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
Money Talks
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
All Normal on the American Front
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.”
Boxing Match
Back in the 90s there was a controversy, now happily long settled (and so perhaps unfamiliar to many of my younger readers), about “letterbox” versus “pan-and-scan” video formats. See, most movies by then were widescreen (and this had been so for decades), but television screens were still 4×3, which had been the dominant aspect ratio for theatrical movies when commercial television first became widespread – which meant that movies with a wider aspect ratio (which soon became the majority), when shown on television, either had to leave out whatever was happening at one or both sides if the screen, or else shift back and forth between them (the latter option being the origin of “pan and scan”), even if the original scene had been intended to be static. You can see how this mismatch between theatrical and televisual aspect ratios would ruin, for example, scenes like these three from Lawrence of Arabia, North by Northwest, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, all of which could show one of the main characters in a scene only by completely eliminating another.
Greg Lukianoff on “Cancel Culture”
In a much quoted tweet, Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has defined (“defined”) “cancel culture” as follows:
We define cancel culture as “the measurable uptick, since roughly 2014, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or *would be* — protected by the First Amendment.”
That’s from a tweet posted in 2022, but Lukianoff has repeated that “definition” many times since then. I’ve seen it in FIRE’s Facebook posts as recently as yesterday. Continue reading
John Davenport’s “The Democracy Amendments”
I’m very pleased to announce the publication, about two weeks ago, of PoT blogger John Davenport’s newest book, The Democracy Amendments: Constitutional Reforms to Save the United States (Anthem Press, 2023). I read and commented on the book in manuscript form, and thought it was spot-on. I agreed with virtually every one of John’s diagnoses and reforms; I only wonder how many of them will be taken seriously enough to be put in place, or even to find a place in public discussion. The book’s subtitle may seem hyperbolic, but isn’t: the United States really is a sinking ship, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that reforms like John’s are needed to keep it afloat. We probably need a lot more than that, but John’s reforms would be a good starting point.
“All Aboard!”
I asked a bunch of New Jersey state legislators–Andrew Zwicker, Roy Freiman, and Mitchelle Drulis–where they stood on S.1923, which “[p]rohibits investment of pension and annuity funds by [the] State in companies that boycott Israel or Israeli businesses,” and A.3882, which establishes the State’s official definition of anti-Semitism. I also asked each of them for an explanation of why they hold the view they hold. Never got an answer from any of the three, so I’ve decided to return the favor in the upcoming primary election by voting against them, even if they’re the only choices on the ballot. Hard to vote for people who insist on turning the state legislature into a forum for the defense of an apartheid state, but can’t be bothered to explain what they’re doing or why. Continue reading
WHEN A SOCIETY OUGHT TO BE SOME WAY
What does it mean to say that a certain institutional arrangement P in some society S ought (or is morally required) to be? Maybe that comes to this: S is required to come up with and implement a plan to achieve S. And perhaps that, in turn, comes to something like this: each individual and collective agent in society is required to make reasonable efforts, relative to role or position, to promote S (all of us collectively) coming up with and implementing a plan to achieve P. Different agents in different roles would have different more-specific requirements.
Is this kind of analysis standard? What are the alternatives?
If this analysis, or something very much like it, is right, there would seem to be some important results that I don’t think are always acknowledged in discussions of justice with regard to the basic structure of a society.
The Most Dangerous Game
For a moment the general did not reply; he was smiling his curious red-lipped smile. Then he said slowly, “No. You are wrong, sir. The Cape buffalo is not the most dangerous big game.” He sipped his wine. “Here in my preserve on this island,” he said in the same slow tone, “I hunt more dangerous game.”
–Richard Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game“
Anyone who favors intervention in the war in Ukraine owes it to themselves to read about the emerging consensus on nuclear war over Ukraine. A year ago, anyone who brought the subject up was dismissed as a pacifist, a scare-monger, a defeatist, or a crank. Now, a little over a year later, the idea of nuclear war is being normalized in military circles in both the United States and in Russia. Sober, respectable, mainstream strategists are now beginning to speak and write as though nuclear war was just another one of those things that’s headed our way, and will just take a bit of getting used to. Continue reading
HOW EXTREME UNLIKELIHOOD MIGHT BLOCK REQUIREMENT SPECIFICALLY
Suppose that general normative requirement works like this: if X is generally required to A, this is partially constituted by X’s not-A-ing options in her choice situations starting out with a very high negative valence (that generally swamps any negative valence of the not-A-ing options). Now suppose that, in particular choice situation S, it is super-unlikely that X will pull off A-ing. In such a case, the relevant option is really her attempting to A. But also any attempt to A is almost certain to come to her not-A-ing. It seems plausible, then, that all of X’s options in S have nearly the same magnitude of highly negative valence. So there is not, as there would normally be, some huge “valence gap” between (token) A-ing and (token) not-A-ing. There is no normative “swamping” to leave A-ing as the far-and-away best option. And so, despite being under a general requirement to A, X is not, in S, required to A (realize this token of A-ing).
