Tiberius and Gaius Speaking...

An obnoxious sportswriter? What are the odds?

    One of the reasons I read Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy on espn.com)  is that he transmits his enthusiasm for sports through his writing. He makes sports fun and interesting even when (or perhaps especially)  he says something stupid or annoying.  He conveys that sports are important to him. It's not just a job; it's a calling.

    But Skip Bayless has now written an entire column on why this Super Bowl is boring. Skip says, "Yawn, I have been to so many Super Bowls and this one is sooo dull." What a cockbite! Nevermind that his favorite sporting event is a golf tournament. Nevermind that this guy would be salivating if Indy won and he could write the column he really wants: "Ohmigod! I am jerking off to the thought of Peyton Manning finally getting his ring." If you can't find something interesting to say about sports, then stop writing your fucking column and go sell Amway products.

    I don't know why this column irritated me so much. Maybe it is because Skip Bayless has a job that is undeniably, irrefutably fun and he spends his time writing about how bored he is. Maybe it is because Skip Bayless has always been a conventional wisdom whoring asswipe...I just don't know.

P.S. And this is how he justifies his claim that the Seattle Seahawks are an "underdog" after being the top-ranked NFC team for half the season and then dominating in the playoffs:

Would the Seahawks have risen from 2-2 to home-field playoff advantage if Terrell Owens hadn't torn apart the Eagles? If Michael Vick hadn't regressed? If the Giants, Redskins and Cowboys hadn't been forced to do battle twice in the East and the Panthers, Bucs and Falcons hadn't beaten each other up in the South?

And...? Isn't this true of 90 percent of the football teams that make it to the Super Bowl? Who peaked at the right time? Who avoided injuries? Etc etc. Basically, his claim amounts to something like this: "If all those other teams had been better than the Seahawks throughout the season, then the Seahawks wouldn't have been better than them." Good job!

Steve Butler gets it wrong....again

    I last linked to Steve's blog when he was busy constructing Strawmen concerning religion. Now, he is commenting on the Alito filibuster. And, sadly, he doesn't do much better this time around. Ordinarily, I would just comment on his blog. Unfortunately, Steve has told me he doesn't my read my comments because they upset his delicate system I guess. So, I figured I would just post over here. So here's what I was gonna say:

    You said you don't read these, but I enjoy making them. Let's take your assertions one by one, shall we?

"The appointment of Judge Alito to the Court will not result in an about face."

    You know, I would be less upset if you had failed to provide a reasonable or convincing argument for that statement. That's not upsetting. What is upsettting, although it is only a mild discomfort at this time, is that you haven't even provided a prima facie argument. Nothing, zip, nada. There are many, many legal scholars (some whom I have linked to) who think that an Alito for O'Connor trade will result in a dramatic shift in the Court's perspective on abortion, executive power and authority, and police power. They may be wrong, but they have provided a fairly convincing prima facie case.

"Apparently, the only way the Court is allowed to swing is left."

    This is a joke right? Quick, what two far right justices on the Supreme Court were appointed with Democratic majorities in the Senate?

Hmmmm....that would be Scalia and Thomas. Those crazy Democrats, so intolerant.

  Wait a tick. Who was it that torpedoed the moderate choice for the Supreme Court that would have kept the ideological balance much better? That would be Harriet Miers. And who sunk the Miers nomination? The far-right of the GOP...hmmm. But it is those Democrats that are intolerent of ideological diversity. Stupid Democrats...

"That is, unless you accept that there are other judicial philosophies that have merit."

    Right... Obviously, accepting a reasonable range of views automatically commits us to accepting all possible views. The objection to Alito is not that we have the correct view and Alito doesn't qualify. It is that Alito is beyond the pale of reasonable views: Right and Left.

Strawman anyone?

"Also, the entire Gang of 14 voted together; Obviously they didn't believe the nomination to be an extraordinary circumstance either."

    Or it indicates they were sufficiently afraid of Mullah Dobson that they didn't want to spend their political capital on a done deal. Or...maybe...they are wrong! These people all thought that Saddam had WMD's and that going to war was a good idea, for example 
    But hey, arguments from authority always add that special flavor to the argument. Besides, what's the point of this statement? Obviously, they disagree with Kerry. So what? You haven't given us any reason to think that Kerry's wrong...anywhere.

Random Ten

1. Til I found you- Susan Tedeschi
2. Velouria- Pixies
3. Smells Like Teen Spirit- Nirvana
4. The River- Bruce Springsteen
5. Faded from the Winter- Iron and Wine
6. Miracle Drug- A.C Newman
7. Bedroom Scene- Delays
8. Jumpers- Sleater Kinney
9. Countin on a Miracle- Bruce Springsteen
10. Blackbird- The Beatles

Where are the private political organizations?

    Unsurprisingly, the Alito filibuster did not succeed. Even more unsurprisingly, "moderate" Dems once again give the the GOP another reason not take them seriously an opposition  party. What reason do Republicans have to fear Nelson or whomever when it comes to their legislative agenda? None at all. And the "progessive" wing of the Dems, with an eye to 2008 perhaps, decided to run a kamikaze mission giving Bush a personal political victory at the eve of the State of the Union. And sadly, the media will run process stories describing Democratic goofiness rather than the policy piece explaining that Alito is a whacko. Then again, the media was never going to write that story anyway.

    A standard liberal circular firing squad. Ugh. What a joke. And what did the netroots accomplish? Nuthin. We only got the 25 Senators who were most liberal to begin with, and not a single Democratic or Republican waffler who faced netroots pressure switched sides. In fact, the Kossacks and company probably did considerable damage by demanding this Charge of the Light Brigade in parliamentary form in the first place.

    Still, the fault lies primarily with the politicians. But there is one question that I find to be a genuine puzzler: where are the private groups? Planned Parenthood, NARAL, NOW, and PFAW have been almost entirely silent. This is supposed to be the fight they have spent 30 years gearing up for. This is the fight for which they keep asking, and I keep giving, money for, but they did nothing!

    Now, this might be considered ammunition for those who thought that NARAL was crazy to endorse Chafee over a pro-life Dem. But aren't these also the same people who are crying bloody murder over Lieberman and all the moderate Dems who just took a dive on Alito? I am so confused.

Phil 436 Discussion 2

    After WW II, the revelations concerning the Nazis caused a stir in the philosophy of law leading to an upsurge in natural law theory. This development was starkly demonstrated in a series of debates between the legal positivist exemplar H.L.A. Hart and "natural law theorist" Lon Fuller.

    In his book, The Morality of Law, Fuller sets out what he calls the internal moral standards of a legal system:

1. The rules must be general and not mere ad hoc commands.
2. There can be no secret (unpromulgated) rules.
3. There can be retroactive rules.
4. The rules must be understandable by those to whom they apply.
5. The rules must not be either self-contradictory or contradictory as a group.
6. The rules must not demand actions that are beyond their subjects' power to perform.
7. The rules must not be constantly changing.
8. There must be some miniomal correspondence between what they rules say and how they are administered or interpreteted by the courts.

    According to Fuller, any legal system that totally lacks one of these characteristics or has substantial defects in several is not a true legal system. Thus, it cannot produce a real obligation to follow its commands.

    My question to all of you is this: is this a genuine natural law theory from the perspective of any of the thinkers we have considered? Why not? Reminder: you may respond to another person's post rather than develop a point from scratch.

UPDATE: If you find this question utterly bewildering, you may want to look at the Feinberg article on page 56 of your coursepack. Nota bene: Feinberg and Clarence Thomas are natural law thinkers for the purposes of this post.

UPDATE

Three interesting links...

    Since the other posts below are pretty long, I think I'll make this short.

• The 100 most sustainable large corporations around the world has some interesting members (Alcoa, Bank of America, Coca-Cola..hmmm)
• I have to admit that I am becoming more and more impressed with Daniel Drezner despite an initial bad impression based on his posting on Political Animal. He, along with another, does a very good job debunking a debunking of a study showing that peace is on the upswing. The most incredible statistic is that average fatalities for an intrastate conflict have dropped from 37,000 to 600 in the last 50 years. Incredible. (Via Matt Yglesias)
• Although I am certain that this is shocking to the conventional wisdom, it has always been pretty obvious to me that private schools do better than public schools because they get "better" students to begin with. Turns out, that's true. Private schools do worse than public schools on standardized tests once you control for some pretty basic variables.

Meritocracy?

    Matt Yglesias likes to point out that meritocracies are often quite unfair, because they assign valuable offices and positions based on relatively arbitrary characteristics. Matt:

People need to think harder before holding this up as a worthy ideal. Suppose we were creating "an intelligence-blind pigmentocracy that doesn't care how well you did on the SAT, as long as you were born with pale skin." That would be bad, right? Since people shouldn't have crappy lives just because they have dark skin. So why should people have crappy lives just because they're in the bottom 30 percent of the intelligence distribution curve? Granted, unlike with skin color, it's good to have some inequality determined by "merit," because if you didn't allow any, it would be hard to generate any kind of economic activity and absolute living standards everywhere would be very low. But there are real limits to how far that rationale can take you. People should read Michael Young's book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, in which the term was coined -- meritocracy was supposed to be a bad thing.

I am very sympathetic to most of this, but I think there is a distinction to be made that makes meritocracy much more plausible and attractive than it is. Setting aside Matt's obviously correct point that the SATs are not particular good judges of merit in the non-normative sense, I think meritocracy, broadly construed, has two fundamental theses:

• The Assignment Thesis: Society should be organized so that, ceterus paribus, the inherent abilities of each citizen can be fully realized and that offices and positions of society should be filled by, as much as possible, by those who are the most talented of those available. Further, education should, at least, provide equal opportunity for every person to develop their natural talents.
• The Rewards Thesis: The rewards of social cooperation (income, wealth, harems, whatever) should be granted to those in proportion to their natural talents, or merits.

The way to think of this distinction is to differentiate between who gets the job versus what rewards might accrue to the individual by having that job. For example, we might think it better for society that Warren Buffet runs an investment firm instead of George W. Bush, but we may not think, as a result, that Warren Buffet consequently deserves a massive amount of wealth compared to a ditch-digger.  So a set of rules that enshrined the first thesis (the Assignment Thesis) but didn't include the second (The Rewards Thesis) might be acceptable.

    And this is, not surprisingly, Rawls's position. He thinks that all major positions and offices must be open to fair equality of opportunity: the career life chances of each citizen should match their natural abilities and not be arbitrarily limited. But this is not just until you have democratic equality of opportunity: the benefits of occupying of those offices should be distributed according to the difference principle (inequalities in primary goods are only justified insofar as they benefit the least well off).

    The benefit of making of this distinction is that it allows us to criticize the meritocratic society while retaining what is so obviously appealing about the view. We want people like Jonas Salk to be medical researchers, Frank Lloyd Wright to be inventors, and Richard Feynman to be physicists. But we don't think it fair that people who aren't so naturally endowed to be stuck in mind-numbing poverty either. So we retain the Assignment Thesis and discard the Rewards Thesis. And it is only because the former is so compelling that we think the second is so plausible. But they can be easily disconnected.

    So, Matt rejecting both theses or only the second?

Moral Fetishism: a two edged sword?

    Richard Chappell at Philosophy Etc. produces a pretty standard objection to deontological ethics. Deontological ethics, on his view, states that one should not perform certain acts even though those acts might produce net positive net effects. And this is true even if the act will prevent other acts of precisely the same type: I will not torture even to prevent torture. Richard argues that this kind of ethics demands a kind of fetishism, an obsession with one's own moral status at the cost of others. Here is what he says:

As you might be able to tell, such priorities [deontological ethics] strike me as kind of moral fetishism. We should recognize that what matters is human welfare. Sanctimonious "moral absolutists" don't. They instead think that what matters is to keep their own hands clean, no matter the suffering of others.

I think there are many things that could be said at this point. One is that this kind of "moral fetishism" seems somewhat important when it comes to the reform of widespread behaviors. Consider the movie Lord of War. Nicholas Cageg plays an arms dealer response for arming some of the world's worst dictator's, and his guns probably cause deaths in the hundreds of thousands.  On the other hand, Nicholas Cage is (until he is discovered) happy and his family is better off than they would be otherwise. So, if Nicholas Cage decided to be an unhappy restranteur working for his father, would that have made any net difference in the world? Almost certainly not. So what does a concern for human welfare tell us that Cage should do? Continue running guns it seems to me.

    Or consider the case of the concentration camp guard. If he refuses to engage in the murder of undesirables, he will be killed. If he refuses, someone else will do it. Everyone who observes the act will think him crazy and unpatriotic. Now, we might think that this kind of action isn't required and that it might be considered permissible to engage in the murderous activity anyway (I am not one of those people. You might be unlucky, but the concentration guard had an obligation to die and Cage had an obligation to stop running guns). Be that as it may, we certainly would think that such behavior is heroic. But according to a consequentalist, the guard's refusal isn't just not heroic, it is morally wrong! The point is not that deontologists don't engage in this kind of "fetishism" but that the fetishism isn't as weird as Richard perhaps thinks it is.

    Secondly, there seems to be a hidden premise in both the deontologist interlocutor and Richard's part: that "valuing" is a maximizing notion. To value something is to select scenarios with more of it over scenarios that has less. This might be opposed to value defined  in terms of "respect" as opposed to "maximization."

    But this takes to the other subtle move from valuing human "life" to that of human "welfare" as if valuing one uncontroversially lead to valuing the other. It seems to me that it rests importantly on the question: why is human life valuable? It does not strike me as obviously true that what is valuable about human life is that human lives are loci of welfare. These aren't supposed to knockdown objections to Richard, but I am trying to make explicit the general framework that he is assuming when he does make the argument. And that framework is far from uncontroversial.

    Besides, the most plausible--in my mind at any rate--way to justify deontological ethics is something along Kantian lines. And Kant famously inquired into the necessary preconditions for valuing anything and for being the type of being that values. What if, hypothetically, being the type of being requires--in some rational sense--that we adopt a deontological (absolutist or not) perspective when it comes to right and wrong? It would not seem right to call such a theory fetishistic in the perjorative sense. Rather than obsessively following "rules," Kantians like the above try to found deontology in the most basic and important sources of value.

    Although, some Kantians think that the deontological/consequentalist divide might be more misleading than important. I think Barbara Herman's book The Practice of Moral Judgment argues along these lines.

Hamas

    The Hamas election victory has caused a lot of speculation on both the right and the left that it might be a good thing. The reasoning goes something like this: Hamas is now the governing party and will be pressured to seek compromise with Israel and consider the common good of the Palestinian people. As a result, it might be better for them to be in the driver's seat rather than a sniping minority. Here is an example from the Left:

But political participation can force a hard form of accountability. If there is a major constituency for Hamas in the territories -- which certainly there is -- perhaps to have them in the government, on the line for dealing with nuts and bolts problems of administration, on the line for delivering a better life for the Palestinians as opposed to just peddling the heroin of violence, has some advantages over having them on the outside as a paramilitary force with a de facto veto over whatever the Fatah-based government chooses to do.

And the Right:

On the other hand, if Hamas decides to negotiate with Israel, any agreement it reaches will have legitimacy among the Palestinian public. Why might Hamas change its views toward recognizing Israel and cease engaging in terrorism? Now it is responsible for the welfare of the Palestinian public. The Israeli government has not used even a fraction of its retaliatory capability against the Palestinians.

To be fair, these two are pretty skeptical that this might happen. But I want to point out another reason to be sceptical. What is the prime example of this kind of thinking int he 20th century? I would argue that it is Hindenburg's decision to install Hitler as Chancellor. The Nazi Party was close to defeat in 1933. It had lost its forward momentum, done poorly in local elections, and was almost out of money.

    Yet, Hugenberg and Papen believed that they could control the Nazi Party and use its massed popular support as a prop for their generally conservative regime and as a counterweight against a Communist revolution (while it may not have been a totally rational fear, it wasn't ga-ga crazy). They figured they could box Hitler in, and this was reflected in the fact that the Nazis didn't control very many cabinet positions (though the ones they did ask for gave them control of the internal security apparatus of most of Germany). They also felt that a primarily negative party defined by what it opposed would quickly flounder and dissolve through infighting in the face of governing during a national crisis. They were wrong. It would be hard to find a more disastrous political calculation in modern European history.

    My point is that the "pressure of governance" doesn't always or even often lead to radical movements changing their tune. Quite the opposite, they see their taking power as a sign, unsurprisingly, as a reason to execute their radical agenda.

The Media and Democrats: a Pessimistic Outlook

    I will point you to three links at the outset. Here we have an article telling the truth, nuanced and complex. Here we have an article reporting spin as if it was truth. And here we have an article essentially defending the kind of journalism the produces the second.

    The last article really burns my ass, especially because of this line:

"I never thought I'd see anything to match the right's visceral disdain for Bill Clinton, but I was wrong. Spurred by contempt for President Bush and the media's stumbling performance after 9/11 (symbolized by the WMD fiasco), the left has the MSM squarely in its sights."

Why does it burn my ass? Because we have the defender of journalism engaging in Orwellian crap. He is acting like liberals "all of sudden" were spurred by their hatred of Bush to start criticizing the media. A load of garbage. My entire life has been nothing but the media fucking by the numbers: soft reporting onRwanda, Whitewater, Lewinsky, the impeachment, the endless number of fabrications that they subjected Gore to, the ridiculous performance of the media during the recount, the post 9/11 patriot-thon where dissent was equated with treason, the subsequent rding of that culture to a victory in the 2002 elections, the complete swallowing of Bush Administration lies about the tax cuts and the deficit, the WMD's in Iraq, the "connection" between Bin Laden and Saddam, the Swift Boating of Kerry, Kerry as flip-flopper, the Social Security fight, the failure to take torture seriously, Roberts, Alito,  the equation of terrorism with dissent, and the consistent mis-reporting of the corruption scandals as bipartisan or equally distributed between Democrats and Republicans.

    And that is just off the top of my head. Perhaps the baby boomer generation was raised on the Pentagon Papers, heroic reporters in Vietnam, and Watergate and they respect the journalistic profession as a result. Me? All I have seen is the intense corporate consolidation of media outlets, incompetent reportage, and the MSM organs becoming more and more mouthpieces of the GOP that have consistently failed to do what Mencken says the press should do: "Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted."

    And Peter Daou has explained why the media seems to consistently favor the Republican agenda. Consider his discussion of the recent embarassing performance of the MSM in the 2004 presidential campaign:

"Flip-flop" took hold as an anti-Kerry theme because it was repeated ad nauseum in the press. And mind you, reporters are far too sophisticated to simply deliver the meme as an accusation; they frame it as a question, they toss it in as an offhanded remark, they run a caption that says it for them, they use the language of Democratic duality and Republican unity, they use polls for cover, they play false equivalency games, they allow Republicans to repeat the narrative unhindered, and so on. This despite the fact that Bush contradicted himself on major policy issues and was a master ‘flip-flopper’ himself. Had the media fact-checked the assertion every time it popped up and had they called Bush a flip-flopper with the same brutal, methodical intensity, the race might have ended differently. One of the few chances Americans got to test the flip-flop meme was the debates, and we all know how those turned out.

The same holds true for the Swift-boat sliming of Kerry: much has been made of the Kerry campaign’s response or lack thereof, but there’s another angle less discussed: the story was a cable staple for days and weeks, unchecked. Had the cable nets and other media outlets covered that story with more balance, more dignity, more judiciousness, more responsibility, it would have been a sideshow. And this has nothing to do with deflecting blame - the Kerry campaign should have known that their enemy wasn't a vindictive crackpot like John O'Neill, but the many 'journalists' and media outlets who rammed the story down our collective gullets.

Precisely. What do I have to add to his analysis? Not much besides this pessimistic thought: what can we do about it? I mean this as citizens, bloggers, and (possibly) Democrats. This is Peter Daou's optimistic take:

Progressive bloggers and the millions of online activists whose conversations they shepherd are fighting to close the triangle. Sadly, Democrats will resist, out of fear. And the press will fight back, hard. Not to mention the anticipated wrath of the rightwing machine, built on the "liberal media" myth. Still, the latent power of the netroots is ignored at the political and media establishment's peril.

What is my pessimistic take? In their current political environment, what can we do? Nothing. The best we can hope for is support the Democratic Party and hope something breaks our way. I am serious. The Republicans control the "commanding heights" with machine guns and they are just mowing us down. This is me at my most pessimistic but I feel like Winston Smith who is looking at Big Brother and saying "The only hope is with the proles."

    Maybe there are those who remember with longing better days when the MSM were not sell-outs, but I know I've never seen anything different. (Of course, this isn't to deny that some journalists do good work. I provided an example. But they aren't the ones that get influence and prestige.)