I found myself thinking the other day of Peter Breughel the Younger’s 1564 painting, “The Procession to Calvary.” I used to teach it when I taught aesthetics in college. As is probably obvious, it’s a depiction of Christ’s being taken to be crucified. It reminds me of so many things happening now, and vice versa.
The Scot Peterson trial has ended very quickly–far quicker than anyone thought it would, and too quickly, I think, to do justice to the real complexity of the issues involved. That said, the narrow issues raised by the criminal charges against Peterson are so obvious that there’s a sense in which the trial could reasonably have been shorter–by not happening at all. So from that perspective, a short trial may well be appropriate.
The case for acquittal is, in a certain sense, so simple and obvious that it can be stated fairly briefly. For Peterson to be found guilty of the main charges against him, it had to be proven that he was a “caretaker” in the legally relevant sense, that he knew where the shooter was, and that knowing where the shooter was, he failed to engage the shooter as he was (supposedly) required to do. To acquit, all that the jury needs is reasonable grounds to doubt any one of these claims. Continue reading
In two previous posts (here and here), I’ve made reference to the report by police tactical expert Philip Hayden as the best written account of the events relevant to Scot Peterson’s actions at the Parkland Shooting. In the just previous-post, I raised some provisos and reservations about Hayden’s report, but (apart from Appendix A) those are all matters of omission and incompleteness, not of disagreement with anything Hayden says in the report. In fact, I fully agree with the contents of the report. I received the report in the form of two PDFs. Here is the first one, which I’ve called “Hayden 1,” about 53 pages long, and here is the second, which I’ve called “Hayden 2,” about 17 pages long.*
I highly suggest that anyone interested in this topic read the whole report in its entirety, from beginning to end. It’s somewhat long, about 41 single-spaced pages of text, and another five pages of appendices. But every sentence is worth reading. Continue reading
In the five years since the Parkland shooting, I’ve read my fair share of books, reports, articles, and editorials regarding the charges made against Scot Peterson. Peterson, we’re told, was a coward, derelict in his duties, neglectful of the welfare of the children he was tasked with protecting, and, aside from Cruz himself, the fundamental cause of the carnage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Some of this material makes a valuable contribution in a narrowly limited way: it identifies facts relevant to reaching a verdict on Peterson’s actions. Read carefully, and taken cumulatively, I would say that at the very least, it exonerates Peterson of the criminal charges against him, and plausibly of all the others as well. But virtually none of it–literally none of the hundreds of pages I’ve read, the vast majority of the pages written on the subject–really drills down to ask the right questions, seek the right answers, or get the right answers. To read this literature is, for the most part, to drown in a sea of irrelevance. Continue reading
(The following brings together themes from maybe half a dozen or more posts from the past two years or so, many associated with MTSP Zoom discussions of Thomas Scanlon’s *What We Owe to Each Other* and George Sher’s *Desert*. I do not claim consistency with prior posts. I hope this post constitutes progress in a kind of on-again off-again philosophical project. Interspersed Roman numerals indicate footnotes, text of which are below the main text.)
*****
I think this: it being appropriate for you to resent me for not telling you about the party constitutes my wronging you by not telling you about the party. (i, ii) Wrongings are different from moral wrongs. All wrongings are moral wrongs, but not all moral wrongs are wrongings. (iii) (Moral wrongs, on my telling, are actions that make observer-role indignation appropriate – and the main action that is like this is people wronging other people. Indignation is third-personal agent-directed anger, unlike resentment, which is second-personal agent-directed anger. (iv) )
So an action being a wronging (and likewise an action being morally wrong) is like a joke being funny or a person being admirable. For an item to have such a property is for it to have the (second-order) property of having some (first-order, probably descriptive) property or other that makes it appropriate to have some particular type of response in emotional attitude.
Coming from this framework, I want to ask and answer (at least schematically) two questions. First: what are the most general features of an action that make resentment appropriate (thereby constituting an action being a wronging)? Second: on this understanding of wrongings, why might we be required to refrain from wronging persons?
Kerouac, caffeinated:
I told Dean [= Neal Cassady] that when I was a kid and rode in cars I used to imagine I held a big scythe in my hand and cut down all the trees and posts and even sliced every hill that zoomed past the window. “Yes! Yes!” yelled Dean. “I used to do it too only different scythe – tell you why. Driving across the West with the long stretches my scythe had to be immeasurably longer and it had to curve over distant mountains, slicing off their tops, and reach another level to get at further mountains and at the same time clip off every post along the road, regular throbbing poles. …” (On the Road)
Kerouac, amphetaminated:
We were talking about the Great Scythes of our childhood, when I, riding in New England littleroads with boulders and posts and hills of vine all along, would, imaginary, cut it all down with my scythe as my father swept the car by; and he, Cody [= Neal Cassady], in the tragic red roads of Sunday afternoon in Eastern Colorado, when blackhatted men grimly drive the children, swept alongside the car either on foot or wielding from inside the car a gigantically and intricately built Scythe that not only snipped the close posts and sage or wheat but extended itself in a monstrous dream to horizon with all the massiveness of unbelievable realities like the Oakland Bay Bridge or the skeletal Swiftian frame of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia when they were raising the octagonal facewalls into place by longnecked celestial giraffe cranes, slow as the Bird of Paradisical Eternity raising the Great World Snake in its beak to the lost up, a scythe also so fantastic in its hinges that it could sweep over the flat plain, adjust itself to cut tablelands, rise a notch in the beyond and extend to horizons to cut mountain ranges entire while still managing in the little forefront blade to cut that bunchgrass into clouds of flying – We talked about this. (Visions of Cody)
If you do a Google search on the term “Woke Princeton,” you’ll find dozens of hits, in both the mainstream and conservative media, laboring to prove that Princeton University is a “woke” place dominated by “The Left.” So powerful is this dominance, it’s alleged, that Princeton’s beleagured conservatives are afraid to speak their minds on campus. The poor dears are obliged to creep their way through campus life, blending in with the ivy, habitually looking over their shoulders, fearful of cancellation or even physical assault, unable to exercise their rights of free speech, or to engage in authentic discussion of the contested issues of the day. Continue reading
Since 2018, I’ve written ten posts here questioning the mainstream narrative on the so-called Parkland shooting–that is, the shooting, by Nikolas Cruz, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018.* The shooting left seventeen dead and seventeen injured. Cruz was arrested on the day of the shooting, charged with the murders, then tried and convicted, and eventually sentenced to life in prison. The shooting gave rise to a widely-publicized student movement in favor of gun control. Continue reading
Before I started working in health care revenue cycle management, I might have doubted my right to contest this bill. But I now know better, and hope to put others in the same position.
This is a bill for a fifteen minute telehealth session with a DO, a Doctor of Osteopathy. It doesn’t count the $30 co-pay I paid, or the payment for the prescription she wrote. And I’m not contesting the fee, contestable as it may be. What I’m contesting is Capital Health’s right to send me a bill at all, given that… Continue reading
Sometimes American foreign policy speaks for itself. From “Blinken to Talk to Saudis about Normalizing Ties with Israel,” The New York Times, June 6:
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Monday that he planned to talk to Saudi leaders and other Gulf state officials this week during a visit to Saudi Arabia about the possibility of the kingdom normalizing ties with Israel. The Biden administration supports such a move, but it should not come at the expense of “progress between Israelis and Palestinians” and a two-state solution, he said.
“The United States has a real national security interest in promoting normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia,” Mr. Blinken said at a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “We believe we can and indeed we must play an integral role in advancing it. Now, we have no illusions that this can be done quickly or easily.”
Policy of Truth 