More on a theme. Worth watching the whole thing. Via Leiter, News Apps.
Oh, and apologies for being down earlier today; technical difficulties.
Category Archives: General discussion
Anything else.
To all the h8trs
Some puzzling words in favor of "traditional" marriage:
It was not for nothing that societies for millenniums recognized marriage for its civilizing properties and stepped in to regulate them secularly. That's because marriage, among other things, seeks to protect the lives and rights of women and children in a historically patriarchal society.
This from the mouth of the Chicago Tribune's get-off-my-lawn conservative guy, Dennis Byrne. This is in an argument against gay marriage–or rather, to use his words, in support of "traditional marriage." Of course, for Byrne, "traditional marriage" is one-man-one-woman leave-it-to-beaver marriage: not the real traditional marriage of the kind where the wife had very much unequal status. That particular argument from tradition would appeal to very few.
Anyway, so Byrne maintains that marriage civilizes. But it civilzes only when it's one-man and a series perhaps of individual women (or vice versa: one woman and a series of individual men). There seems to be no actual evidence for that claim, other than the fact that some form of contractual union has existed for a long time. In the absence of such evidence, one must naturally rely on the slope:
The formulated response to this point is that marriage can continue to go on protecting those lives and rights whether or not gays and lesbians are legally included in the marriage contract.
But that's too simplistic. Cultural institutions like marriage can be fragile structures, bending to the crosswinds of changing public attitudes. Tamper with them too much, and they become diluted and ineffective in their purpose.
I believe people have rights to legally designate in contract law who can visit them in hospitals, who can be named as insurance beneficiaries and the raft of other considerations sought for gay and lesbian couples. Call the arrangement civil unions if you wish.
But that's not the same as defining any union a marriage.
My fear — based on secular, more than religious precepts — is that watering down marriage could eventually rob society of the stabilizing and other beneficial effects of an institution now relentlessly under attack. Perhaps this argument is too ethereal to be grasped or accepted in an age of radical individualism. But it's an argument that is understood by plenty of Americans willing to state it, although it puts them in danger of being painted as haters.
This argument achieves new heights of terribleness. Byrne believes people have contractual rights except when they don't. Marriage, one might recall, as far as the law is concerned is a type of civil contract (that's why Sea Captains can perform marriages). People have a right to this with its responsibilities and benefits or they don't. If they don't, some aspect of contract is closed to them. Why don't they have those rights, according to Byrne? The slippery slope.
Recall that Byrne has already argued that marriage has stabilizing, er civilizing effects. Nowadays, more people want access to those effects (people who would not have accessed it before). So this means, somehow in Byrne's world, that marriage is under attack. And of coruse, the very fact that more people want to realize the benefits of civilization means the very end of civilization. I mean, you can't get a good drink around here anymore.
All a twitter
The weather is too nice around here. So please enjoy the following tweet:
The sweet spot is a mistake that allows the press to prosecute the error without sounding too political.
Sounds right to me. via Atrios.
Marriage is between one man and a series of women
Disgraced former Speaker of the House and current Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich on Gay Marriage:
"I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. I think that's what marriage ought to be and I would like to find ways to defend that view as legitimately and effectively as possible."
Getting hetero-married over and over (Gingrich is on his third wife) is not perhaps one of those ways.
In other news–every read this awesome post by Scott and Rob Talisse at 3 Quarks Daily.
Slip Slidin’ to 20 Billion
Crooks and Liars link to a Senate committee discussion featuring Al Franken, Bernie Sanders, and Rand Paul on funding the Older Americans Act–a program that provides services to the elderly to allow them to remain in their homes and be healthy.
PAUL: I appreciate the great and I think very collegial discussion, and we do have different opinions. Some of us believe more in the ability of government to cure problems and some of us believe more in the ability of private charity to cure these problems. I guess what I still find curious though is that if we are saving money with the two billion dollars we spend, perhaps we should give you 20 billion. Is there a limit? Where would we get to, how much money should we give you to save money? So if we spend federal money to save money where is the limit? I think we could reach a point of absurdity. Thank you.
FRANKEN: I think you just did.
This is probably not a slippery slope argument, though it has some similarities to one. In fact, it's hard to figure out what Paul's point is.
P1) If spending x produces savings, then spending 10x would save 10x as much.
P2) This will reach absurdity.
C) Therefore, we shouldn't spend x.
This is not a good argument, but primarily because premise 1 seems false. Most preventative expenditures are not infinitely scalable (how much preventative maintenance should you do on your car, as Crooks and Liars notes), and so the absurdity never gets generated.
I think, in fact, there is a sort of equivocation at the root of Paul's rhetoric.Rand Paul is obtusely refusing to admit that when you spend money in order to reduce future expenditures that you would otherwise be forced to incur we can consider these "savings." He seems to be relying on a narrow notion that would define savings and spending as contradictory concepts. Thus, spending cannot be savings and vice versa. This latter sense of savings and spending is certainly operative in our language ("How can spending money be saving money?"). But, Franken reasonably expects a bit more sophistication than Rand Paul is able to muster. Rand's problem, I think, is that he needs to deny that those savings will be realized, but is unable to do so, and so falls back and some very silly twaddle.
Meat stoking, plenty of it
I've been thinking of the reverse straw man for a bit now. Following the suggestions of some friends and commenters at the Mid South, one variation of the too charitable straw man we might call the "iron man." This is when someone's weak argument–or some weak arguer–is made stronger by irrelevant and inappropriate charity. Too often this inappropriate charity comes from people who ought to know better. And trolls depend on troll enablers.
The Onion, of all places, seems to get this. Here's their take on Michelle Bachmann:
Michele Bachmann Announces Bid To Be Discussed More Than She Deserves In 2012
That pretty much sums it up. Bachmann makes Bush look like Aristotle. Not iron-manning every incoherent utterance. I heard this yesterday on NPR:
ELLIOTT: I think the reception that Minnesota Congresswoman, Michele Bachmann, got here. She was really the star of the day. The crowd even sort of mobbed the stage when she finished her speech. And she really gave this conservative crowd just what they were looking for: plenty of meat stoking the anti-President Obama fervor that was rumbling through the crowd.
She attacked the president's health care overhaul. She attacked his energy policy, as well as his handling of the economy.
Representative MICHELE BACHMANN (Republican, Minnesota): We know what works. It's cutting spending. It's growing the economy. It's doing what free markets do, and what economic superpowers do. And Mr. President, you're no economic superpower.
I think it's a stretch to call this an "attack" on the President's handling of the economy. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say that she said words which on the most charitble interpretation were probably meant as criticism of Obama on the economy. Anything more would be iron-manning. The sample clip doesn't begin to make sense–it begs the question (it's growing the economy!), ignores basic economics (cutting spending!), and it equivocates on "economic superpower" (in the first it's a property of nations, then it's denied of Barack Obama).
Nature wrecked again
Someone in Florida is arranging a kind of Tea Party summer camp, designed to inculcate such not at all vague and totally consistent core "principles" such as (1) God exists; (2) America is Awesome; and (3) No one (save presumably God and your tithe-requiring church) can make you share.
TAMPA — Here's another option now that the kids are out of school: a weeklong seminar about our nation's founding principles, courtesy of the Tampa 912 Project.
The organization, which falls under the tea party umbrella, hopes to introduce kids ages 8 to 12 to principles that include "America is good," "I believe in God," and "I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable."
Organized by conservative writer Jeff Lukens and staffed by volunteers from the 912 Project, Tampa Liberty School will meet every morning July 11-15 in borrowed space at the Paideia Christian school in Temple Terrace.
"We want to impart to our children what our nation is about, and what they may or may not be told," Lukens said.
He said he was not familiar with public school curriculum, but, "I do know they have a lot of political correctness. We are a faithful people, and when you talk about natural law, you have to talk about God. When you take that out of the discussion, you miss the whole thing."
Pointing and laughing is a reasonable option. But I don't know if it will do much good.
Fallacy Exercise
Alright readers of the NonSequitur, I have an exercise for you. John and I have had a few laughs with the following form of joke: employ a fallacy in giving an argument against using that fallacy. It's funny. Here are a few examples:
Agree that ad baculum arguments are fallacious or I'll punch you in the face!
and
If you don't stop using tu quoque arguments, you'd be such a hypocrite!
and
If we don't stop using slippery slope arguments, we'll become sloppy arguers, and if we become sloppy arguers, we'll become sloppy people. And if we become sloppy people, flies will land on us. And if flies land on our sloppy bodies, they'll lay eggs. And then we'll be sloppy slippery slope arguers covered in maggots… that's what we'll be!
See? Fun! Give it a shot in the comments.
UPDATE: John reminded me that the NS did the exercise back in 2008. Check the entries out here.
New Books in Philosophy
Just a brief announcement that a new podcast platform is up, New Books in Philosophy. Carrie Figdor (U of Iowa) and Robert Talisse (my colleague at Vanderbilt) co-host the podcast, and each episode features an in-depth interview with an author of a newly-published philosophy book. Interviews will be posted on the 1st and 15th of each month.
The inaugural interview, posted today, is with Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside), author of Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press). An interview with Jerry Gaus (Arizona), author of The Order of Public Reason (Cambridge University Press), will be posted on July 1st. Upcoming podcasts include interviews with Robert Pasnau, Sandy Goldberg, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Fabienne Peter, Allen Buchanan, and others. Please click over to the NBiP site, and keep track of what's new.
Make me one with everything
Jokes often work because of some unexpected but intelligible ambiguity in the circumstance or in some utterance. That's how puns work. For example:
Why do farmers give their cows money to eat? Because they want rich milk!
The crucial thing is that the (i) the ambiguity be detectable and (ii) the slippage be understandable. Same goes for amphibolies. For example:
Boy: I broke my arm in six places!
Mom: I told you to stay out of those places!
Hilarious. And, again, notice that in order for the joke to be appropriately posed, the ambiguity must be detectable by the audience and the audience must judge the slippage as understandable (that is, sees how both interpretations are reasonable).
Now check out this joke fail. This reporter tells the joke:
So the Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop, and he says: "Make me one with everything!"
To the Dalai Lama himself. That's totally funny. But the joke bombs. Watch it here.
'Make me one with everything' is amphibolous. On the one hand, it is a directive about pizzas — one with the works, please! On the other hand, it is a directive about mystical vision — enlighten me, please!
The funny thing is that the joke fails on both fronts. First, the joke has to be translated, so it's not going to have the same amphiboly. Moreover, I'm not convinced that the DL really understands what a pizza is with everything. But that's not the biggest failure. Second, the DL, when he hears that he asks to be one with everything, he says, "That's not possible." (At least, that's what I hear). Which makes it even funnier, because it's a presentation of the DL's views that the DL doesn't seem to recognize as his own. Moreover, why would the DL ask someone else to do that for him… isn't he the mystical teacher?
It would be like telling the following joke to Descartes:
So Renee Descartes walks into a bar. He orders a drink, and the bartender asks him if he wants a fancy umbrella in it. Descartes replies, "I think not!" And then he disappears.
Descartes' reply would be something like: I don't get it. I said I know I exist so long as I'm thinking, but my thinking isn't what makes me exist. You're worse than Hobbes. Read Meditation II more carefully, moron.