SCOTUS = Shoot 'em up

This court obviously wants to eliminate all of us by giving us guns and letting us shoot it out. Why are conservatives so gung-ho about gun rights and so shy about, say, gay rights? We'd rather arm our gays than marry them off, I guess.

When they decided to actually start thinking about the Second Amendment again after decades of neglect, looks like this Supreme Court was serious. Hot on the heels of 2008's Heller case in which they declared that the Second Amendment does indeed protect an individual right, they have now agreed in their coming season to consider the case of McDonald v. Chicago...whether an individual's right to own guns for self-defense...also covers states and other cities with gun-control laws... {This is about] the meaning of the 14th Amendment and whether it can or should be used to thus stymie states from restricting weapons possession rights. More...

Polanski, very clearly analyzed

This works for me. 'Nuff said.

Drugging and raping a child, then leaving the country before you can be sentenced for it, is behavior our society should not tolerate, no matter how famous, wealthy or well-connected you are. More...

First amendment takes a hit

Poliitcal correctness is not what free speech is all about, obviously.

Does Conan the Barbarian have serious artistic value? That's one of the intriguing questions raised by a case the U.S. Supreme Court will hear next Tuesday. Because Conan includes footage of horses tripped by wires, it seems to be covered by a federal ban on depictions of animal cruelty. If so, Amazon is committing a felony by selling it, unless it could convince a jury that the 1982 epic—in which a bare-chested, codpiece-wearing future governor of California declares that the best thing in life is "to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women"—has "serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value." By inviting jurors to be film critics, with the consequences of a bad review including up to five years in federal prison, Congress has turned the First Amendment on its head. That lamentation you hear is the dismayed cry of the Framers at the blitheness with which the people's representatives seek to crush expression that offends them and drive politically incorrect thoughts from the realm of tolerable discourse. More...

Muslim women oppressed?

A video on Boing Boing throws a common sense spin on things.

Muslim women are just like any other woman. We come in all shapes and sizes, and all sorts of beliefs. You can't paint us all with the same brush. I'm as American as anyone else, I watch movies, I read celebrity gossip, I shop at Victoria's Secret, I work outside the home, I'm pursuing my dreams, the only difference is that little piece of fabric I wrap around my head. Big whoop. I'm not harming anyone by wearing a piece of material on my head so what's the big deal? I myself wear the headscarf and I do so because it's something I believe is mandated in my religion. No one is forcing me and it has no political significance (I have no idea why people keep thinking it does). More...

Bill Clinton on gay marriage

He did, after all, sign the DOMA, right? Well, he's changed his mind.

That our society has an interest in coherence and strength and commitment and mutually reinforcing loyalties, then if gay couples want to call their union marriage and a state agrees, and several have now, or a religious body will sanction it, and I don’t think a state should be able to stop a religious body from saying it, I don’t think the rest of us should get in the way of it. I think it’s a good thing not a bad thing. More...

Supreme Court book review

This is a pretty interesting thesis.

He sees the justices and the people as partners in a “marriage” that bypasses the elected legislature and the president. “It frequently is the case that when judges rely on the Constitution to invalidate the actions of the other branches of government, they are enforcing the will of the American people,” he says. The marriage between the court and the people, like many enduring ones, has gradually mellowed. At first, there were occasions when the two sides clashed mightily, but over the years they’ve learned to come into equilibrium. These days, when the court gets into trouble with the public, it’s often on an issue it’s confronting for the first time. (The eminent domain case Kelo v. City of New London, for instance, provoked a populist outcry in 2005.) “What history shows,” Friedman argues, “is assuredly not that Supreme Court decisions always are in line with popular opinion, but rather that they come into line with one another over time.” More...

Begging the (human rights) questions

Interesting piece on how questions can skew answers.

Information on human rights depends heavily on opinion surveys. Unfortunately, surveys can be wrong and misleading for so many different reasons that we have to be very careful when designing surveys and when using and interpreting survey data. One reason...is the framing of the questions. Even very small differences in framing can produce widely divergent answers. And there is a wide variety of problems linked to the framing of questions. More...

Postmodernists redux

A new series of books inspires a little rethinking of the pomos.

Whilst many are happy to take their demolition of French theory at face value, as it provides a convenient justification for not reading any of it, it is often forgotten that part of the authors' point was a plea for clearer writing among leftwing thinkers in the face of the continuing march of neo-liberalism, not simply to damn any and all contemporary thought as "fashionable nonsense", however appealing this easy gesture might be. More...

Marriage in Indiana is meant to last

This speaks for itself.

An Indiana judge has turned down a divorce request from two women married in Canada, ruling that state law doesn’t give courts the authority to dissolve same-sex marriages. More...

Sandel's course, online

Drop everything.

Harvard University and WGBH Boston have posted online Sandel’s very popular course, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” How popular is it? Over 14,000 Harvard students have taken this course over the past 30 years. More...

The goal of education

There's some hidden material here that may lead you down an interesting Sept-Oct path.

If you ever doubted that the public schools are chiefly run for the benefit of teachers, this article will put those fond delusions to rest. Educating children is an incidental side effect of giving teachers jobs. Of course, not all school systems are as dysfunctional as New York's is, but the monopoly power of government schools cannot help but foster creeping incompetence and the growth self-justifying educational bureaucracies at the expense of educating students. More...

Poverty vs Rights

The P.A.P. Blog supports way more rights than this blog, but this provocative material is fascinating.

Strange as it may seem to some, unemployment benefits are a human right, and rightly so in my opinion. Poverty makes rights impossible... More.

MIT's Project Gaydar

As your data become public, the math determines who you are? The point here is not to hide one's identity, but to be aware that, if you put yourself entirely on line, your identity becomes less and less under your control.

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction... Their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep... “That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information - because you don’t have control over your information.” The work has not been published in a scientific journal, but it provides a provocative warning note about privacy. More...

Kids and tests, fairly anecdotal

There's a marginal relationship of this to Sept-Oct. Telling, but probably useless.


"Children learned and remembered an extraordinary amount of information about a school trip to a museum" even after a lengthy delay. The findings also showed that giving the children the opportunity to draw, significantly increased the amount of accurate information they recalled... These same children do poorly in recollecting information about the museum on a comprehension test designed by adults. In another words, what children learn from the museum is not in general what the adults are inclined to test them on or what the adults think they should be learning. More.

Rush sez: segregate school buses

You'll have to read this a few times. Then you'll have to track it down further. It's scary.

In a remark extraordinary even by the standards of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio heavyweight declared on his program Wednesday that the United States needed to return to racially segregated buses. Referring to an incident in which a white student was beaten by black students on a bus, Limbaugh said: “I think the guy’s wrong. I think not only it was racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that’s the lesson we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama’s America.” More...

Justice Brandeis bio

This is just a review of the book, but it has its amusement value as a stand-alone.

Brandeis thought the law an instrument of morality and progress. “Is not the challenge of legal justice to conform to our contemporary notions of social justice?” he asked in a speech just weeks before President Wilson nominated him to the court. It is all but impossible to imagine the nomination of a lawyer like Brandeis today, and it is a small miracle that he was confirmed even in his day. More...

Sandel on the Today show

Good grief, he's riding the trolley: link. The prof is good; I wish this were an hour longer.

Tasers on school campuses. Middle and high school, that is.

I find this rather frightening, myself. The rights of students are curtailed to a great degree in aid of safety, of course, but somehow this doesn't sound right. 50,000 is a lot of volts.

Middle and high schools across the country are inviting Taser-toting cops on school grounds. This comes at a time when Tasers have claimed the lives of hundreds of people, including three teenagers this year alone. While heightened security might be a necessity in an age where kids smuggle deadly weapons to school, this fact alone should give parents and school officials pause. Even as school administrators and local law enforcement accept and incorporate Tasers as disciplinary measures, deploying them on school grounds is putting students at risk. More...

Abortion and Down syndrome

A classic, and sad, conundrum.

Will The Down syndrome Children Disappear? This is the incredibly provocative question asked by a Children's Hospital Boston researcher in a recent article published in Archives of Disease in Childhood. Given the new prenatal tests available to mothers, the author, Brian Skotko, asks, are we entering an era where slowly Down Syndrome babies will begin to be born in dwindling numbers? And is this, he asks something that we as a society would even want to happen? More...

A duty to preserve African culture?

Identity politics in the US is one thing. Forced identity politics in Africa? That's something else altogether. This article discusses the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights.

The introduction of a duty to preserve a culture, particularly in Africa, is understandable given the experience of colonialism, but “understandable” doesn’t mean “OK”. People have a right to an identity, cultural or otherwise, and human rights do a great job protecting identity (there’s religious freedom, freedom of association, freedom of thought and speech, freedom of residence etc.). But there cannot be a duty to have and preserve an identity. It seems here that the language of human rights – this is after all a human rights declaration – is used to smuggle in the opinion that it is somehow OK that a cultural identity is forced on people, and that individual identities disappear into the collective. More...

A racist bigot whose legacy is mass murder

Okay, ban me in Boston, but this stuff bears repeating. Who are we talking about?

[His is] a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying. More...

(Yep. Charlie Darwin.)

Where morality comes from

Those of us who worked last year on Sept-Oct (AKA throw the fat guy at the trolley) recall the moral instinct arguments (which I find pretty persuasive). Here's a different look at the sources of moral sense.

...universal concerns among children — such as a need to feel in control of one’s behavior and disapproval of harming others — shape moral development far more than cultural values do. “It’s remarkable how little cultural variation we have found in developmental patterns of moral reasoning,” says Helwig, who presented his results in Park City, Utah, at the recent annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society. Helwig and like-minded researchers don’t assume that kids’ universal responses spring from a biologically innate moral-reasoning capacity. Instead, they say, children gradually devise ways of evaluating core family relationships in different situations. Kids judge the fairness and effectiveness of their parents’ approaches to punishing misbehavior, for example. These kinds of relationship issues are much the same across all cultures, from Helwig’s perspective. More...

Predicting that you will be a criminal

This article is a bit Minority Reportish in its connotations.

With the emergence of new and powerful imaging technologies, scientists can see detailed pictures of the brain and trace activity along its neural networks. “The brain was forgotten until neuroscience techniques evolved to a level where we could, for the first time, really look at brain structure and function,” he says. “And from then on, we found that there’s certainly a brain basis to crime—that the brains of violent criminals are physically and functionally different from the rest of us.” More...

Aesthetics

The Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the concept of the aesthetic is somewhat heavy going, but anyone interested in theories of art (e.g., Caveman fans) might want to take a look. If nothing else, you'll like this explanation of "taste":

Mainly British philosophers working mainly within an empiricist framework began to develop theories of taste. The fundamental idea behind any such theory—which we may call the immediacy thesis—is that judgments of beauty are not (or at least not primarily) mediated by inferences from principles or applications of concepts, but rather have all the immediacy of straightforwardly sensory judgments; it is the idea, in other words, that we do not reason to the conclusion that things are beautiful, but rather “taste” that they are. More...

Corporate speech

This issue is coming to a head. From NPR: The question always is: Who does the First Amendment apply to? Do only individuals have the right of free speech? Or does this right extend to corporations and unions as well?... Ronald Bailey replies: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...." So my naive constitutional question is: What part of "no law" don't the courts, NPR, and campaign finance and speech "reformers" understand?

A good article with interesting links to sources.

Gendercide

Some facts and figures on gendercide, the choice to bear (usually) only male children.

The word gendercide describes the results of sex-selective abortions that take place on a massive scale in some countries, particularly India and China. These abortions have led to the “disappearance” of perhaps more than 100 million girls and women (or about 1 million a year). Evidence of this can be found in the abnormal sex-ratios in both countries: More...

Carbon problems

For the deeper diggers of PF October, carbon markets and carbon taxes.

Will government solutions to global warming be worse than global warming itself? Remember that man-made global warming is a negative externality that occurs when burning fossil fuels release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Economists define negative externality as a spillover from an economic transaction that harms parties not directly involved in the transaction. In this case, the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is thought to be boosting temperatures, raising sea levels, and having other effects on the climate that people must involuntarily pay to adapt to (more air conditioning, switching crops, and so forth). Thus, goes the argument, the price of fossil fuels does not reflect the full cost of consuming them. More...

The right to die

We used to have this as a topic every now and then. Assisted suicide is a complex issue no matter how you slice it, and it's been a while since it's been in the news. (Even John Stuart Mill had something to say about killing oneself, btw. He talked about your responsibility to others, something that most suicides don't consider.)

The arguments happening over the right to a medically assisted suicide in Montana indicate that if there is a ‘slippery slope’ - that misused and overworked metaphor repeated in the debate on assisted suicide - it is from the limited rights of those with terminal illnesses towards allowing all who feel they are suffering the right to a medically assisted suicide. More...

Ban POTUS

I'm sorry, but this just strikes me as silly, the whole don't-let-kids-hear-the-president thing. Still, there's at least one point of view that's intelligent on the subject, and I pass it along. You should draw your own conclusions.

The medium is the message. The speech will be a pile of platitudes, not an overtly ideological address. But the exercise itself has ideological undertones, with an implicit lesson that reinforces the bipartisan cult of the presidency. The man in the Oval Office is not supposed to be the nation's chief guidance counselor or its father-in-chief, and it sends a creepy message to act as though he is. More...

Measuring democracy

We've posted on this before, and it's always interesting.

How do we assess if a country is a democracy or not, or is more democratic than another? Or, in other words, how do we assess the “democraticness” of a country, or the level or quality of its democracy, if any? It’s obvious from this way of phrasing the question that my preferred system of measurement will not be binary or dichotomous. I want to have a measurement system that gives me more than merely an indication of the presence or absence of democracy in a country. I want a scale of “democraticness”, ranging from total absence of any elements of democracy to a perfect democracy, with as many intermediate levels as possible. How this can be done is another matter. More...

On prison populations

Just the photo of California's prison alone is enough to scare you straight. But why is the US so prison-happy? And is the South all that criminal?

California’s archipelago of 33 prisons houses more than 170,000 inmates, nearly twice the number it was designed to safely hold. Almost all of its facilities are bursting at the seams: More than 16,000 prisoners sleep on what are known as “ugly beds” — extra bunks stuffed into cells, gyms, dayrooms, and hallways. [Governor Arnold] Schwarzenegger has referred to the system as a “powder keg.” More...

For Oct PF, meet Mr. Chomsky

This Chomsky article will enlighten people, a bit, on the UN and world poverty. And on poverty in general. Very interesting.

On June 11 the Financial Times reported, “the United Nations’ World Food Programme is cutting food aid rations and shutting down some operations as donor countries that face a fiscal crunch at home slash contributions to its funding.” Victims include Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, and others. The sharp budget cut comes as the toll of hunger passes a billion—with over one hundred million added in the past six months—while food prices rise, and remittances decline as a result of the economic crisis in the West...

The “devastating news” released by the World Food Programme barely even reached the level of “mere ‘news.’” In The New York Times, the WFP report of the reduction in the meager Western efforts to deal with this growing “human catastrophe” merited 150 words on page ten under “World Briefing.” That is not in the least unusual. The United Nations also released an estimate that desertification is endangering the lives of up to a billion people, while announcing World Desertification Day. Its goal, according to the Nigerian newspaper THISDAY, is “to combat desertification and drought worldwide by promoting public awareness and the implementation of conventions dealing with desertification in member countries.” The effort to raise public awareness passed without mention in the national U.S. press. Such neglect is all too common. More...

Defense spending in the US

Any topic with international connotations will probably be able to use this chart. Internalize it, meanwhile, and think about what it really means.

More on the Hillary movie

This article in Reason excellently pits Freedom of Speech against McCain-Feingold.

So what should the Supreme Court do here? In a 1789 speech advocating the addition of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, James Madison famously described the judiciary as "the guardians of those rights...an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive." By defending the First Amendment against the creeping depredations of so-called campaign finance reform, the Supreme Court will be doing its constitutional duty. More.

There's also an interesting follow-up article here.

Interesting meditation on property rights

Why, if at all, are we entitled to the fruits of our labors?

Talking about property rights, Chris refers to one common justification for property: namely, that 'creating something generates rights over it'. There's no doubt that it's a widely shared moral intuition. If I fashion an old piece of wood into an intricate sculpture, whose should the sculpture be but mine? If you spend long days writing a literary masterpiece, are you not a proper beneficiary of its publication and sale? What is less clear is why we think the creation of the object generates an entitlement on the part of its creator. Is this because it's he or she that's put in the effort, and so deserves the reward? Or is it because, independently of how much effort has been expended, something of the person is thought to be, loosely, 'in' the object created? Neither answer is unproblematic in its implications. More...

Who can say what, politically? It's still being determined

The theme of unfair advantages seems strong lately, which is what this is really about. This is in reference to the case of the anti-Hillary documentary. It will explain the situation if you're unclear on it.

"When the government of the United States of America claims the authority to ban books because of their political speech," says Citizens United, " something has gone terribly wrong."... The government cannot create a pure, balanced, undistorted political debate; all it can do is introduce new distortions. And as bad as distortions caused by wealth (or visibility or good looks or charisma) might seem, distortions imposed by force are worse, which is why the Constitution forbids them. More...

The animated Howard Zinn

What more can we say? Although I'm personally not a Zinn fan, what I would call his critique of US history is pretty popular with an awful lot of people. Anyhow, check it out.

Alan Turing

This is just sad.

Just about anyone in analytic philosophy is familiar with the work of Alan Turing, who is a central figure in the development of the theory underlying modern computers. In addition, he was pivotal in the breaking of the Enigma Code in WWII. And the treatment he received, which almost certainly led to his suicide, is shocking... More.

Women and Wikipedia

I have no idea what this means, but it's rather startling.

Women are consummate content creators online. From technology mavens like Google’s Marissa Mayer to influential mommy bloggers, and even YouTube stars like iJustine, females have played a significant role in shaping web trends. That’s why we’re slightly surprised by a revealing study conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Their research found that only 13% of Wikipedia contributors are women. More...

Meritocracy

Sort of as a subnote to the recent post on economic advantages, there's an amazing rant on Salon by Glenn Greewald about other unearned advantages. Makes you think, again.

Liz Cheney is really the perfect face of Washington's political culture, a perfect manifestation of all the rotting diseases that define it and a pure expression of what our country has become and the reasons for its virtual ruin. She should really be on every political TV show all day every day. It's almost as though things can't really be expressed thoroughly without including her. More...

Wealth inequality

As the post says, not the worst inequality in terms of morality, but interesting.

People who have wealth have an advantage in gathering the information necessary to increase their wealth; they have networks of other wealth holders who can improve their access to opportunities for wealth acquisition; they have advantages in gaining advanced professional and graduate training that increase their likelihood of assuming high positions in wealth-creating enterprises; and they can afford to include high-risk, high-gain strategies in their investment portfolios. So there is a fairly obvious sense in which wealth begets wealth... More.