Here’s a must-read interview with Chris Sciabarra at Folks magazine, on Sciabarra’s lifelong struggle with Superior Mesenteric Artery Syndrome, along with his lifelong attachment to the work of Ayn Rand (and Nathaniel Branden).
One doesn’t usually think of Rand or Objectivism as offering much insight into the nature of disability, but Chris clearly does:
January 10, 2018:
Good afternoon, Irfan!Thank you for contacting me about purchasing Aristotle on Political Community for the Philosophy Department. I am CCing our Assistant Director…with your request and she will follow up with you about the purchase. Please contact either one of us with further questions.Sincerely,Head of Research and Instructional ServicesFelician University Libraries
Calling all philosophers! [Cue Rodin’s The Thinker searchlight-figure cutting through the Gotham night.]
Suppose that C, as a brutely probabilistic matter, has a 50% chance of causing/producing E1 and an equal chance of causing/producing E2. Now suppose that condition K causes the E1-as-against-E2 probability to shift, say, to 80/20. And suppose that, with condition K holding, E1 happens. Continue reading
France 24: “Israel’s Netanyahu Says US Embassy Could Move to Jerusalem within a Year.”
Reuters: “Trump Denies US Embassy to be Moved Within a Year.”
CNN: “US to Move Embassy by Year’s End, Netanyahu Says.”
Ha’aretz: “Trump Denies Netanyahu’s Claims that US Embassy Will Move to Jerusalem within Year.”
Calgary Herald: “Netanyahu Says US Embassy to Move to Jerusalem this Year.”
Jewish Press: “Trump Curbs Netanyahu’s Enthusiasm: No Embassy Move Any Time Soon.”
The New York Times: “U.S. Presses to Relocate Embassy to Jerusalem by 2019” (print version: “Trump Administration Presses to Relocate Embassy to Jerusalem by 2019.”)
NHK World: “Abbas: Jerusalem Could Be Gate to War.”
So I go to CVS with a stuffy nose, hoping to land something strong to clean it all out–some good shit, like Zyrtec-D. I know I’m going to have to run the regulatory gauntlet, but I need a hit. So I go.
When I get there, there’s a line three deep in front of me, and within minutes, three deep behind. Finally, I get to the counter.
Khawaja: Hi, I need some Zyrtec-D. That’s available behind the counter, right?
Pharmacist: Yes. I need to see your driver’s license.
Khawaja (handing it over): Here.
Pharmacist (scanning it): Thanks. I’ll go get it.
A few minutes pass.
Pharmacist: That’ll be $19.99. But first you’ll need to sign this agreement on the screen. Once you click “agree,” and sign it, you can pay.
I glance at the long agreement on-screen, browse through it without understanding it, look nervously over my shoulder at the line behind me, click “agree,” sign it, and hand over $20. Continue reading
Two views of William F. Buckley from the Op-Ed page of today’s New York Times, visible at exactly the same level on the same page of the print edition:
But most of the world — including most of the Jewish diaspora — will have a hard time coming up with a decent justification for opposing a Palestinian campaign for equal rights. Israel’s apologists will be left mimicking the argument that William F. Buckley once made about the Jim Crow South. In 1957, he asked rhetorically whether the white South was entitled to prevail “politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.” The “sobering answer,” he concluded, was yes, given the white community’s superior civilization.
–Michelle Goldberg, “Is Liberal Zionism Dead?”
Same page, five inches away:
About a year and a half ago, having spent a summer in Palestine and a week on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, I ventured the observation on Facebook that three political disputes I’d “recently encountered” (in a loose sense of “encountered”) struck me as fundamentally similar in nature, and yet attracted fundamentally different constituencies. For brevity’s sake, let’s call them “Malheur,” “Standing Rock,” and “Palestine,” taking those as shorthand designations for more complex things. Continue reading
The ethics of driving is a topic dear to my heart, having lost my two closest childhood friends (and the wife of one of those friends, who was also a friend) to traffic accidents, and living as I do in north Jersey, where every day’s commute is a near-death experience. I hate cars, I hate driving, and above all, I hate driving in New Jersey, so I’m always open to anyone who’s willing to trash the way “we” drive, ascribe it to “our” moral failings, and demand that “we” do better. (I hijacked a presentation on the Aristotelian virtue of eubolia at the Felician Ethics Conference this past fall to insist that in the modern world, eubolia is a virtue best exemplified by virtuous drivers.)
This anti-driving (or anti-bad-driving, or anti-ubiquitously-bad-driving) attitude competes with another downer sentiment of mine: I can’t stand David Brooks. Just to be clear: I can’t fucking stand David Brooks.
So I opened up this morning’s New York Times, turned to the Op-Ed page, and faced a bit of a dilemma. Here was David Brooks trashing the way “we” drive, describing Jersey drivers as people who “treat driving as if it were foreplay to genocide,” acknowledging that “driving means making a thousand small decisions” (internalized eubolia, anyone?), and getting a few things right. But like so many so-called dilemmas, this one wasn’t an instance of that fabled entity, the irresolvable ontologically-based moral dilemma, and collapsed before long. Because as per usual, Brooks managed to snatch polemical failure from the jaws of success, re-confirming my hate for everything he writes. Continue reading
From an article on the recent “swatting” case in Wichita, Kansas:
The law allows the police to use deadly force when an officer reasonably believes, given the information at the time he pulls the trigger, that his life or someone else’s life is in imminent danger. The Wichita officers had been told, wrongly, that they were encountering an armed hostage-taker who had already killed one person and was threatening to burn the house down.
“Nine-one-one is based on the premise of believing the caller: When you call for help, you’re going to get help,” Chief Livingston said. The prank call, he added, “only heightened the awareness of the officers and, we think, led to this deadly encounter.”
The antinomies of legalistic reason: The first paragraph tells us that the 911 caller made an accusation of criminal activity. But according to one prominent line of legal reasoning, an anonymous telephone-based accusation at best establishes reasonable suspicion of the commission of a crime–and usually requires a “totality of circumstances” test that conjoins the claims made in the call with facts observed or gathered independently of the call (see Lippmann, Criminal Procedure, pp. 107-109, 139-40, 2nd ed.). Continue reading
Remember this gem from Fernando Teson, Tobias Simon Eminent Scholar at Florida State University’s College of Law?
Almost everyone has by now accepted the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
What a difference a few years makes, right? From “almost everyone has by now accepted” to “almost no one of consequence now accepts” in two short years. A fine day’s work. Almost makes you wonder what kind of knowledge the original claim was based on.
JERUSALEM — An emboldened Israeli right wing is moving quickly in the new year to make it far more difficult to create a Palestinian state, signaling its intention to doom hopes for a two-state solution to the conflict.
The actions have come on multiple fronts, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party for the first time has urged the annexation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the nation’s top legal officers pressed to extend Israeli law into occupied territory.
In addition, the Israeli Parliament, after a late-night debate, voted early Tuesday to enact stiff new obstacles to any potential land-for-peace deal involving Jerusalem, while abandoning at the last minute a measure that would have eased the way to rid the city of several overwhelmingly Palestinian neighborhoods.
Coming on the heels of President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in defiance of decades-old United States policy and international consensus, the moves showed that the Israeli right senses a new opening to pursue its goal of a single state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
“We are telling the world that it doesn’t matter what the nations of the world say,” Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan told more than 1,000 members of Likud’s central committee on Sunday. “The time has come to express our biblical right to the land.”
If you think my title is in bad taste, what do you think of the calm serenity of Teson’s unretracted expression of blank ignorance masquerading as impartial, scholarly expertise? I guess there’s always the standard-issue Bleeding Heart Libertarian expedient of re-writing the original post and pretending not to have said what you did say.
No one has ever accused me of being calm, serene, impartial, scholarly, or an expert of any kind. But you’d be hard pressed to argue that I was wrong.
Policy of Truth 