Weird flu shot reaction

Take this from the source, and come on, you really can't debate it, but, well, it's the weirdest thing I've seen today, and I've seen plenty of weird things (I'm a debate coach). It's a woman who can only walk backwards: Link. The good news is, at least she didn't get the flu.

Consequences of the anti-vaccine movement

Vaccinations down, disease up. Duh.

The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk. More...

Why doesn't Justice Thomas talk?

He already knows what he needs to know.

Thomas—who hasn't asked a lawyer a question during arguments in nearly four years—said he and the other eight justices virtually always know where they stand on a case by reading legal briefs before oral arguments. "So why do you beat up on people if you already know?"More...

Discussion of the value of democracy

There's plenty on this subject at P.A.P., but it is soooo useful to us that it makes sense to keep pointing it out. Here, a consequential and a deontological take. (Those heres are all url links.)

An instrumental justification of democracy can take many different forms, depending on the ultimate goal that is supposed to be promoted by democracy. The most common forms are:
Democracy promotes prosperity, economic growth and poverty reduction. Read more here and here.
Democracy promotes peace (internally and externally). See here, here and here.
Democracy leads to better political decisions. See here, here and here.
Democracy leads to less repression and more respect for human rights. See here, here, here, here and here.
...
The non-instrumental justification, the one that says that democracy is good, not because of what it produces, but because of what it is, is also very interesting and persuasive. More...

Causality and correlation

This article is a good reminder that you need a link. And it also includes my favorite xkcd strip of all time.

“Omitted Variable Bias“, a type of statistical bias that illustrates this problem. Suppose we see from Department of Defense data that male U.S. soldiers are more likely to be killed in action than female soldiers... So there is a correlation between the gender of soldiers and the likelihood of being killed in action. One could – and one often does – conclude from such a finding that there is a causation of some kind: the gender of soldiers increases the chances of being killed in action... However, it’s here that the Omitted Variable Bias pops up. The real cause of the discrepancy between male and female combat mortality may not be gender or a gender related thing, but a third element, an “omitted variable” which doesn’t show in the correlation. More...

Hate speech

I have a feeling that the subject of hate speech will be dead thanks to the new legislation from the senate. While one reacts favorably on an intuitive level, that nagging freedom of speech issue, and the double penalties, keeps coming back.

For example, let us suppose that I am running with a friend who is openly gay and cross-dresses. As we run along someone jumps out yells “take that, skinny!” and cuts me on the arm with a knife. Realizing that the person in the skort (a running skirt) is a guy, the mugger yells “fag!” as he takes a slash at him, also cutting him on the arm. After we subdue the mugger and tie him up with my friend’s tasteful pink running scarf, the police haul him off. Because I’m a straight guy wearing shorts, my cut is a matter of assault and not a federal crime. But, since my gay friend was wearing a skort and the mugger yelled “fag”, the attack on him is now a federal crime-even though his injury is the same as mine. As such, it would seem to be unjust for the mugger to be regarded as having done something worse to my friend than to me. More...

Cap pun bad -- the rational actor

The old deterrence arguments have their basis here.

We tend to believe that this deterrence effect correlates with the severity of the punishment. More years in prison means more deterrence. More brutal punishments – such as capital punishment – means even more deterrence. The belief in this correlation between degree of deterrence and degree of punishment rests on the “rational actor hypothesis”: people will take only those actions that produce more benefits than costs. More...

PF: Failed states

These graphics should be useful in November: link.

Interesting way to look at human rights

We often accept that human rights are universal because they affect all of us. But there's more to it than that.

Human rights ... are omni-lateral, meaning that they are claims directed at all entities within the previous dimensions: every other human being, every state and every intermediary entity can violate our rights. That is what we mean when we say that rights are rights erga omnes. More...

Aff on Nov-Dec

This guy is soooo in favor. Good links in the article on the actual science.

No one pretends that vaccines are perfect, or 100% risk-free. But approved vaccines work. They save lives. They do not cause mercury poisoning or autism. They carry very low risks -- risks almost always worth taking. And, to top it off, vaccines have become something of a civic responsibility: they work best when everyone takes them. More...

Health lottery

Interesting problem. Resources are scarce, so who gets to die?

There are various ways to allocate scarce medical resources. The New York group developed a system for rationing ventilators based on the numbers of organs that were failing, and patients’ risk of dying. The idea behind it is the utilitarian principle that we should maximise the numbers of lives saved. Others favour including the age of the patient, their previous functional status, and coexisting illnesses, in order to maximise the number of quality-adjusted life years saved.

But these methods of rationing are vulnerable to an objection on the basis of fairness. Certain patients (for example the elderly or those with more severe illness) will be given no chance of having their life saved. The 80 year old with influenza has just as strong a desire that their life be saved as a 20 year old. Their right to life is equal to that of the 20 year old. But they are denied life-saving treatment in such a rationing system. More...

Higgs boson

This has nothing to do with debate, but it's just too interesting not to pass on.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather. More...

Hate crimes

The take on hate crime laws is that, on the neg, they are both mind-reading and unnecessary. It's also about to become law. A classic LD conundrum.

The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which President Obama plans to sign soon, is named after two men who were murdered in 1998. Shepard, a gay college student, was beaten to death in Wyoming. Byrd, a black hitchhiker, was dragged to death behind a pickup truck in Texas. Bigotry seemed to play a role in both crimes. Here is something else Matthew Shepard and James Byrd have in common: Their killers were arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison or death, all without the benefit of hate crime laws, state or federal. Hence it is very strange to slap their names onto a piece of legislation based on the premise that such crimes might go unpunished without a federal law aimed at bias-motivated violence. More...

Organ donations

I've posted on this subject before. The moral questions just seem so...unique.

The report—co-authored by University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan and three European colleagues—oddly concludes that individuals have the right to control their bodies, except when they want to sell one of their organs. Let’s be crystal clear: It is heinously wrong to treat people like slaves, coercing their labor without voluntarily agreed upon compensation. The question is: Are poor people who sell their organs coerced? More...

Jury nullification

This is a hardy perennial that will certainly come up as a resolution sooner or later. This is a really good article on the subject.

If law has a moral foundation, then it would owe (at least some of) its authority to that moral foundation. This would seem to entail (with some suitable and lengthy argumentation) that any law that goes against that moral foundation would be an illegitimate law. This would clearly provide a moral basis for jury nullification. After all, if the jury has correctly discerned the law as being illegitimate (that is, it violates the moral foundation of law) then they would be in the right to refuse to apply it. Naturally, if they elected to apply it, then the folks on the jury would be acting in what would seem to be an immoral manner. More...

Public opinion and gays

This is a fairly hopeful chart in its way. At least it's trending the right way.

Regarding the public’s acceptance of homosexuality as such (independent of criminalization and marriage rights), the data are still a bit disappointing. A large minority wouldn’t vote for a homosexual presidential candidate, for example. Again depending on the survey, only a small majority or a large minority thinks homosexuality is morally acceptable. But public opinion is growing more tolerant over the years: More...

Who said this?

“I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table, and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.”

The answer is pretty funny.

This is so much more effective than exit exams

The Ohio legislature passed a ban on corporal punishment this July, bringing the number of U.S. states that have banned corporal punishment to 30. In the other states, it’s still legal and it typically involves an administrator or teacher hitting a child repeatedly on the buttocks with a wooden “paddle” or board about 1 ½ feet long, 6 inches wide, and 1 inch thick. More...

Why aren't more countries nuclear?

I mean, they could be if they wanted to. Given the regularity of nuke topics, you might enjoy this.

There are between 40 and 60 states with the technological capacity and economic wherewithal to build a nuclear bomb, and the vast majority of them have decided not to do so, even when there were other nuclear powers in their neighborhood. A few states have started down that road and then turned back, sometimes in the face of international pressure (Libya, Brazil, Argentina), and sometimes mostly on their own (Sweden, South Africa). [...] Iran’s own nuclear program (which began under the Shah) reflected broader security concerns and the Shah's own desire for status, and doesn't appear to have been a direct response to anyone else's bomb. North Korea’s entry into the nuclear club hasn't led South Korea, Japan, or anyone else to start a new nuclear weapons program yet. In short, people have been forecasting the rapid proliferation of nuclear weapons ever since the nuclear age began, but all of those forecasts have been overly pessimistic. More...

American exceptionalism

Why is the US different? Is it?

America is exceptional not because it banished evil, not because Americans are somehow more moral than anyone else, not because its founding somehow changed human nature—but because it recognized the indelibility of human nature and our permanent capacity for evil. It set up a rule of law to guard against such evil. It pitted branches of government against each other and enshrined a free press so that evil could be flushed out and countered even when perpetrated by good men. More...

The Matthew effect

There's a name for everything. As Lady Day sang, them's that got will get...

The Matthew Effect – a concept invented by sociologist Robert K. Merton - is based on the following extract of the Gospel of Matthew:

For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

This statement is intuitively convincing. Those who already have economic resources can use these to acquire even more of them, often if not by definition at the expense of those who don’t have them. More...

Connection of water shortage and human rights

The Universal Declaration covers a lot of stuff, and obviously health is one of them (shades of Nov-Dec?).

We obviously need water to survive, and no human rights without survival. Inadequate water supplies also cause diseases, violating our right to health. We need water – and clean water - to drink, but also to eat. Or rather, to produce our food. And we need a lot. People drink on average just a few liters a day, but they consume thousands of liters a day if we count the water required to produce their food. And evidently we should count it. Many areas of the world face already now face water shortages (there’s a map here). A fifth of the world’s population already lives in areas short of water. A global water crisis waits around the corner, and one likely consequence is famine, another human rights violation. More...

Can you violate your own right to privacy?

Interesting meditation from talkingphilosophy.com.

On the face of it, it would seem that a person cannot violate her own right to privacy. A privacy violation would seem to require that someone acquire information that they do not legitimate have a right to know and they do so without the consent of the person. For example, someone stealing another person’s diary and reading about their secret hopes and fears would be a privacy violation. When a person knowingly reveals information about herself (such as by being very loud in public, posting it on a public blog or twittering it), then that person has obviously given consent to herself.

However, I think that a case can be made for the claim that a person can violate her own right to privacy. The first step in doing this is arguing that a person can (in general) violate her own rights. More...