A Curious Little Blog

A friend posted this image on Facebook yesterday.  On the surface, it seems obvious:  voting actually does something; arguing is just exchanging words.  Upon further consideration, though, I think this t-shirt has it exactly backwards. I believe that voting is important.  Realistically, though, the odds that your vote is going to change the outcome of an election is pretty close to zero.  Obviously, if enough people follow that logic, it could change the outcome; but we're just talking about the marginal value of your single vote. On the other hand, arguing has the chance to convince other people.  Granted, "arguing" implies contentious discussion, which rarely changes any minds.  But "arguing" can also mean presenting a case and reasoning through it, and certainly some people do become convinced by such arguments. The way that people come to their political beliefs is very interesting and, I believe, worthy of more study than it has recei...

I've always been a little ambivalent about the push to convince Americans to vote in every election.  In principle, I agree that having more people vote is good; on the other hand, it seems kind of overbearing, in the way that the anti-smoking campaign seemed well-intentioned but became overbearing.  I will not wear the "I voted" stickers, for instance, because it seems infantile.  Then again, maybe it's just because I'm so contrary. In either case, I thought it would be a good idea to consider the other side of getting more people to vote.  Thinking of it in economic terms, we can consider the marginal voters -- the ones who don't vote now but will be the next ones to be convinced to do so.  It seems logical that people who are motivated to vote are also the ones who are motivated to research the issues, and that people who haven't thought much about the issues will be the ones who care the least and are least likely to vote.  Therefore, by convincing m...

(This is inspired by an article by James Taranto called "What Went Wrong With Human Rights?"   The original Wall Street Journal article is paywalled, but it isn't too hard to find the full text of the article elsewhere.) Conservatives generally are big believers in natural law.  It was a given for most of the founders, and it serves to underpin the fact that people have rights ("natural rights") that are prior to government.  These rights aren't granted by government, and therefore can't be taken away from them.  All the government can do is to secure the rights, or, as the case sometimes is, not secure them. The idea of natural law is a very old one and is based on the principle that reason dictates certain rules -- for example, that one person may not harm another without cause.  On the other side is "positive law," which consists of agreements made by people, such as laws passed by a legislature or a treaty agreed between nations.  Most ...

In a recent piece in his journal " Current Affairs ," Nathan Robinson shows that he is a talented writer and debater. He also shows that he is willing to employ his talents to be deceptive; in this case, to claim that Brett Kavanaugh is a "serial liar." Since he makes the argument in such depth and with such a superficial air of plausibility, it is worth spending some time showing why it is wrong. To set up his case, Robinson admits that there is no evidence other than Ford's word to support her case. "S omeone strongly committed to due process," he writes, "might think the allegation extremely weak." But, he continues, prosecuting sexual assault would be almost impossible if we used this standard of evidence; therefore, we have to consider the case based solely on the testimony provided by Ford and Kavanaugh. Robinson has apparently attended law school, so one would expect him to know that rape rarely comes down to a simple ...

According to Elizabether Warren, “It is not enough to have a good heart … we are called to act,” Warren said. ”We are on the moral side of history.”  And Cory Booker is even more emphatic:  “I’m here to call on folks to understand that in a moral moment, there is no neutral. In a moral moment, there is no bystanders,” he said. “You are either complicit in the evil, you are either contributing to the wrong, or you are fighting against it.”  (Quotations cited in The Hill .) What is this great evil?  Genocide?  Slavery?  No, it is the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Are they angry because of the sexual assault that Christine Ford accuses Kavanaugh of?  No, these quotations are from July, long before anyone (other than Dianne Feinstein) was aware of those accusations. Democrats often complain that Republicans inject religion into politics, but if you listen to their language, they are the ones speaking in terms of religion....

I am always willing to have an argument with someone where there is a reasonable point to debate.  However, sometimes a point is so blatantly self-interested that there is no point in discussing it -- it is clearly being made purely for political purposes and not to advance a better understanding.  This happens on both sides, of course.  What astonishes me is how otherwise intelligent people seem to be so unaware of their own biases; how they, in other words, take a completely unreasonable point that their side is making for political purposes and treat it, like everything else coming from their side, as gospel truth to be defended. Perhaps I will soon find a good example among Republicans, but for today I want to discuss a post I read relating to Christine Blasey Ford and her accusations against Brett Kavanaugh.  I'll just put the image here rather than retype the text: Let's start with the details of this assertion and work our way back to the broader point....

I don't go to see many movies, but "Peppermint" is definitely a kind I enjoy.  I would have appreciated a lot more backstory such as "Man on Fire" had.  Even the line from the trailer, which explains the film's title, is missing from the final cut.  I definitely see the limitations of this movie, but the reaction among the literati has been predictably misguided.  According to the New York Times review , "the film plays dangerously into violent Latino stereotypes. One blood bath takes place in a piñata warehouse, where Riley mows down Diego’s unsuspecting gang one by one...All of the dead appear to be Latinos (save for a couple of Korean mob allies), but she leaves the sole white guy working there alive in order to interrogate him." (The following may contain spoilers.)  Let's start with the obvious problem:  all the dead are Latinos except the ones that aren't?  It wouldn't be credible to attack the idea of a Latino drug gang in ...

I stumbled onto a very interesting article about a scientist, Michela Massimi, who was making waves by promoting the idea that philosophy has an important role in science.  It seems fairly obvious to me, but I don't work in science so my perspective is very different.  Then again, I also felt that philosophy had an obvious role in history, and many historians don't.  It often seems that way as long as you're taking some of the fundamental things for granted, but the moment they become questioned, you need philosophy to help you out. The interesting thing is not just that Massimi defends philosophy, but that she takes a contrarian view that science is actually closely related to physical reality.  This probably seems to most people like a silly thing to debate, but it is a major issue in philosophy.  Do scientists describe what actually happens, or do they just give us a model that can account for what happens but bears no actual relation to what is going on?...

Here is a book, The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, that I have been vaguely aware of for many years without having any idea what it was about. I am fortunate that an audio version exists thanks to Librivox.org. I could read it, of course, but it is a massive book (well over 800 pages) and I doubt I would be motivated enough to read it through without something else to hope for from the effort than a little enlightenment. So here is the book: it is about a Roman priesthood, succession to which was determined by challenging and killing the existing priest. That's right, you remained priest as long as someone else didn't kill you. This curious priesthood existed into Imperial times, and Frazer sets out to explain why it had such a curious means of choosing new leaders. With that introduction out of the way, most of the rest of the book is not about this particular priesthood at all, but about magic and religion in primitive societies in general. I say ...

I am strangely attracted to the concept of Taoism.  I say "strangely," because I normally have no interest in mystical thought.  I was nearly an adult when "The Tao of Pooh" became a bestseller, and I was not impressed at all.  Somewhere along the line, however, I found myself attracted to Taoist thought, in particular the concept of wu-wei.  When I recently read the Tao Te Ching, therefore, it was not the first time I had done so.  It is a challenging work, deliberately so, and one can read it repeatedly without fully comprehending it.  Fortunately, it is also very short and therefore easy to re-read.  The real question is whether there is something to understand at all, or whether it is a lot of nonsense. I have not devoted myself to understanding Tao the way I have to Christianity, but I have been curious about it for a long time and so I was happy that recently I could read some excerpts from the work of Zhuangzi, a Taoist thinker who lived about...

I have taken a small detour to read some Chinese classics:  the Analects, the Tao Te Ching, Zhuangzi, and Sun Tzu's Art of War.  They are all short works, but challenging. I thought about trying to learn Chinese once, but I don't think I'm cut out for it.  On one hand (and feel free to correct me if any of this is wrong), it seems to have a very simple grammar:  no cases or declensions, no real verb conjugations, no moods, simple markers for tenses.  On the other hand, the very simplicity of it makes it difficult to interpret.  I saw the following example of a Chinese sentence, each word translated directly into English:  "Tiger father no dog son."  I stared at it for some time without having any idea what it meant.  The explanation:  "if the father is a tiger, his son will not be a dog" -- i.e., the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.  Now that I know it, it makes sense, but I suspect that in reading there must be many cases wh...

Progressive:  "We want to make a colour-blind society." Observer:  "That's a great idea!  I suppose the government will no longer collect information about race then." P:  "No, we still do that." O:  "Oh.  Well, maybe you want the data, but you're not going to make any decisions based off of race, certainly." P:  "Actually, we will.  We need to correct the historical wrongs of racism by active measures." O:  "Hmm, I don't understand...well, at least in society you will downplay racial issues, emphasizing togetherness and the common humanity of all races, and not bring race into an issue unless it is clearly and overtly part of the problem. P:  "Absolutely not!  We must root out all racism, overt and covert, conscious and unconscious, macro and micro.  We scrutinize every action for any hint of racism and force people to apologize if there is the remotest possibility of racist implication, even in actions that...

I have written before about what it means to be "cool" (not from first hand experience, but from observation) but I think I overlooked one of the central aspects of coolness:  magnanimity.  "Magnanimous" literally means to have a "great soul," in the sense of a large soul.  A person with a great soul does not concern himself with trifles; hence, the common meaning of "magnanimous" as a person who overlooks insults because they are beneath him. Being magnanimous is not the same as being cool, but they are clearly related.  If you are cool, in the sense that you don't react strongly to events, it could be because you are magnanimous, i.e. you are focussed on things more important than particular events.  This is a central feature of the noble ethos in European history, and indeed, as far as I can tell, nobility from just about any society (I was inspired to write this after reading the sayings of Confucius).  A noble is only supposed to care...

I felt like I had a revelation recently toward understanding Plato and the realm of forms.  Upon re-reading my previous blog entries ( here and here ), I actually expressed pretty much the same ideas that I am going to say here, except that I now understand them somewhat differently. To be brief:  Plato says that things on earth are not real, they are poor copies of the "real" things from the realm of ideas.  This has never made sense to me before, because I could not understand what the real idea behind common things (chairs, rocks, dogs, etc.) would be.  And that was the problem:  I had been trained to look from the realm of the immanent to the transcendent.  This is natural, because we can see the immanent, but it is also backwards, because we are looking for the essences of things that don't have a permanent existence. What Plato meant, I now feel certain, was not that there was an ideal corresponding to a particular object, but that representation...

I went to a flea market today.  A lot of people are under the misconception that a flea market is a place to buy fleas.  This is not the case, although sometimes there are fleas for sale there.  Rather, a flea market is a place to buy flea accessories.  I got a new leash and a smart bonnet for mine. Getting quality flea accessories at a reasonable price can be a challenge.  The skill required to make anything small enough to fit a flea naturally puts a premium on them.  Not only that, but many flea accessories come in only one size.  As anyone who has raised fleas can tell you, getting a flea collar that is too large is like having none at all.  Before you know it, your flea will slip out of his collar and hop on the next dog or cat he sees, and then you have a hopeless time trying to find it among the fur.  I recommend you not buy cheap Chinese knockoffs because they are rarely true to size and do not stand up to the kind of workout a norm...

I have been reflecting a lot recently on the question:  who am I?  I think of the answer primarily in terms of, "I am the kind of person who..."  For example, I am the kind of person who listens to a live album and thinks:  why would I want to listen to this when there is a much better version recorded in a studio? I get it, people value the spontaneity of live music.  I guess I don't, for the most part.  I have The Who's "Live at Leeds" album, which is generally regarded as one of the best live albums ever.  I kind of appreciate it, the random interjections, the weird transitions and musical medleys.  But I've had that album for 30 years now, so I've gotten used to it.  I just listened to a different live album, and I can't help thinking:  yuck.  This is just like the studio release, only sloppier.