The latest issue of Reason Papers is now out–Volume 39, Number 2 (Winter 2017). The issue includes a symposium on Tara Smith’s Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System, as well as Part II of a symposium on Den Uyl and Rasmussen’s newest book, The Perfectionist Turn. There’s also a revised version of a piece I posted here at PoT on teaching Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the Americans” (scroll all the way down to “Afterwords”). And other stuff as well–psychological egoism, Nozick on patterned theories of justice, interviews with Nazi filmmakers, commentary on a theatrical production of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. Enjoy. Continue reading
free will, part three
I’m going to be brief because I just typed up my post and lost it. Grrrr.
(1) I won’t be connecting up rationalizing causes, free will, and functional or goal-oriented systems. False advertising there, sorry.
Football: The Final Frontier
Much of our national life can be defined according to frontier and hinterland attitudes. Take our two national pastimes, football and baseball. Football is a frontier game, because it has to do with the conquest of territory. The aim of the game is to invade the other team’s land and settle there until you’ve crossed the goal line. As on the frontier, time of possession is everything.
Football is a metaphor for land hunger, a ritualized reenactment of the westward movement, going back to colonial times. Look at the names of some of the teams in the NFL, the Patriots, the Redskins, the Cowboys, the Broncos, the Forty-Niners, the Chiefs, the Raiders, the Buffalo Bills, and the Oilers, all names connected with different stages of the frontier epic. Look at the way a first down is measured. Officials bring out the chains, which are a vestigial replica of the surveyors’ chains and a reminder of the men who marked off the wilderness, dividing it into ranges and townships and sections.
On their hundred-yard-long turf-covered universe, football players act out the conquest of the frontier. And just as they fought the taking of their land on the real frontier, Native Americans today protest the appropriation of their past on the football field, in the use of team names like the Redskins and Chiefs, and in the hoopla of fans painting their faces, wearing chicken-feather headdresses, and waving foam-rubber tomahawks. In the game itself there are emulations of Indian customs, such as the huddle, which is a stylized Indian pow-wow, and the gauntlet that each player must run upon entering the stadium.
Football breeds a defiant frontier attitude, because someone is out to get you and you’re not going to let him. As the late linebacker Lyle Alzado once said: “I don’t think there is anyone on earth who can kick my ass.” Another great linebacker, Lawrence Taylor, once said that his purest joy was to hit someone so hard he could see the “snot bubble out of his nose.” And here’s the Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka defining the frontier ethic as well as the game of football: “It’s people hittin’ each other, that what it’s all about. I’m tired of skill.” Skill gets taken for granted, while there’s a degree of physical punishment reminscent of life in the wilderness. The limits to that punishment are suggested by some of the penalties, such as “piling on,” “unnecessary roughness,” and my personal favorite, which has a colonial ring in its phrasing, “coming unabated at the quarterback when offsides.”
–Ted Morgan, Wilderness at Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent (1993), p. 14.
free will, part two
In the first part, I argued that non-determined events need not be random (where ‘random’ means that there is no causal explanation of why this rather than that alternative possibility is or would be realized given the fully-specified initial conditions). I conceded, for the sake of argument at least, that if intentional action (choice, decision) were
Chris Sciabarra on Objectivism and Disability
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:
Non-Deterministic But Non-Random Causation
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
free will, part one
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
The Bottom Line on Jerusalem
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.”
Zyrtec-D and “Express” Consent
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
The Truth is Hard, But Kinda Funny
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:
Policy of Truth 