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.