insofar as our reason leads us to natural, logical laws that order the universe, why would there be irrationality, wickedness, or chaos?

Avicenna's explanation of this is perfectly rational, and falls back on the chaotic nature of matter. As we get farther down the chain of emanations, the lesser ordering intelligences are less capable of bringing chaotic matter into accord with the divine principle. Thus, he can explain the irrationality he observes in the world -- but not by reference to faith. The world is irrational just where it begins to depart from God.

Aquinas has the same problem, but follows Augustine in simply declaring that there is no evil. In this, though, they are both doing exactly what the author says they shouldn't be doing. They aren't using faith to assert that the world is irrational. They're using faith to assert that it is even more rational than we understand it to be. Both of the saints assert that there are reasons for bad things and apparently irrational things: we just haven't learned what they are yet.

Now, that isn't to say that the author is entirely baseless in his assertion. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides does make a run at assertions of the type the author suggests. He does so for something like the reasons that the author suggests, too: he attacks Avicenna's astronomy-based metaphysics using appeals to ignorance, for the purpose of preserving divine providence and prophecy. (Having done so, however, he asserts that this providence follows according to normal and natural forces that are obeying the normal and natural laws -- the parting of the Red Sea by just the right alignment of natural forces to create the right combination of wind and tide, for example.) Dad29 points to the Islamic school of thought that does so as well, going all the way to the pole that the author suggests. In the 19th century, Kierkegaard also goes this route.

Still, I don't think it's correct to say that this is what "faith" is for (or "belief" -- he seems to muddle his terms a bit). Faith can be used that way, but it can also be used the other way. It can be used by those hoping for an exception to natural law, but it can be, and has very often been, used to exalt reason and natural law.

In the final post in this series, I will examine how I think faith and reason are related. I think it may be right to say that reason is prior to faith; but we will save that for the next post.

In Memoriam

In Memoriam:

Rest in peace Dr. Denis Dutton, founder and editor of Arts & Letters Daily. We've all benefited from his work over the years: I don't think there has been any other website of more value to this Hall, unless it was Cassandra's.

I am grateful for his work, and therefore, for his life.