Friday, December 04, 2009

Eagle!

<a href="http://librarychronicles.blogspot.com/2009_12_01_archive.html#1901682302846581343">Jeffery</a> might not appreciate the Eagle Scout reference, but I thinks it's quite an accomplishment.  Where I grew up, the challenge was to make Eagle Scout before they find out you're gay and boot ya.  Harder than it sounds. 

so it begins

Signs have already begun popping up on St. Charles, letting us know who the old money is voting for.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

heads up

A number of bloggers whom I respect are planning to endorse Stacey Head.  I don't get it.  Her politics are shit.  She's on the wealthy side of a corrupt system, so she can stand as an emblem of reform.  And fighting corruption shouldn't involve supererogatory acts.  It should be a basic standard.  What matters is her disregard for the poor and working people of the city; her interest in the killing the public school system, public housing, public transportation, and public services in general.  She's a politician, her politics are important. 

Saturday, October 03, 2009

dissertating

sucks.

Monday, August 03, 2009

Friday, July 17, 2009

Thursday, July 09, 2009

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Nowhere in Iberville

Reckdahl puts a contradiction before us - and not just two competing opinions, but one opinion and a statement of fact - and cannot manage to draw it out, let alone inquire after it.

On Wednesday morning, before the mayor's speech, HANO's one-woman board, Diane Johnson, announced she had walked the long-neglected complex the previous day and did not like what she found.


Isn't the one-woman board responsible for the long-neglected complex?

Sunday, May 24, 2009

preying on the slovenliness of our representatives

Jindal is, of course, accepting the federal stimulus money, despite all the hoopla about it. But to qualify for the unemployment compensation portion (98 million), the state would need to alter its laws and expend the eligibility requirement for unemployment compensation. Jindal and LA Republicans oppose the move, while many state Dems support it. So state Rep Honey (D Baton Rouge) turns to some 'rookie-doo' and catches the Republican lead house off guard.

Rep Honey slides the amendment into a non-controversial bill, offers the House time (though, little time) to read it, and then non-nonchalantly waves any further discussion of the amendment. Unsuspecting, the house passes the bill unanimously. Caught by their own laziness, they are, of course, raising a stink. This reminds me of that documentary I watched on the texas house, where most reps didn't even bother showing up for votes. They'd just have their friends vote for them.

And I would ask the T-P why a 3 1/2 hour meeting is supposed to be fatiguing?

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

font sizes

This has been an academic year from hell, and I have one party to blame: Microsoft. What did you do to Microsoft Word? Why (Oh, why!) did you shrink the average page size? (1 and 1/4 inches? Why not just 1 inch? What the hell??) But most importantly, why did you change the default font? (Times new roman was simple and easy to read. This Cambria crap is too big, too bubbly, and looks horribly unprofessional. Why not just set the default to a crayon font?)

Microsoft, I hate you more.

Monday, April 27, 2009

The Heideggarian Virus

Or: The only reason you would want an M.B.A., rather than a degree in philosophy. What a great article. Maybe my students will like it.

The Management Myth
Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Diagnosis

Obama recognizes: whether to prosecute is not his decision
But we so fetishize the omnipotence of the President as the central and absolute power that we look to him to make all decisions for us ("will you prosecute, Mr. President?"). We barely recognize any longer that there are other political officials with independent authority and responsibilites.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Friday, April 17, 2009

political sentiments

The significance of Obama's decision to release the torture memos

"Like" and "trust" are sentiments appropriate for one's friends and loved ones, not political leaders.


Probably true.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Math is hard

2 + 2 = 4

Trivia Question: What is the longest path for the theorem 2 + 2 = 4?

Trivia Answer: A longest path back to an axiom from 2 + 2 = 4 is 150 layers deep! By following it you will encounter a broad range of interesting and important set theory results along the way. You can follow them by drilling down this path. Or you can start at the bottom and work your way up, watching mathematics unfold from its axioms.


have fun!

Saturday, March 21, 2009

virginity taken

I was thinking the other day, riding my bike down St. Charles, that I could go through life without getting hit by a car. But I didn't knock on wood.

I was scolding a friend last night, that driving drunk was dangerous to others. He was stubborn, so I took him for a walk and then left him at the bar.

I guess karma caught up with me.

Luckily I'm a ninja; I walked away mostly unscathed.

Or wait, I'm not a ninja.

So I'm just really fucking lucky.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Self Assessments

To predict what will make you happy, ask a stranger rather than guessing yourself

I don't find this surprising. I think Hume is right on this: we gain far more data from experiencing others than we do from experiencing ourselves. We quickly learn from experiencing our own minds, that it moves between tenuous ideas quickly and haphazardly. Our minds also tend to have too much distracting noise. Thus, it is no surprise that others can predict our emotional responses better than we ourselves can. They can more readily observe the phenomenal cues.

Time and again, psychological studies have found that we overestimate how happy we will be after winning a prize, starting a new relationship or taking revenge against those who have wronged us. We also overrate our disappointment at bad test results, disability or failure to progress at work. Try as we might, we consistently fail to forecast our own emotional reactions, and we even fail to accurately remember our past experiences to be used as guides.


On the other hand, I'm curious how the researchers were able to avoid the phenomena of being primed for a particular response. Hearing that a particular response is appropriate to a situation ought to prepare us to experience that situation in that way.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Fired for not shooting!?

NOPD officer fired for cowardice after failing to shoot at gunman

This is the most outrageous thing I've read in a while. What the fuck is wrong with our police state? Officers already have enough pressure to shoot first, ask questions later. Now we're telling them that if they don't, they'll be fired. These brave men and women are put into dangerous situations every day. So when they do fire their weapons, we - for the most part - look away and honor their decisions. But we expect that these are not simple decisions. We expect that officers have the interest of the community in mind. We expect that they too believe that people are innocent until tried before their peers.

Citizens need to take up an investigation of those overzealous officers who are a part of this investigation.

Monday, March 09, 2009

Cultural crash

Saddening, really.
The cultural crash should have been a tip-off to the economic crash to come. Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh, money managers whose alleged $667 million fraud looted the endowments at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, were fond of collecting Steiff stuffed animals, including an $80,000 teddy bear. Sir Robert Allen Stanford — a Texan who purchased that “Sir” by greasing palms in Antigua — poured some of his alleged $8 billion in ill-gotten gains into a castle, complete with moat, man-made cliff and pub. He later demolished it, no doubt out of boredom.


But how do we recognize cultural crashes?

Saturday, March 07, 2009

Profoundly saddened

by Idols, Friends, and Characters.

Which just goes to show that Philosophers don't live the good life, and the base make life good.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

procrastinating

I need a concrete task.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Post-race

I tend to agree that we can become post-racial. But banter about the idea rarely involves a clear set of properties defining the post-racial. What would it look like? How is it supposed to function? How is it different from a racial society? On the last point, one hits squarely the question of whether this supposed phenomena of "colorblindness" is possible or even desirable.

A good place to start would be the empirical aspects of race. The watering-down of great sociological and psychological research during 60s and 70s is what allowed the anti-PC movement to arise. The idea of using respectful titles was separated from the empirical fact that names matter to things that we presumably desire, like self-esteem.

Now, social-psych research has come a long ways since the 60s and 70s. I'm not saying all of those studies would pass the sniff test today. My point is merely that, if we want to talk about race, we need to define the empirical criterion. (Here is a powerful example of what I mean.) Moving to realm of rhetoric is just asking for the talking heads to drive in with their propaganda-tanks and win the battle of ideas.

Further, relying on marketers and advertisers to measure the opinions of the public seems problematic. In the first place, they often rely upon and are vigorous consumers of social scienfic research. Secondly, while gathering self-reported data can be useful, if we really want to understand social phenomena, we need to know more than just the fact of the matter, but causes and therapies. This is something social sciences pursue, which marketers and advertisers tend to avoid.... and insofar as they pursue therapies, the social good is not really their interest.

The article I point to above, for instance, identifies both the phenomena, possible causes, and possible therapies. In fact, one might say that they are unexpected therapies. For instance, it points out that inter-racial association is not necessarily good enough to overcome this "other-race" effect. Training seems important.

So, I guess my point is that a post-racial society means different things to different people. And my worry is that, while it might in fact be true that for each generation, "culture is something to be taken apart and remade in their own image," this isn't necessarily a good thing. There ought to be some sort of guiding principle. And it seems like the guiding principle of the Southpark generation is a perfect revelation of the illness arising when empiricism is co-opted by a rhetoric that can so easily be turned on its head.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Worth keeping an eye on

PolitiFact.com: How is Obama fairing on his campaign promises?

ruthless

Glennzilla strikes again. And helps clarify what was not already unbelievably clear.
To begin with, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not "being tried by the UCMJ." And that's not a ancillary or technical issue. That's the whole point of the military commissions controversy. They could have tried Guantanamo detainees in civilian courts or in standard courts-martial proceedings governed by the UCMJ. Instead, they created an entirely new process of "military commissions" that were explicitly not governed by the rules and safeguards of the UCMJ.

In fact, the Military Commissions Act (.pdf), pursuant to which Guantanamo military commissions are conducted after the Supreme Court's 2006 Hamdan ruling, explicitly states in numerous provisions that various critical safeguards and procedural rights afforded by the UCMJ do not apply to detainees tried at Guantanamo (see e.g., 948b (c) and (d)). The most notable (though far from only) example is that the Military Commissions Act expressly allows the use of evidence obtained through coercion (see 948r), whereas the UCMJ explicitly bars the use of such evidence (830 Art. 30(d)):

No statement obtained from any person in violation of this article, or through the use of coercion, unlawful influence, or unlawful inducement may be received in evidence against him in a trial by court-martial.


In critical respects, the Guantanamo military commissions and proceedings under the UCMJ are opposites. That's the whole point of the controversy and always has been.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

as seen on reddit

Katrina

President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.

President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina. Citing the Bush Administration's "unconscionable ineptitude" in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims. Obama visited thousands of Hurricane survivors in the Houston Convention Center and later took three more trips to the region. He worked with members of the Congressional Black Caucus to introduce legislation to address the immediate income, employment, business, and housing needs of Gulf Coast communities.

President Barack Obama will partner with the people of the Gulf Coast to rebuild now, stronger than ever.


And it's right on the new whitehouse website!

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Kantian twists

What I love about Kant is that he constantly forces us to twist our expectations.

For instance, in the Critique of Judgment, beauty involve a relationship between the feeling of pleasure and a judgment. What direction does that relation flow? Do we have a feeling of pleasure and then judge something to be beautiful? Or, do we judge something to be beautiful and then have a feeling of pleasure?

Our intuition would be that we experience the pleasure of observing a masterful work of art. Then we assert: that work of art is beautiful! But Kant flips this on its head.

He argues that assertions about beauty presuppose a universal voice - we don't mean simple that the work of art is agreeable to my sentiments. We mean that is should be agreeable to yours as well.

"If one calls the object beautiful, one believes oneself to have a universal voice, and lays claim to the consent of everyone, whereas any private sensation would be decisive only for him alone and his satisfaction" (5:126).


Thus, if we buy into Kant's account of beauty, no feeling of pleasure can provide a ground to leap towards a judgment of beauty. In judgments of beauty, then, the relation must flow from the judgment to the feeling of pleasure. What an odd thing to say!

Monday, January 05, 2009

symbolic gestures and moral absolutism

always insightful:
Amazingly, when you consider that this conflict regularly takes the lives of hundreds of people, it was the gesture that counted. It was the fact that one side showed willingness to even budge on matters of principle that prompted the other to do the same. It just goes to show that when people promote their ideas to the rank of beliefs, they risk losing the ability to view those issues rationally.


I don't know if I like the wording of the last point, however. Maybe I'm reading too much into "risk", but it's not necessarily a pitfall of moral reasoning that it resist a utility calculus. In fact, insofar as we admit that these "beliefs" of the moral absolutists are epistemically distinct from the "facts" of the pragmatic non-absolutists, we also imply that there are cognitive reasons to keep them distinct. The gesture, after all, is what makes possible the value of facts; and so, while rationality informs us, by utility calculus, what is useful, moral reasoning and beliefs are the means by which we select the very goal of that utility.

To put it circularly: we shouldn't be surprised that moral absolutists are enraged by tangible bribery, just as we don't expect moralist to fight against materialism. It is a rational domain that is, in some sense, defending itself. Though I think we could also give some sort of materialist, pop-evolutionary account of why moral reasoning is useful for the material survival of a social species.