The Los Angeles City Council today is considering a measure to ban the use of wild animals in circuses throughout Los Angeles. Here’s how you can help lend your voice to the measure.
Category: Ethics
The Little Professor on The Shadow Scholar
I vaguely remember the kerfuffle about David Tomar and writing papers for college kids, and not caring very much, though I probably ought. The Little Professor made me chuckle with her review of his book…
Tomar may not be an academic (although he plays one on your computer screen), but his memoir soon runs into exactly the same problem that every academic memoir does: the sad non-resemblance between the author, who spends his days (and nights, and sometimes his poker games) writing, and Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones had, all told, a relatively interesting life, what with the lost ark and Sean Connery for a dad. Academics sit in front of computer screens, read books, go to archives, lecture students, attend meetings, and, when they’re feeling especially adventurous, go to conferences. Much of interest may come out of this life; the life, however, is rarely interesting. Many of us thanked the heavens when the brief vogue for academic memoir went the way of all flesh.
(Via The Little Professor)
Because you should always read anything by Stephen Coll that you can
Here is a terrific piece in the New Yorker on Why Do Americans Believe in Muslim Rage? A great quote:
Some of the protests appear to have been organized by fringe political parties and radical activists; for them, “Death to America” is a mobilizing strategy. The rioting they encourage is about Muslim rage only in a tautological sense: raging Muslims do the burning and looting, but they do not typically attract even a large minority of the local faithful. The faces on American screens are often shock troops, comparable to Europe’s skinheads or anarchists.
Go read.
You ever gone a week without a rationalization? Dan Ariely gets animated.
Good friend at the University of Colorado, Bruce Goldstein sent this animation to me. Cognitive scientist Dan Ariely gives a talk for RSA animation, and result is about 10 interesting minutes on YouTube about why we cheat in little bits.
Pogge on what it was like studying with John Rawls
Nothing about this conversation makes me envy Pogge any less for having the opportunity to work with Rawls.
I love the explanation of the Harvard training and context: talking fast, using dialogue as a competitition to “best” others rather than to share understanding and empower. I have no idea if that’s really the case, but that’s certainly how dialogue in the academy feels to me.
Michael Ignatieff on learning from Rushdie’s Fatwa Years
Unfortunately, the article (found here)is behind a paywall, and I usually only link you to free content, but this bit of writing was so good that I can’t help myself:
So we come out of the Rushdie affair with one thing in common: democratic life together is a hard bargain. Each of us, Muslim believer and secular liberal, wishes the other were different. But we are not, and living together requires us to accept what we cannot change.
Living together should not be in resentful silence, each in our own ghettos. It means shouldering a burden of mutual justification without privilege.
Yes, well. Here we have the multi-cultural problem, don’t we? So a movie crosses a line, and we shouldn’t do that sort of thing, out of respect. But it’s acceptable to stone women and execute rape victims because it’s somebody culture to do so? There’s only so much you can ask one to bend their principles for the sake of harmony, there are two ways on the dialogic street if there is meant to be no privileging of individual positions.
I’m predicting lots more resentful silence.
Help for Ann Romney’s speech writers
It’s hard to tell what actually got said in this bit from the HuffPo, but…Ann Romney’s comments about not feeling wealthy because she has MS rather reinforces the criticisms of clueless wealthy people:
In an interview Monday on Fox News, the wife of the Republican presidential front-runner, Ann Romney, was asked about criticism that her husband can seem out of touch with average Americans. His worth has been estimated as high as $250 million.
Mrs. Romney said her struggle with multiple sclerosis has given her compassion for people who are suffering from multiple sclerosis, cancer or other diseases.
“We can be poor in spirit, and I don’t even consider myself wealthy, which is an interesting thing,” Mrs. Romney said. “It can be here today and gone tomorrow.”
The last bit of that quote makes me think she was saying something that had more to do with health as being realwealth.
But still.
MS is terrible disease, but I’m pretty sure that being a millionaire helps out there. Rather a lot. MS symptom management medications are wildly expensive. And while your husband is zooming around talking about undoing Obamacare, pointing out that you don’t “feel” rich because you have a disease that is much, much more manageable when you have money and insurance than when you don’t does not help your case that you understand what others in America, even others in America who share your suffering with this horrible disease, struggle with.
I don’t feel fat, either, but the BMI says I am. Majorly. Just like she’s pretty well-to-do, and always has been.
So what’s the stronger approach for Romney here, to win more empathy and respect? Here’s one:
Pet Peeve #1,902,003: When people act like you can’t define social justice
It’s a favorite ploy of libertarians, and it annoys the living daylights out of me. Have the guts to argue with reason instead of hand waving, like you have the rigorous high ground because you can define your concepts, while those bed-wetting liberals just deal in fuzzy concepts like social justice.
Bullcrap.
Define “liberty.”
Yeah, I thought so.
Now define “utility.”
Yeah, I thought so, too.
If you can’t live in a world where meanings are contested and pluralistic, I suggest a desert island.
Photographing elderly animals
Beloved Fboo friend Kenneth O’Brien sent this story around, from the New York Times, on Isa Leshko’s photographs of elderly animals. Go see her lovely photographs here. Her artist commentary at the NYT is worth reading.
I regularly adopt older animals from shelters, and it’s always a roller coaster. You love them, then you lose them. But I don’t really fear dying much anymore. I have reached the age where, as Bill Clinton said, you realize that whatever happens to you doesn’t really matter much. Giving a few months of comfort and affection to an old dog or cat is worth a few tears of grief when they leave you for their next adventure.
David Brooks, annoying me (again)
David Brooks annoys the living daylights out of me, and his newest “Let’s All Feel Superior” doesn’t fail. He wants to take us down a peg: you have no idea how you’d act in the face of atrocity, he says. Look at genocides. We’re all capable of evil and inaction in the face of evil.
No kidding. Ya think?
There’s a reason why we don’t buy the Nuremberg defense. We already know that power creates its own rationality, and that we are capable of going along.
But we also know we are capable of standing up and resisting.
The official policy of the Catholic Church was to stay in bed with the Nazis; meanwhile, groups of principled nuns and priests and other Catholics risked their lives to do the right thing.
To equate the pressures faced by the “ordinary German”–e.g., the threat of death to oneself and one’s family—to the consequences of whisteblowing at Penn State, where one might lose one’s job or graduate assistantship for turning in a pedophile *to the police* who would have taken on the physical risks of arresting said pedophile, strikes me as, simply, a ridiculous analogy. They are in no way comparable, given the differences in the personal consequences of whistle blowing. I understand why the graduate student might have been afraid to physically confront Sandusky, but not going to the police?
Perhaps Sandusky is innocent; it’s entirely possible, since I haven’t seen the evidence. Due process, you know. But to try to shame people who are outraged that a group of people valued their football program more than the health and safety of vulnerable young boys? Please.
Social groups need to pass moral judgments; it’s not mere vanity. That’s one of the reasons why we should construct ethics with care. We need to have consternation when immoral acts occur, and we need to be able to picture ourselves doing the right thing if we are ever in a similar position. The fact that some of us don’t do the right thing isn’t the point; the point is that we have free will, and Brooks’ silly contrarian argument reduces moral choice to a function of mob conscience or vanity.