A Curious Little Blog

The mascot question has become much more acute since I wrote about it here 7 years ago ( Offensive mascots , 11/27/09).  The NCAA has imposed penalties on teams with Native American nicknames and mascots, and the pressure on the Washington Redskins has become much greater, including many networks that will not say the name on air. A new poll highlights the stupidity of the whole effort:  Native Americans overwhelmingly don't care.  They either aren't offended or actually like the names.  Which should be obvious, since team names are taken not to mock a culture, but to hold it up as a symbol of pride. I doubt this will shame any of the people campaigning against Native American names into minding their own business, because they do not have a normal sense of shame when it comes to their touchstone issues.  You're either right, or you're a racist/fascist/sexist.  I don't know what they would say to Native Americans in this case; perhaps they would argue ...

Having devoted the last two posts to the issue of illegal immigration, I thought I should offer my opinion lest people think the arguments in those posts cover my views exactly.  I have mixed feelings about immigration, which seems to make me unique in the country, everyone else being strongly for or against it. First, I am convinced that illegal immigration is bad and should be punished.  It makes a mockery of a country to have its laws flouted with impunity.  If people think the law is bad, they should repeal it.  As long as it is on the books, and that includes up to the present, it should be enforced. But is it a good law, or not?  In principle, I see the value to increasing population.  This is the classic measure of a successful state, and perhaps no country in history has been more successful at attracting voluntary immigrants than the U.S.  (Ironic, I suppose, since the U.S. also had one of the larger populations of involuntary immigrants,...

Illegal immigration is a hot-button issue for a lot of reasons, but one of the most important is that progressives refuse to support their position honestly. Libertarians can and do argue that border controls are immoral and should be abolished, and the legalization of existing immigrants is a logical consequence of this position. But progressives don't like to admit that they oppose controlling immigration on principle (and indeed many of them may not). Therefore, they can't come out and say that we should grant amnesty to illegal immigrants because all immigration control is wrong. Instead, they have to erect artificial reasons for their position: it's not fair to separate families. But no one is trying to stop children from returning to their parents' native country, of course; why should we grant amnesty to the parents on behalf of the children who were, after all, born here only because their parents were in the country illegally to begin with? (This ...

So Trump is all but certain to be the Republic presidential nominee this year. Why is that? He's an outsider, obviously, but that doesn't explain it completely. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina were also outsiders, as have been Herman Cain and Steve Forbes in the past. Trump is more willing to be blunt and offensive than any of these, but I don't think voters are just looking for someone who violates social norms. What does Trump stand for, in a positive sense? What particular policies has he advocated? You could, no doubt, list quite a number of issues where Trump has weighed in, but I doubt the average person would be aware of most of them. Nor would these issues distinguish Trump from the rest of the Republican candidates, even in aggregate. He has propounded chiefly conservative views, very incoherently at times, but not views much different from Cruz, Rubio, or any of the other candidates. I found that I could name exactly one specific policy that I knew...

I was lost from the very beginning of Spinoza's Ethics. Consider the third definition, on page one: " By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception." I have no idea what that means. I consider "substance" something with physical reality; Spinoza's defintion appears, as far as I can tell, totally different. Or definition six: "By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite—that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality." I can understand a definition of God that includes that he is infinite in some way. But an infinite number of attributes? I do not understand what that is supposed to signify. Fortunately, the rest of the book is not so obscure. Unfortunately, unless you have a firm grasp on these obscure definitions, most of what Spinoza says w...

I will not be voting for Trump in November. As I've seen more and more Republican politicians fall in line behind Trump, I've come to the realization that this guy might actually get elected. Although that is a scary thought, part of me hopes he does win. Why? Because the alternative is Hillary Clinton. Now, just for what Clinton could do in four years, I wouldn't mind having her as president. The president is not a legislator, and she's not so popular that she would be able to ram legislation through Congress the way Obama did with the ironically-named "Affordable Care Act." The problem is that the president selects members of the highest legislative body in the U.S.: the Supreme Court. You may think I made a mistake by saying the Supreme Court is a legislative body, but I did not. The court has shown a willingness to rule anything it doesn't like "unconstitutional." And while it is theoretically acceptable for the court to mak...

I was interested to find this TED talk on vexillology (the study of flags), not only because I find flags interest -- although I can't imagine making a career of studying them -- but also because it made many of the same points that I made in my blog posts on college and professional football helmets.  The speaker recounted some general rules for flag design created by the North American Vexillological Association, almost all of which I would agree with: Keep it simple Use Meaningful Symbolism Use Two to Three Basic Colours No Lettering or Seals Be Distinctive or Be Related I harped particularly on the first one of these.  The vexillological principle is that a flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory.  Flags apparently appear about 1" x 1.5" when viewed from a normal distance, so excessive detail gets lost (in addition to being distracting).  I would say that football helmets have at least the same problem with detail when viewed from...