tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8695598.post4109232752401123701..comments2023-12-17T19:35:07.459-08:00Comments on Bouphonia: The Dim-Witted PublicPhilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15849261651028725772noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8695598.post-30896350046035383622010-03-19T17:50:06.672-07:002010-03-19T17:50:06.672-07:00what deserves extensive consideration in long-essa...<i>what deserves extensive consideration in long-essay form is truncated into a poorly worded comment</i><br /><br />Good thing this isn't true. I don't need you horning in on my racket.Philahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15849261651028725772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8695598.post-64720843222633197362010-03-19T17:30:24.479-07:002010-03-19T17:30:24.479-07:00RMJ,
It seems to me that you're talking main...RMJ, <br /><br />It seems to me that you're talking mainly about a failure of leadership. No argument there. (Though our media make that kind of leadership harder than it used to be, IMO. As does our obsession with identity politics, perhaps. But no doubt the Internets will solve both problems, right?)<br /><br />I agree with everything you're saying, basically. But then, as I've said before...segregation, fewer rights for women and gays, general inattention to environmental issues (though to be fair, some of that had to do with the state of the science at the time). And so on. <br /><br />It's interesting that the forward movement on those issues has been accompanied by the regression you describe. I suppose the general anti-regulatory sentiment could account for some part of it.<br /><br />Which is a pretty depressing thought.<br /><br />Eh, who knows. Maybe someone can do a study to prove that it's all a matter of "licensing." With brain scans and everything!Philahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15849261651028725772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8695598.post-48146984004404855832010-03-19T13:07:14.993-07:002010-03-19T13:07:14.993-07:00Absolutely. Though what's even more striking, ...<i>Absolutely. Though what's even more striking, IMO, is that a proper economics would do the same thing. We can't even afford to follow our popular substitute for morality to its logical conclusions.</i><br /><br />The general philosophical basis for economics as presetned in this country (especially "free-market" economics, but discounting, say, Marxism, which is seldom considered an economic theory on these shores) is utilitarianism. Which as first proposed as a moral (or ethical) philosophy.<br /><br /><i>Language games aside (sort of)...were things really different, once, in the sense that a public morality was also a "proper" one?<br /><br />I'm not asking this rhetorically. Nor even skeptically. I honestly have no idea.</i><br /><br />I know I'm swinging widely here, and what deserves extensive consideration in long-essay form is truncated into a poorly worded comment, but the short answer is: Yes. Of a sort.<br /><br />Michael Moore pointed out (and it's been bugging me since) that there were no large-scale bank disasters between WWII and the '80's, when Reagan deregulated things and the first to disappear were S&L's (remebmer them? I was in Austin, Texas, the epicenter of the debacle. I remember it well.) Essentially, we gave up public duty (regulating banks and S&L's) in favor of private gain. And now we bail out those who are "too big to fail," and treat these occurrences as akin to hurricanes and earthquakes: we prepare for them, we can't prevent them.<br /><br />Except, of course, we can. Depends on the "frame." We tried Japanese soldiers for waterboarding, and declared certain acts "war crimes." Until, of course, a generation later, we conduct them. Then it's "national security." A cynical person might say it's the presence of the "other" that's decisive: when "they" do it, it's evil; when "we" do it, it's good. And there's certainly that strain in American history. But alongside it are the public figures who quietly dispute (and diminish) the impact of an Oliver Wendell Holmes (whose judicial pronouncements tended toward "Three generations of imbeciles are enough!"), people like Benjamin Cardozo and Learned Hand (Holmes was more popular, but as a jurist he's not fit to clean their pen nibs). There were Presidents like FDR and LBJ who saw to it that the "right thing" was done, Supreme Court Justices like Earl Warren, who tried to set right what he did wrong in California to the Japanese Americans there. <br /><br />I don't see those people, now. I see Obama apparently championing new laws to give the POTUS the power to detain whom he pleases, or at least not denying that power that Bush took. I see Fox News discussing how the French apparently love torture, blind to the double irony of their statements. I see better leadership, and ethical and moral leaders in the church and society at large, but not now, where the one undisputed religious leader (Pope Benedict) is caught in the pedophile scandal (and the Archbishop of Ireland speaks more bravely and morally than the Holy Father), and the other religious leaders of the mainline US Christian churches are too small to hear, too tiny to notice. Not their fault, entirely, but: where are the leaders of yesteryear? Now that we need them, where are the public voices that can call "Shame" without dividing us into pure and impure (the public morality your rightly decry), but call us all to change?<br /><br />Where is our Jonah, and our King of Nineveh?Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8695598.post-88428141821443105722010-03-19T11:10:37.335-07:002010-03-19T11:10:37.335-07:00And wouldn't a proper morality not just threat...<i>And wouldn't a proper morality not just threaten "specific political and economic projects, but undermin[e] their philosophical foundations"?</i><br /><br />Absolutely. Though what's even more striking, IMO, is that a proper economics would do the same thing. We can't even afford to follow our popular <i>substitute</i> for morality to its logical conclusions.<br /><br /><i>Which is the problem, isn't it? We've lost any sense of the "other." We've lost any public sense of morality.</i><br /><br />Depends what you mean by "public." I'd say that a lot of what passes for morality is nothing <i>but</i> public...shallow, judgmental, economic, "democratic" in the worst sense, rigidly punitive, merciful only when it's OK with everybody else, and obsessed with transgression (which is where the sense of the "other" still thrives, unfortunately).<br /><br />Language games aside (sort of)...were things really different, once, in the sense that a public morality was also a "proper" one?<br /><br />I'm not asking this rhetorically. Nor even skeptically. I honestly have no idea.Philahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15849261651028725772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8695598.post-8094697794585288112010-03-19T09:08:47.796-07:002010-03-19T09:08:47.796-07:00That said, AGW isn't just threatening specific...<i>That said, AGW isn't just threatening specific political and economic projects, but undermining their philosophical foundations. So it's no wonder that the resistance is incredibly intense. It's likely to get much worse, in my view.</i><br /><br />The problem in a nutshell, of course. Which takes us back to "framing."<br /><br />One might as well say the French are less ethical than we are, <a href="http://rmadisonj.blogspot.com/2010/03/lautre-est-tous-autre-emmanuel-levinas.html" rel="nofollow">because they tolerate torture as a TV show.</a> And where the first irony there is obvious, the second is that the premise of the show is the work of an American scientist.<br /><br />So there is an interesting question as to whether we are even "moral" any more (I take "ethical" as Aristotle originally described it: the pursuit of happiness. That obsession we Americans have down pat.). And wouldn't a proper morality not just threaten "specific political and economic projects, but undermin[e] their philosophical foundations"?<br /><br />Which is the problem, isn't it? We've lost any sense of the "other." We've lost any public sense of morality.<br /><br />Or as good as done, anyway.Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8695598.post-86717227741858209642010-03-18T19:32:35.721-07:002010-03-18T19:32:35.721-07:00It is a problem that is driving me nuts right now,...<i>It is a problem that is driving me nuts right now, and I don't have a solution.</i><br /><br />Me neither, believe it or not.<br /><br />Obviously, it's not really the fact that's at issue, but the legitimacy of the process by which it came to be <i>affirmed</i> as a fact. Which, as you say, is something that scientists sometimes have a hard time remembering.<br /><br />That said, AGW isn't just threatening specific political and economic projects, but undermining their philosophical foundations. So it's no wonder that the resistance is incredibly intense. It's likely to get much worse, in my view.<br /><br />I understand the need for scientists to try to operate apart from these influences and power struggles...but one shouldn't mistake that for "objectivity," IMO.<br /><br />Also, the endless obsession with public opinion is a distraction from the real issues, I think (and a welcome one for denialists). If 95% of the public suddenly accepted the basic facts about AGW, would we then get serious political results?<br /><br />I'd like to think so, but I'm not so sure. Money and power have an awful lot of inertia.Philahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15849261651028725772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8695598.post-11153665499866720712010-03-18T17:58:50.643-07:002010-03-18T17:58:50.643-07:00This is the position that scientists always take: ...This is the position that scientists always take: just the facts, ma'am. As if there were a neutral way to state the facts, which they believe is the way they state the facts. It is a problem that is driving me nuts right now, and I don't have a solution.<br /><br />And Horgan, of all people, should know better.Cheryl Roferhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11082102629165547210noreply@blogger.com