Everyone seems to dislike this new system and it seems silly to pay for something that does not do the job when there is a comment system internal to blogger that is free. Why not just switch?

The answer is that if I switch, I lose every comment in the history of the blog; four years of conversation — gone. I’ve been poking around and there seems to be no way to get the comments out of Haloscan and into Blogger. The blog is not about me, but about setting up interesting questions and letting you folks go at it…and it’s been an absolute joy for all this time. I hate to lose all those conversations. But I also hate wasting money on something that detracts from the blog and I really hate being coerced into it.

So, what would be your suggestion? Switch? Stay? Anyone know of any way to import the Haloscan comments into Blogger?

This is relevant in terms of observing a philosophy class which is a discussion-based endeavor. Philosophy classes are often very sensitive to class make-up and chemistry. Add or subtract one or two people and it completely changes the room and therefore the conversation and thus the class as a whole. Add a strange faculty member who is evaluating the professor they feel an allegiance to and they get odd, often clamming up out of fear that they’ll say something stupid and make the prof look bad.

But trying to become a classroom avatar is a mixed bag. Showing an engaged love of the material will make me seem sympathetic and thus relax the students, but I am clearly a different sort of presence in the conversation and cannot blend in. I speak with a different sense of authority, not only as a professional philosopher, but one with local authority.

So, the question is what do I do? If I do not contribute to the conversation, the artificiality of my strangely silent presence negatively affects the room and harms the measurement. If I do talk, then my contribution changes the system possibly throwing my colleague off a bit, possibly taking the class in a slightly different direction and because many of the students have been in my classes before it now becomes an awkward combination of my colleague’s class and my class, something that clearly skews the observation. Further, by asking questions, I get a better sense of what the students have learned, but at the cost of a sense of my colleague’s classroom style and acumen.

Is it appropriate to become a member of the class in observing a class or should the observer try to maintain distance?

There is a long tradition of trying to figure out the meaning of dreams. The question is whether such an endeavor is itself meaningful.We can think of images and events in the dream as dots and the interpretation we give of them as lines connecting them. The question then seems to have five possible answers:

(1) The dots are random and not intrinsically connected. Dreams are just a by-product of neurological happenings during sleep. The body is fixing and cleaning itself, and when this happens to certain parts of the brain, images pop up. They don’t really mean anything, so trying to connect the dots is an exercise in futility.

(2) The dots are random, but there is value in the creative act of trying to connect them. Dreams don’t have any implicit meaning, but the act of interpretation endows them with meaning. Like reading poetry, where we can understand ourselves better through images, the randomness of dreams allows us a novel standpoint from which to rethink our lives.

(3) The dots are not random, but the lines aren’t terribly interesting. Dreams are the result of neurological processes that are influenced by the brain states immediately before sleep, so all that we get from dreams is a sense of what we were thinking about before bed in a jumbled way. I saw a bit of the West Virginia/UConn game that evening, so of course basketball appears in the dream. So what?

(4) The dots are not random and the lines will give you insight into what your mind was really doing. This is the Freudian take in which the conscious mind is only a small part of psychological activity. Dreams are one place where we can get a sense of all that is happening behind the curtain. Interpretation of dreams is a crucial way to gain insight into our true selves.

(5) The dots are not random and the lines extend beyond yourself. Dreams, on this line, are the conduit connecting your mind with something outside of it, a collective consciousness or an aspect of reality one usually does not have access to. Dreams may be foretelling future events, giving you access to the dead, or other insights beyond reason.

Which seems the most reasonable? Or is there another possibility?

The case in favor of it would be based on what we call an ostensive definition — that is, defining a word X by pointing at clear examples that satisfy the sense of X and saying that “this and everything like it are X.” We can point to the events of 9/11 and the attack in Oklahoma City as clear examples of terrorism and argue that there are important similarities with this example. In the Austin and 9/11 cases, you have individuals who had great antipathy for the policies of the American government and then used airplanes as weapons against notable buildings associated with the government in an attempt to cause death and destruction. Like the Oklahoma City case, it was someone tied to violent radicals on the American right who see themselves as the sole owners of “real America” and who see the democratic process as a threat when it does not give them what they want. We see these people charged by fringe and not so fringe conservative elements who preach hate and violence. Oklahoma City was clearly designed by these folks to send a message to the government by attacking a prominent federal building. This happened in this case as well. On these grounds, there does seem to be a case that this is terrorism in the way these other cases are.

The case against calling it terrorism is in the intent. It seems to be a necessary condition of an act of terrorism to cause terror, fear of a continuing wave of retributive attacks if a policy direction is not changed. the bombing of abortion clinics and the Atlanta Olympic Games by Eric Rudolph, for example, would be clear home-grown terrorism of this sort. The Austin case, however, did not seem to be designed to cause fear of death, but death itself. It seemed to be less associated with a centralized plan to undermine confidence in the government’s ability to keep its citizens safe, than an attempt to murder federal employees because Stack did not like the mission of the agency. This was someone who was clearly connected with the violent rhetoric of the right, but it is not clear that this is part of a coordinated effort to create an atmosphere of fear. One might be able to argue that it was treason, that it was an act of war in a sense, but according to this line, one wouldn’t call it terrorism.

To be honest, I don’t know which is right. What do you think? Was it an act of terrorism?

A quick note to those who didn’t see this item in the bulletin, but I will be appearing at Magooby’s Joke House in Baltimore on Sunday. Show starts at 8 and I’ve got a new set, so would be great to see people there.

This week is the birthday of the Great One, Jackie Gleason, actor, band leader, radio, tv, and movie star, but best known for his role as Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners.

Comedy on television in the early days was dominated by folks like Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar, both of which gave us very heady sketch comedy. In the earliest days of television, the only people who could afford them were professionals, doctors, lawyers, and like, folks with more education than the average person in the 50s and so tv catered towards a particular socio-economic class where radio was a much more populist medium. Once the price started to come down and television became a more standard part of the post-war home across the board, radio stars crossed over and the content of television comedy started to aim at a different audience.

The Honeymooners came from a series of sketches Gleason had done on his variety show, Cavalcade of Stars, which featured singers, the June Taylor dancers, and comedy skits from his regulars which included the magnificent Art Carney (and of course, always opened with Gleason’s tagline “and away we go…”). Gleason based the skits on his life growing up in tenements in Brooklyn. The characters were so real, so human, so flawed, that everyone could identify with their hopes, their failures, their insecurities. It became so popular that it was picked up by CBS as a stand alone show, although the original Alice, Pert Kelton, was not allowed to make the move because CBS would not pick up her contract because she was named in the red scare McCarthyist garbage of the era. And so Audrey Meadows was named for the role.

The Honeymooners stands as a monument to honesty in comedy. Don’t try to be funny, try to be real. The reality is unsettling enough that seeing ourselves in the mirror forces us to laugh. This calls for a clip. And away we go…Happy birthday, Jackie Gleason.

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

The Olympics are perhaps the worst. The announcers are such homers, openly cheering for the Americans and taking nasty cheap shots at competitors from other nations. I hate it. The most indicative moment was from the winter games a decade or so back when American speed skater Dan Jansen who had been featured to death and was expected to win the gold medal, wiped out in a race. The American commentator looking to make excuses (because clearly an American athlete, much less one expected to win gold, certainly would never make a mistake), opened the interview by asking if the ice was slippery tonight. Jansen, looking at her like she was a moron replied, “It’s ice. It’s always slippery.” These people have undermined any enthusiasm I had for watching.

At first, I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. But now I think I get it. My understanding of what it is to be a fan has been shaped by my experiences growing up in Baltimore, a city with a proud sports heritage, but a middle market city whose teams, at best, go through regular rebuilding cycles.

When you are a fan of teams that don’t often win championships, being a fan means having hope in the face of doubt. You know they probably won’t, but what is wonderful are the moments where you can see a glimmer of chance that they might. And when they do…WOW.

But cheering for the US in the Olympics is different. It’s like rooting for the Yankees or Duke. It’s not the thrill of hope and possibility, it’s about entitlement and expectation. If they lose, it wasn’t some heroic effort against the odds that inspires us with their moxy, rather it is a let down, a disappointment. We deserved that gold, it should have been ours. How dare someone else take it. It’s like rooting for corporate lawyers in a product liability case. It just feels wrong.

Libertarianism is a movement spawning from the Enlightenment in which human beings were seen as discrete atomic rational entities. Just as ping pong balls in a box are subject to Newton’s laws that will govern their motion, we are individuals endowed with reason and interests and we use this reason to determine how best to serve our self-interest. In this way, we are well-ordered beings. Our welfare is maximized when our self-interest is best met and being rational, I will always be able to determine for my interests in my context what will best serve my interests. Hence, any interference in my autonomy, any limits placed upon my liberty, will necessarily shut off the best path to my fulfillment, my self-actualization, and therefore should be opposed. as long as contracts are being honored and personal safety is ensured, just leave me alone. I am an atom, let me seek my natural energy state.

Contemporary liberalism, on the other hand, begins by denying this atomistic precondition. It begins by asserting the existence of what Durkheim calls “social facts.”

“Here, then, is a category of facts with very distinctive characteristics: it consists of ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him. These ways of thinking could not be confused with biological phenomena, since they consist of representations and actions; nor with psychological phenomena, which exist only in the individual consciousness and through it.”

These are objectively real things which (1) exist outside of individual consciousnesses, and (2) exert a coercive force on the individuals within the society in which the fact exists.

“If I do not submit to the conventions of society, if in my dress I do not conform to customs observed in my country and in my class, the ridicule I provoke, the social isolation in which I am kept, produce, although in attenuated form, the same effects as punishment in the strict sense of the word.”

There are social facts that are usually not noticed because when we in accord with them, we get left alone or rewards we think we deserve because we exert effort in staying within the socially constructed boundaries. We only feel them when we violate them and the result is either internal (guilt, worry, paranoia) or external (arrest, social shunning, getting turned down for dates).

These social facts are not biological or psychological in that we can resist them (although doing so comes with a cost) and we can shape them by altering aspects of our culture and its institutions. While they do not have deterministic effects on any given person or any given decision, they do have empirically demonstrable statistical effects. It makes it more likely that a person in society X will do X or not do Y. He illustrated this with his work on suicide, clearly a personal decision deeply tied to individual circumstance and choice, but the rates of which predictably increase with certain social factors such as religious mix in an area (the more Protestants in a region, the higher the suicide rate in proportion).

Contemporary liberalism starts from the premise that we do not decide our action from the will of a blank slate endowed with reason, rather we are social beings who are affected in ways we don’t realize by forces that result from the structure of our society. In addition, these forces are not randomly distributed, but weigh the cultural dice in the favor of some and against others. This means that advancement is in part the result of unfair capricious causes tied to our social structure, unfairness that can be dealt with by changing the culture.

Think of the hackneyed cliche “leveling the playing field.” Libertarianism in its focus on atomic individuals argues that the only thing operative is the players. The playing field is irrelevant. Liberals on the other hand, argue that the playing itself is something that needs to be considered because while it does not force players to move in certain directions, the social facts “on the ground” do make certain moves more difficult and therefore both less likely to be tried by those moving in a certain direction and less likely to be successful. If you have two punters who kick equally well and who have been training equally hard, but one gets to kick with the wind while the other kicks against it, the effects will be different and we shouldn’t celebrate the one and condemn the other. Liberals argue that there is a cultural wind. Speed skaters do not start next to one another, but are staggered. Libertarians would argue that one is being given an unfair head start, but in fact because of the social facts governing the lengths of turns on the inside and outside lanes, the seemingly unfair stagger is actually maximally fair.

The difference is a disagreement over the existence and effect of social facts.

I had a similar idea about fifteen years ago when reading an article about people who were having themselves cryogenically frozen when close to death in order to be thawed out when their diseases could be cured. My idea is that they could be cured if they had the money to afford the operation, but since everyone they know would be dead and since they would be considered legally dead and therefore could own no property, they would need a source of ready cash. They would have no cash, but they would have plenty of time before that, so why not use the power of compound interest? I would set up an account such that as soon as they are unfrozen , they would get the cash meaning that they would not only be healthy, but also rich. I would only take a small percentage of the interest as a management fee.

In both cases, neither I nor the post-apocalyptic dog walkers expect to have to pay up. We see it as free money, as taking a rube. But those buying the pet insurance or the post-mortem mutual fund see it as perfectly rational, indeed as desirable. They enter into the contract willingly, thinking it to their advantage.

The ethicist in the article sees this as identical to any sort of insurance arrangement. Those who sell auto insurance expect not to have to pay. That’s how they make money. She sees nothing unusual, and therefore nothing wrong.

But surely this is a flawed analogy. In the case of health or auto insurance, they have actuaries who figure out the risk and adjust the price in their favor. It is an odds game that we play in case we hit the lotto of bad fortune. But this is a case where the insurer thinks there is absolutely no chance, that those who are their customers are just plain missing the boat. They think they are scamming them. Isn’t there a problem there morally? Does the intent to scam mean that this is wrong or is it o.k. if the people you think you are scamming are hip to the scam and still do not think they are being taken? Is there something ethically problematic with this arrangement or is it like a Jewish publisher selling the New Testament, just business?

I reflected on the wonder of seeing Rick Riordan at the DC Book Festival a while back and how youth book culture has gotten to a point where authors are treated like rock stars. But the questions that academics don’t like to ask — yet should ask anyway — is “how do we capitalize on this?” My short person is so smitten that she is studying every book she can find at the library on ancient Greek mythology and classical Greek culture. She’s learning how to transliterate into the Greek alphabet so she can pass notes with her friends. Because of these books, she is asking about The Iliad and The Odyssey. There is legitimate interest here in classical studies, what has long been among the least sexy fields in the academy.

I’m not saying that we’ll see a generation of new classicists come out of this, but surely a new soft spot is being prepared. When CSI hit big, there was a giant leap in courses in chemistry and forensic science. If we play it right, could we eventually see something similar in classics. How do we appeal to these youngsters who are already primed to be interested in the deep questions the Greeks asked? I’ve thought we need a new series like the Hardy Boys, where Aristotle and Eudoxus leave Plato’s Academy and try to solve eternal mysteries. Alright, what would be a good idea?