AnalPhilosopher

Most of you probably don't know this, and many of you won't care, but we Texans go to the polls a week from tomorrow to vote on a constitutional amendment that defines "marriage" as a relation between one man and one woman. See here for the text of the amendment. I predict that it will pass by a two-to-one ratio. As you may have guessed, opponents are using scare tactics. It's being said, for example, that the amendment would prevent homosexuals from entering into contracts of various sorts. This is clearly not the case, as anyone who can read can see. It's also being said that heterosexual marriage (which would be a retronym if it weren't a pleonasm) is threatened by the amendment, since heterosexual marriage is "identical" to marriage. That one makes me laugh. Finally, it's being said that the amendment is unnecessary, since "marriage" is already defined by statute as a relation between one man and one woman. This ignores the fact that statutes can be struck down as unconstitutional by state judges. A constitutional provision cannot.

Check out this pumpkin horse on Peg Kaplan's blog. While you're there, do a little grazing—I mean browsing.

You maintain (on the computer) an alphabetized list of philosophers, showing their full names, birth dates, and death dates.

Moral terms are inapplicable to animals and infants, just because animals and infants are not language-users and do not entertain arguments or self-consciously make up their minds to act differently; we can train them and we may cause them to act in one way rather than another, but we cannot persuade them.

(Stuart Hampshire, “Freedom of the Will,” The Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 25 [1951]: 161-78, at 165)

Here is John Fund's column about the new media. The blogosphere is coming of age, as much as that troubles the old media.

Here. (Aw, shucks.)

Brian Anderson just informed me that the latest issue of City Journal is posted. See here. The essay by Victor Davis Hanson looks interesting.

Hallow-e'en

[Shortened from All-Hallow-Even: see All-Hallow 4.]

The eve of All Hallows' or All Saints'; the last night of October. Also attrib.

In the Old Celtic calendar the year began on 1st November, so that the last evening of October was ‘old-year's night’, the night of all the witches, which the Church transformed into the Eve of All Saints.

1556–1698 [see All Hallow Eve s.v. All-Hallow 4]. 17.. Young Tamlane in Border Ministr. (1869) 478 This night is Hallowe'en, Janet, The morn is Hallowday. 1773 Fergusson Eclogue 18 Nae langer bygane than sin Halloween. 1785 Burns Halloween ii, To burn their nits, an' pou their stocks, An' haud their Halloween. 1808–18 Jamieson, To haud Halloween, to observe the childish or superstitious rites appropriated to this evening. 1864 Chambers' Bk. Days II. 519/1 The evening of the 31st of October, known as All Hallows' Eve or Halloween. It is the night set apart for a universal walking abroad of spirits. 1883 J. Hawthorne in Harper's Mag. Nov. 930/2 Halloween is the carnival-time of disembodied spirits. 1884 Queen Victoria More Leaves 69 We saw the commencement of the keeping of Halloween. 1795 Statist. Acc. Scotl. XV. 517 Formerly the Hallow Even Fire, a relic of Druidism, was kindled in Buchan.

Nominate, v. To designate for the heaviest political assessment. To put forward a suitable person to incur the mudgobbing and deadcatting of the opposition.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

To the Editor:

Your Oct. 27 news article "Devastating Exodus of Doctors From Africa and Caribbean Is Found" cites statistics about African and Afro-Caribbean doctors leaving to work in rich countries, adding that staff shortages in those countries are part of the problem contributing to that exodus. What it does not mention is an even more powerful motivating factor for the flight of Africa's brains: good remuneration abroad.

At the end of the day, no matter what anyone says, faced with the choice of going to the United States or Britain to work in a well-facilitated environment and to earn in one month what most people at home do not earn in a lifetime, or working in some dilapidated, overcrowded, understaffed, under-equipped institution, not many people will take the latter option.

Now, if only the governments around Africa went easier on gun purchases and used the savings to improve health care . . .

Shyaka Kanuma
Kigali, Rwanda, Oct. 27, 2005

With all that's going on in the world, economic and otherwise, the only thing Paul Krugman* can think to write about is President Bush—and the theme is always the same: how awful he is. See here. Krugman's hatred for the president is palpable. What would you think if, in every blog post, or even just once a day, I wrote about Krugman? Wouldn't you conclude that I'm obsessed with him? Krugman needs therapy. He is a fright.

* "Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults" (Daniel Okrent, "13 Things I Meant to Write About but Never Did," The New York Times, 22 May 2005).

Here.

See here.

President Bush has nominated federal appellate judge Samuel Alito Jr to the Supreme Court. See here. Alito was not on my list of preferred nominees; nor did I predict that he'd be chosen. But I'm pleased with the choice and will support the nomination. To me, the only question is qualification. Both Harriet Miers and Samuel Alito are qualified—by education, temperament, and experience—for the position. Why there is even discussion of anything else, such as the nominee's "positions" on this or that issue, is puzzling. For the last time: We elect presidents, who, constitutionally, stock the federal bench. Presidents are entitled to judges who share their judicial philosophy. (By "judicial philosophy," I don't mean liberal or conservative but how one interprets the Constitution—strictly or not so strictly.) If you don't like President Bush's choices, get someone elected!

Addendum: Ordinarily, I don't turn on the television until late in the evening, if at all. I don't turn on the computer until early afternoon, after I've done my daily reading, walked the girls, run, and showered. But today was special. I fired up the plasma television and turned to the Fox News Channel for news of the nomination. There on the screen was Bob Beckel, foaming at the mouth (literally), railing against Judge Alito. This is what's coming, folks. Leftists will misrepresent Judge Alito's rulings, distort his views and values, question his character, and try to make him out to be a fascist. (That's Brian Leiter's word for anyone to his right, which is everyone.) When the American people compare Judge Alito to what's being said about him, they will conclude that leftists are nuts. It's going to be a great show.

Addendum 2: Many leftists do not believe in the rule of law. They're result-oriented. They think judging is the making of moral judgments in accordance with one's personal values. It's not. A judge is an umpire. Umpires are not supposed to take sides (i.e., they're to be impartial). Nor are they to be concerned with, or even to think about, how the game comes out. Admittedly, some legal rules are vague and must be interpreted. There are also cases in which rules conflict, which requires that some higher-order rule be invoked to resolve the dispute. But none of this implies that the judge's personal values should come into play. Leftists care about results, not process. They believe that law is just politics in disguise. If you read Brian Leiter's blog, you'll see that he doesn't believe in the rule of law. He says that a judge's values inevitably dictate his or her decisions. That's like saying that an umpire who grew up a Red Sox fan couldn't possibly be impartial while umpiring a Red Sox game, and therefore shouldn't even try to be impartial! Don't buy it. Leiter wants judges to legislate leftist values, and he opposes any judge who won't (or is not likely to) do that. President Bush and most conservatives want judges who will enforce the Constitution's values.

Addendum 3: Michelle Malkin is keeping her readers updated. See here.

Addendum 4: Law professor Hugh Hewitt is polling his readers about the nomination of Judge Alito. See here.

Addendum 5: The ironically named People for the American Way is, as expected, on the attack. See here. I laughed when I read that Judge Alito is "out of the mainstream." Only someone who is out of the mainstream could say such a thing, much less believe it.

Addendum 6: Am I wrong to hope for a filibuster by Democrats? I'm confident that if Democrats filibuster, the Gang of 14 (Republicans McCain, Graham, Warner, Snowe, Collins, DeWine, and Chafee; Democrats Lieberman, Byrd, Nelson, Landrieu, Inouye, Pryor, and Salazar) will keep their pledge to invoke cloture—for surely there are no "extraordinary circumstances" in this case. If anyone breaches the agreement, the deal is off and Republicans can change the rules to allow a mere majority to end debate (i.e., exercise the "nuclear option"). Democrats need to be given their comeuppance on the matter of judicial nominations. They need to be soundly and ignominiously defeated.

The blogosphere is humming with rumors about the next Supreme Court nominee. See here. An announcement may come as early as tomorrow. I keep hearing two names: Samuel Alito and Michael Luttig. Of the two, I prefer Luttig, since he's four years younger. But I wouldn't be surprised if President Bush nominates someone else. He loves to feint. I think Laura Bush wants him to nominate a woman, and perhaps he should. There are plenty of qualified female conservatives out there, including Alice Batchelder, Karen Williams, Priscilla Owen, Maura Corrigan (whose husband, Joseph Grano, taught me criminal law at Wayne State University), Janice Rogers Brown, and Edith Clement. It would be a shame for women's representation on the Court to decrease.

Addendum: For the record, my first choice all along has been Michael W. McConnell. I have also said that I'd be delighted with Miguel Estrada, Janice Rogers Brown, or Viet Dinh. If you want my prediction, as of this evening, it's Alice Batchelder of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Lyre, n. An ancient instrument of torture. The word is now used in a figurative sense to denote the poetic faculty, as in the following fiery lines of our great poet, Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

I sit astride Parnassus with my lyre,
And pick with care the disobedient wire.
The stupid shepherd lolling on his crook
With deaf attention scarcely deigns to look.
I bide my time, and it shall come at length,
When, with a Titan's energy and strength,
I'll grab a fistful of the strings, and O,
The world shall suffer when I let them go!
Farquharson Harris.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

[I]t often seems to people who are not religious as if there was no conceivable event or series of events the occurrence of which would be admitted by sophisticated religious people to be a sufficient reason for conceding ‘There wasn’t a God after all’ or ‘God does not really love us then’. Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no obvious sign of concern. Some qualification is made—God’s love is ‘not a merely human love’ or it is ‘an inscrutable love’, perhaps—and we realize that such sufferings are quite compatible with the truth of the assertion that ‘God loves us as a father (but, of course, . . .)’. We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God’s (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say ‘God does not love us’ or even ‘God does not exist’? I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts [R. M. Hare and Basil Mitchell] the simple central questions, ‘What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?’

(Antony Flew, “Theology and Falsification,” chap. 6 in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1955], 96-130, at 98-9 [essay first published in 1950-51])

Political correctness is, unfortunately, alive and well. It was born in and remains nourished by academia, which is ironic, since the mission of an academic is to ascertain the truth, however hurtful it may be. Here is a blog devoted to exposing the idiocies of PC. I will add it forthwith to my blogroll.

Here.

To the Editor:

Even higher taxes? Is that your answer? Aren't we taxed enough? We pay taxes on everything, from our cars to our houses to our food—you name it, we are taxed on it. You need to rethink your idea.

Bill Lunetta
Lake Zurich, Ill., Oct. 24, 2005

Here.

Here is James Traub's review of two books on the war in Iraq.

The Old Ball Coach pulled it off. If you don't know what that means, never mind. If you do, no further explanation or comment is necessary.

Affliction, n. An acclimatizing process preparing the soul for another and bitter world.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

What better way to spend a Saturday morning (there was no bike rally or footrace this week) than reading, outside, under a beautiful blue sky? Having read my Lewis and Clark journals of 200 years ago and my ten pages of John Rawls’s Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2001), I chose a long essay by Samuel Freeman entitled “Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism Is Not a Liberal View” (Philosophy & Public Affairs 30 [spring 2001]: 105-51).

The essay is an extended discussion of three political moralities: classical liberalism, represented by David Hume, Adam Smith, David Gauthier, James Buchanan, and Friedrich Hayek; high liberalism, represented by Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, and perhaps John Locke; and libertarianism, represented by Robert Nozick, Jan Narveson, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, John Hospers, and Eric Mack. Freeman says comparatively little about the differences between classical and high liberalism. His main objective is to distinguish both of them from libertarianism.

What I expected, when I flipped down my sunglasses and began to read, was a careful analysis of differences. What I got, to my great disappointment, was a tendentious argument for liberalism. Actually, “argument” is too strong a word, for Freeman doesn’t argue for liberalism. If anything, he assumes it. His strategy is to point out various respects in which liberalism differs from libertarianism and then to say, in effect, “Isn’t libertarianism awful?” Let me give an example. Near the end of his essay, while discussing conceptions of political power, Freeman writes:

Having no conception of a political society, libertarians have no conception of the common good, those basic interests of each individual that according to liberals are to be maintained for the sake of justice by the impartial exercise of public political power. (page 149; footnote omitted)

He didn’t say it, but he might well have: “Isn’t that awful?” Well, actually, it’s not awful, if you’re a libertarian. It’s a statement of what you believe. Several times, in fact, Freeman quotes Nozick or some other libertarian as embracing an implication that he, Freeman, finds unacceptable. Who cares whether Freeman finds it unacceptable? Nozick doesn’t. Other libertarians don’t. Freeman should have laid out the differences between the political moralities and let his readers decide which one (if any) to endorse. That would have been a fine piece of philosophy, which is first and foremost an exercise in conceptual clarification. Instead, he felt compelled to tell us which political morality he prefers. Unless Freeman cares which political morality I prefer—and I’m sure he doesn’t—why should I care which one he prefers?

Freeman’s mistake, which is distressingly common among philosophers, is thinking that a political morality is either true or false. Political moralities are organizing frameworks. They organize and systematize values. Different people have different values. Therefore, different people are attracted to, and settle on, different political moralities. (Rawls calls these “comprehensive moral or political doctrines.”) Libertarians conceive of liberty differently from liberals, and they assign a different value to the various types of liberty. What more is there to say: that one of them is wrong? Wrong about what? Evaluations are not descriptions. To be a libertarian is to commit oneself to a particular set of values. To be a liberal is to commit oneself to a particular set of values. To be a conservative is to commit oneself to a particular set of values. What I expected Freeman to do in this essay—it’s suggested by his title—is show precisely which values libertarians subscribe to that liberals do not subscribe to, or why libertarians and liberals assign different weights to the same value. Instead of doing this, he took liberalism for granted and implied that, by differing from it, libertarianism is false, inferior, or objectionable.

The only sense I can make of Freeman’s essay—I’m trying to be charitable—is that he is writing for his fellow liberals, i.e., preaching to the choir. He is trying to reinforce their prejudices against libertarianism. He is saying, in effect, “Don’t let libertarians persuade you that they’re liberals. They’re not! They don’t share our values. We must not share the label with them.” Libertarians, to Freeman and his fellow liberals, are nasty people. They don’t give a damn about the disadvantaged. If it were up to them, poor people would starve. What’s funny is that Freeman thinks “liberalism” has a favorable connotation. He says in an early footnote that

My purpose is not to establish “bragging rights” to the honorific term ‘liberal’, but rather to point to a fundamental difference in principles and institutions and to locate the principles that libertarians really endorse that lead to this difference. If anyone wants to continue calling libertarianism a “liberal” conception, this is fine so long as its differences with other liberal views are understood as significant. But to categorize libertarianism as a form of liberalism obscures what is really distinctive about both views. (pages 107-8)

Only in academia would “liberal” be viewed as an honorific. To most ordinary Americans, it signifies unjust redistribution of wealth, paternalism, military weakness, disregard of desert and personal responsibility, hostility to religion, and disrespect for tradition. In other words, Americans understand all too well what liberalism is. They simply don’t like it.

Here.

To the Editor:

Re "Supporters of Miers Wince at How She Was Treated; She Seems to Bear Up Well" (news article, Oct. 28):

You write, "Absent tears or self-pity," Harriet E. Miers "seemed intent on bucking up her allies and bolstering faith in her beleaguered boss."

Would you ever say "absent tears" about a man?

She was absent a lot of things, and the selection of "tears" reveals far more about you than about her.

Jessica Freireich
Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 28, 2005

This morning, as a matter of course, I took Shelbie to the wooded area near our house. (Sophie, who is almost 13 years old, stays home most of the time, a victim of sore joints.) When I got to the creek, I squatted to examine the stones at the bottom of a crevice. I thought I might find an arrowhead or an old coin. Meanwhile, Shelbie ran freely through the weeds, bushes, and trees, searching for rabbits or squirrels. When I rose, Shelbie was nowhere to be seen. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her. Thinking that I had gotten ahead of her, she was running like a bat out of hell for home. I yelled several times at the top of my lungs, hoping to get her attention, but she didn’t hear me. Even though we had completed only half our walk, I headed for home. I knew that she would cross the street on her own, probably without looking, so I hoped for the best.

When I reached the street, still a quarter of a mile from my house, I saw my neighbor Jim approaching in his red truck. He waited for me to come up. Jim had seen Shelbie racing past his house and thought something had happened to me, so he dropped what he was doing and came looking. What a wonderful man! I have always gotten along well with Jim, unlike the neighbor on the other side of me. (See here.) I explained that Shelbie had panicked and run home. This is the second time she’s done this, by the way. She did it when she was a puppy. I was much more concerned then, since I wasn’t sure she knew where she lived. But when I got home, in the dark, there she was, standing by the door. What a stinker!

I grew up watching Lassie. Did you? How many times did Lassie go home to notify Timmy’s parents that something had happened to him? Remember that whimpering noise she made? I’ll have to ask Jim whether he watched Lassie. When he saw Shelbie run past his house on the way home this morning, he may have thought she was coming to get help. Maybe, come to think of it, she was.

This is precious. Brian Leiter, who is morally retarded, calls conservatives "morally reprehensible." Note the use Leiter makes of sycophants such as Cacahead. The more you fawn over Leiter, the more he likes you.

Addendum: I said the other day that Leiter is a sloppy thinker and a reckless writer. See here. His post illustrates this. The word "reprehensible" means "deserving censure or rebuke; blameworthy" (The Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide, 1999). Could something be nonmorally reprehensible? Why didn't he just say that conservatives are reprehensible? (They're not, obviously, but that's another matter.)

10-28-85 The secretarial staff at work leaves a lot to be desired. My motions, briefs, and letters invariably come back with typographical errors, and the secretaries make changes that infuriate me. For instance, when I put a date on something, I put the day first, then the month, and then the year—like this: “28 October 1985.” But the secretaries change it to “October 28, 1985,” as if that’s the correct way and I’m just an ignoramus. There are several issues here. First, is there a “correct” way to write a date? Second, whether the date is “correct,” whose decision is it? Third, to what extent am I bound by either tradition or the style of the office in such matters? I realize that it’s a complicated issue, but what upsets me is the thought that the secretaries change things without even asking me. It’s as if they know more about writing style and punctuation than I do. I’ll probably put up with this state of affairs for a while, but if and when I open up my own law office, things will be different. I intend to set out standards for all office forms and correspondence.

One of my DUI clients, Patricia “Patty” L., pleaded “no contest” this morning, and what a tribulation it was! Patty is about fifty-five years old, short and thin, and extremely emotional. She had a blood-alcohol content of .31% at the time of driving and had almost no chance of prevailing at trial. (The legal maximum is .09%.) To compound the problem, she has a prior DUI and thus stood to receive at least sixty days in jail. I was able to shrink that to fifteen days by shrewd negotiations with the prosecutor, but the thought of spending fifteen days in jail terrified Patty. She called me regularly to see how things were going, and several times cried openly while talking to me. I did my best to calm her down, but wasn’t always able to do so. She placed full trust in me to get her out of her predicament, and so I worked hard on [sic; should be “in”] her behalf. This morning, it came to a head. As we stood in front of Judge [Rita] Jett, Patty sobbed and wiped her eyes with a tissue. The judge was obviously sympathetic. Afterward, I told Patty that in a couple of weeks she’d be released from jail and could get on with her life. She thanked me profusely for representing her so well. Good luck, Patty.

The 2006 Tour de France route has been announced. See here. The Tour organizers snubbed Lance Armstrong, implying that it is better for his absence. Ha! Without Lance, the Tour will suffer. He brought class and dignity to it. But what do the French know about class and dignity? They are cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

Addendum: Americans have won 10 of the past 20 Tours de France. Frenchmen have won zero of the past 20. See here. That pretty much explains the French attitude toward Americans, doesn't it? We saved their asses in World War II. We kick their asses in their bike race.

Addendum 2: Lance Armstrong hosts Saturday Night Live tomorrow night. That old woman he dates (she's 9.5 years his senior) is the musical guest. Come to your senses, Lance! When you're 50.5 years old and in the prime of life, your wife will be a decrepit 60.

Addendum 3: Lance Armstrong isn't taking outgoing Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc's criticism lying down. See here. What is it with Leblanc? Lance Armstrong has never tested positive for any banned substance, yet his accomplishments over a seven-year period are called into question by one suspicious sample from 1999. Does Leblanc have no shame? Does he realize how petty this makes him seem? At the very worst, only the first of Lance's seven Tour victories is called into question. I have an idea. Lance should come out of retirement to do one more Tour de France. He can call it the "Leblanc is an idiot" Tour. Imagine the humiliation he could heap upon Leblanc during a three-week race. Imagine the motivation he would have to win an eighth consecutive Tour.

Fort Hood (near Killeen) is the largest active-duty armored post in the United States. See here and here.

The New York Times has long since ceased to be a disinterested purveyor of truth. It is interested, biased, partisan. Instead of making its words fit the world, as journalism requires, it tries to make the world fit its words. Even its news stories, which are ostensibly objective, are slanted. See here for the latest example.

Genteel, adj. Refined, after the fashion of a gent.

Observe with care, my son, the distinction I reveal:
A gentleman is gentle and a gent genteel.
Heed not the definitions your "unabridged" presents,
For dictionary makers are generally gents.
G.J.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

My elderly neighbor is despicable. I no longer even talk to him. Several years ago, while inspecting the wooden fence between our houses, I noticed that a metal plate with half-inch spikes had been nailed to an opening. It was designed to keep cats from crossing from my yard to his. I was appalled by the cruelty of it. I flattened the spikes with a hammer. Later, the neighbor insisted that I stop putting food and water out for the neighborhood cats. He said it encouraged them to hang around, and that he didn’t like their defecating in the beds of his shrubbery. He even complains about the trees. He told me that the developer chose “dirty” trees. By “dirty” he meant having leaves. Why he rakes leaves puzzles me. Leaves should be left on the grass as mulch.

Yesterday, after I got home from teaching, I stood in the front yard while Sophie did her business. The trash truck was on its way back up the street, having collected the trash from our side. When the truck stopped across from my house, the elderly neighbor (he must be in his mid-80s) berated the driver for leaving his trash container on its side, partly in the street. The driver, a sturdy young man, got out of the cab and approached him. I heard my neighbor shout, “Every goddamn week you do that!” Even if the neighbor had reason to be upset, he had no right to speak to the truck driver in that tone of voice. It was frightening. I thought to myself that if he had been younger, he would have been punched. And then it occurred to me. The neighbor knew this. He knew that no self-respecting young man would punch an old man, even if he deserved it. He is using his feebleness as an excuse to be uncivil. There are women who do the same thing. It’s disgraceful.

Here.

Here is Tom Graffagnino's latest poem.

When teaching the classics of moral philosophy Jack would say: “We are not going to criticize these thinkers, but rather to interpret their positions in ways that make the best sense of them, and to see what we can learn from them.” Jack had no tolerance for readers who suppose that the great thinkers of the past might be saying something completely muddled, or silly, or unintelligible. Instead he would interpret the text in a way that made it speak with a recognizable human voice, saying things at once so credible and so illuminating that we were eager to determine whether we could believe them ourselves. The effect was to make us feel as if the figures we studied had become available for philosophical conversations, as if we could put questions to them and get answers. And we could see how the results of Rawls’s own dialogue with the past, the answers to the questions that he put to Hobbes and Kant and Rousseau and Hegel, were embodied in A Theory of Justice. As a teacher, Jack was utterly without showmanship. He stood quietly at the lectern, he read his lectures, he sometimes read too fast, and he seldom told jokes (though an impish spirit occasionally made an appearance). And yet he could make the great philosophers of the tradition seem almost to materialize in the room.

(Christine M. Korsgaard, “John Rawls,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy 11 [spring 2003]: 4-6, at 4-5)

To the Editor:

The withdrawal of the nomination of Harriet E. Miers to be a Supreme Court justice certainly puts the lie to the Republicans' mantra that all they want is an "up or down vote" on President Bush's nominations. The radical right Republicans never even gave her an opportunity for a hearing, let alone an up-or-down vote.

Let us never again be lulled by the Republican hypocrisy of affording a nominee "an up or down vote."

James D. Colville
Rochester, Minn., Oct. 27, 2005

Here is law professor Hugh Hewitt's New York Times op-ed column about the Miers nomination. Hewitt is exactly right: The Left has learned from the Right—the elitist, inside-the-Beltway Right—how to destroy a nominee in this post-Bork world. In the long run, it will hurt conservatives far more than it will hurt liberals, since liberals have lost the capacity to win presidential elections.

If weather could be packaged and sold, I'd be the richest person in the world. It's clear, dry, and 73.4 degrees in Fort Worth. Please don't think that this is a windfall. We North Texans paid for these wonderful days with oppressive heat and humidity during June, July, August, and September. Those of you who had a mild summer have yet to pay for it.

Here.

10-27-85 Sunday. The [Kansas City] Royals won it! Only four teams in the history of the World Series (including the 1968 [Detroit] Tigers) have come from a three-to-one deficit to win the championship, and now the Royals are the fifth. Not only that, but this was the first season in which the playoffs went to seven games. Kansas City came from a three-to-one deficit to win the playoffs, too (over Toronto [the Blue Jays])! That should tell you how spunky these Royals are. Today’s game was a blowout from the beginning, but that didn’t matter. I enjoy seeing good hitting as well as good pitching. Bret Saberhagen was named the Most Valuable Player of the 1985 World Series. George Brett and Hal McRae, who’ve been through several disappointing experiences, were understandably thrilled. And so now baseball is over for three or four months. I’ll be bored and lethargic until it resumes, in mid-February.

Law professor Orin Kerr makes a case for Michael W. McConnell. See here.

Providential, adj. Unexpectedly and conspicuously beneficial to the person so describing it.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Someone put a sign on one of the campus overpasses: "You are beautiful." It was pointed at the vehicles passing underneath. My first thought was, "How indiscriminate can one be?" Imagine saying to propositions: "You are true." Imagine saying to persons: "You are good" (or, to use thicker ethical terms, "You are courageous," "You are honest," "You are loyal," "You are wise"). Not all propositions are true; some are manifestly false. Not all people are good; some are manifestly bad. Not all people are beautiful; some are manifestly ugly. Is this what postmodernism has wrought—the suspension of judgment? Has the imperative of feeling good about oneself, even if the feeling has no basis, superseded the imperative to get things right, even if hurtful?

Now that Harriet Miers has withdrawn from consideration for the Supreme Court (there is no indication that she was pressured), President Bush should nominate a younger person—someone who will serve on the Court for 30 years or more. I thought Miers was qualified and should have been confirmed. She would not have been my choice, but then, I'm not the president. I supported his choice and will support his next choice. My own choice, for what it's worth, is (and has been) Michael W. McConnell. I've also expressed a preference for Miguel Estrada, Janice Rogers Brown, and Viet Dinh. The latter, admittedly, is a long shot. I would not be surprised if President Bush nominated Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to the Court. It would serve his conservative critics right. Their opposition to Harriet Miers was mean-spirited, unfair, elitist, and, in my judgment, sexist.

To the Editor:

Re "2,000 Dead: As Iraq Tours Stretch On, a Grim Mark" (front page, Oct. 26):

Today, I looked at the faces of those who died in Iraq, 2,000 and counting. I saw young soldiers of 19 to 22 who will never fulfill their lives. I saw older soldiers in their 30's and 40's who left behind children, spouses and families that are broken.

I ask myself why: Why the deaths? I cannot verbalize a reason; they did not die to protect me, my country or my countrymen. They died, it seems, because the current administration lied about weapons of mass destruction. They died, it seems, because President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to attack Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

I'm 54. I remember Vietnam clearly, and my father and his brother served in World War II. I know why my father went to war; I know why his brother was captured and held by the Germans for two years. I understood why we at first went into Vietnam and that we should have left far sooner than we did. But Iraq leaves me without understanding.

I only know that our soldiers, young and old, are dying. For no reason, I would say, but President Bush urges us to stay the course to finish the mission. What mission, what course? There is no mission, just a lie and tremendous costs.

We need to pull our soldiers out now, not next year, not in six months, now. Yesterday would not have been too soon.

Frank Shaughnessy
Palm Bay, Fla., Oct. 26, 2005

Congratulations to the Chicago White Sox and their fans. The team played magnificently when it mattered most. In a way, I'm sorry that the World Series ended in four games; but I'm also glad, since it will free up time for other things. Some will say that this series proves that good pitching beats good hitting. It doesn't prove that. Houston hasn't had good hitting all year. It has mediocre hitting. Good pitching will always beat mediocre hitting. It will only sometimes beat good hitting. If I were a fan of the Astros, I would be frustrated. Time after time, Houston's players failed to deliver the big hit. As for my predictions, I got everything right except Chicago. I thought Boston would beat Chicago and win it all. Instead, the team that beat Boston won it all. There have now been six different World Series winners in six years: the New York Yankees in 2000, the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001, the Anaheim Angels in 2002, the Florida Marlins in 2003, the Boston Red Sox in 2004, and the Chicago White Sox in 2005. My Detroit Tigers will make it seven in a row in 2006. You heard it here first.

Here.

Here is Peggy Noonan's latest column. It rambles, and I'm not sure what her thesis is (if indeed there's a thesis), but there were interesting parts.

Here is an insightful column by Shelby Steele, author of the forthcoming White Guilt.

Here.

Vegetarianism is, for me, a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Whether we ought to be vegetarians depends on a lot of facts about the situation in which we find ourselves.

Some writers find this strange. They think of vegetarians as moral absolutists, who will stick to their belief in the immorality of eating meat no matter what. Thus Cora Diamond writes: “. . . one curious feature of the Peter Singer sort of argument . . . is that your Peter Singer vegetarian should be perfectly happy to eat the unfortunate lamb that has just been hit by a car.” Why is this curious? It is only curious on the assumption that vegetarians must think it always wrong to eat meat. No doubt some vegetarians are moral absolutists, just as there are absolute pacifists, absolute antiabortionists and absolutist truth-tellers who would never tell a lie. I reject all these forms of moral absolutism.

(Peter Singer, “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 9 [summer 1980]: 325-37, at 327-8 [italics and ellipses in original; footnote omitted])

Clear, cool mornings and warm afternoons. See here.

Roundhead, n. A member of the Parliamentary party in the English civil war—so called from his habit of wearing his hair short, whereas his enemy, the Cavalier, wore his long. There were other points of difference between them, but the fashion in hair was the fundamental cause of quarrel. The Cavaliers were royalists because the king, an indolent fellow, found it more convenient to let his hair grow than to wash his neck. This the Roundheads, who were mostly barbers and soap-boilers, deemed an injury to trade, and the royal neck was therefore the object of their particular indignation. Descendants of the belligerents now wear their hair all alike, but the fires of animosity enkindled in that ancient strife smoulder to this day beneath the snows of British civility.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

To the Editor:

Re "Tuition Rise Tops Inflation, but Rate Slows, Report Says" (news article, Oct. 19):

The reference by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to higher education as a product, while unfortunate in some respects, might have revealed the real problem. As contemporary demands have outstripped our centuries-old ways, perhaps we lack viable business models.

Are we now like the airlines—unable to make ends meet without mergers, bankruptcy and cuts in service?

We insist on academic excellence and can't forgo costly athletics and student life amenities. We are saddled with spiraling health care costs and legal fees, expensive technology and equipment, and incalculable energy costs. Around the world, the situation is equally troubling.

I suggest that we stop the rhetoric and ideological blame throwing. Higher education needs business models that work. Governments and the private and public sectors must now accept a shared responsibility to develop models that foster creative collaboration, not divisive competition; make higher education affordable; balance excellence with access; advance superb teaching; create new knowledge; and prepare citizens for an enlightened democracy.

William G. Durden
President, Dickinson College
Carlisle, Pa., Oct. 20, 2005

Boxing, n. 1. The practice of fighting with the fists as a sport, esp. with padded gloves. 2. The mechanism by which malfunctioning brains reproduce.

Here.

A Jesuit magazine, La Civilta Cattolica, has called for the prohibition of boxing. See here. I haven't read the essay, which I believe is published in Italian. If you find it in English translation (the translated title is "The Immorality of Professional Boxing"), please bring it to my attention. According to The Dallas Morning News, the magazine called boxing a "legalized form of attempted murder." What do you think? So far as I know, nobody is made to box. Aren't people entitled to risk their lives? What's the difference between allowing people to box and allowing people to climb Mount Everest, jump out of airplanes, or race automobiles? Is this mere squeamishness on the part of the Jesuits?

Addendum: Please don't compare boxing to either hunting or slavery. Boxing is voluntary on the part of both participants.

Addendum 2: The title of the essay contains the word "professional." That's odd. Is amateur boxing any less dangerous than professional boxing? I would dearly love to read the essay.

Acknowledge, v.t. To confess. Acknowledgment of one another's faults is the highest duty imposed by our love of truth.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

To the Editor:

"When Even Health Insurance Is No Safeguard" ("Being a Patient" series, front page, Oct. 23) illustrates the sad reality of the American health care system and its high cost, financially and emotionally, to consumers.

Impoverishing working middle-class Americans with the rising cost of health insurance premiums, diminished services and higher co-pays places our nation in a state of crisis.

The needs of the insurance companies should not negate the pain and the traumas of our vulnerable citizens.

Healthy people do not realize how the health care industry has shortchanged our needs. Unfortunately, they can understand the magnitude of this problem only when confronted with a serious medical issue.

It's a disgrace that a country with our resources continues to deprive people of adequate health care and in some cases force bankruptcy on those who thought they paid for adequate coverage.

Teri Koff
New York, Oct. 23, 2005
The writer, a social worker, is an elder-care specialist.

Should price gouging during natural catastrophes be punished? See here for Richard Posner's answer.

Here is Peter Singer's latest book.

Pete du Pont thinks we should amend the United States Constitution to limit governmental spending. See here. This reminds me of a situation that arose in 1995, when eight friends and I did a weeklong bike tour of Colorado. (We called it the Bike Binge.) The nine of us were very competitive. Nobody wanted to appear to the others to be unable or unwilling to ride each day, even though the distances were staggering. It seemed to me that all of us would benefit from taking a day off in a beautiful mountain town such as Ouray, but unless the ride organizer, Mike, mandated it, someone would ride, and if anyone rode, everyone would ride in order to save face. (Alas, Mike didn't mandate it, and no other Hobbesian sovereign emerged to lay down the law.) Republicans and Democrats are in the same situation we were. Each party must promise people the moon in order to get elected. No party dares to say no to the people, for it will mean electoral defeat. A constitutional amendment would allow them to stop promising the moon without being put to an electoral disadvantage.

Here.

Here is George F. Will's latest diatribe, er, column about the Miers nomination. I don't recall Will being so testy. Do you? He seems discombobulated by this nomination. Perhaps, in spite of his denials, he's an elitist. He's a Princeton graduate, after all. His father was a professor. He's been living inside the Beltway all of his adult life, hobnobbing with intellectuals. Could it be that he has scorn for ordinary people, including ordinary lawyers?

Addendum: There isn't much argumentation in Will's column, but there is this passage that might serve as a major premise:

Thoughtful conservatives' highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution's meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result.

If Will has evidence that Miers dissents from any of this, or that she is disposed to engage in result-oriented reasoning, he should disclose it. I have President Bush's assurance that Miers will not legislate from the bench, and I trust President Bush.

Every week, like clockwork, you put up a post entitled "You Know You're Anal Retentive When . . ."

Reason, n. Propensitate of prejudice.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here is a gallery of philosophical images.

Is it ever appropriate to praise those who do their duty? Imagine praising someone for keeping a promise, repaying a debt, not cheating, telling the truth, not stealing, or, god forbid, not murdering. “Did you murder anyone today? No? Good for you! Keep it up!” I used to think one should never be praised for doing one’s duty, but now I wonder. I can think of two situations in which praise is appropriate.

The first is where the duty is onerous. Suppose I have made an extravagant promise, one that is costly for me to keep. Praising me for keeping the promise seems appropriate, since it would have been easy for me to fail. The praise reflects the degree of difficulty of doing my duty. Other things being equal, the harder it is to do one’s duty, the more praiseworthy it is.

The second situation is where the duty in question is commonly shirked. When I’m out running, for example, I go through intersections in which vehicles coming at me from the side are required to stop. But not all of them do. Many of them pull out in front of me without waiting for me to pass. Sometimes I have to stop or veer to avoid a collision. When someone waits for me, I feel grateful and give a wave of thanks. Yes, the person in question is required by law to stop; but the law is routinely flouted. I like to think that by praising those who do their duty, I encourage them to do their duty in other cases where they might be tempted to shirk it. Note that this case differs from the first case, since there’s nothing onerous about waiting a couple of seconds for a runner to pass through an intersection.

Do you agree with me that praise is appropriate in these two types of case? Can you think of other types?

Anyone writing on the topic of the treatment of animals must acknowledge an enormous debt to [Peter] Singer. Because of his work, as well as the pioneering work of Ruth Harrison, the gruesome details of factory farming are finding a place within the public consciousness. All of us by now know, or at least have had the opportunity to find out, that chickens are raised in incredibly crowded, unnatural environments; that veal calves are intentionally raised on an anemic diet, are unable to move enough even to clean themselves, are kept in the dark most of their lives; that other animals, including pigs and cattle, are being raised intensively in increasing numbers. Personally, I do not know how anyone pretending to the slightest sensitivity or powers of empathy can look on these practices with benign indifference or approval.

(Tom Regan, “Utilitarianism, Vegetarianism, and Animal Rights,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 9 [summer 1980]: 305-24, at 308-9 [footnote omitted])

To the Editor:

Re "Back on the Road" (editorial, Oct. 19):

You are correct to hope that "rank-and-file union members" will accept a rollback in their health care benefits now in the hope of protecting their jobs and the health of General Motors.

The workers who have been asked to approve this deal are generally middle-class working Democrats. Perhaps we might also hope that wealthier Republicans might accept a rollback in their abundant tax cuts in the hope of protecting the health of the country.

Lonnie B. Hanauer, M.D.
West Orange, N.J., Oct. 19, 2005

Note from AnalPhilosopher: What does this writer's status as a medical doctor have to do with this letter? The letter makes an evaluative claim, not a factual claim about which a medical doctor might have some expertise.

Here.

An interpretation of the civil rights act of 1964 came out the next year which first began affirmative action, and which I do think is a perversion of liberalism. It transforms our politics from a constitutional politics to a result-oriented politics. It makes a very big difference how minorities or less-advantaged groups get their rights. That they get them by their own efforts and through means which provide equality under the law. Simply to give them an equal result denies their pride, gives them no sense of achievement, and builds too much government.

(Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., “Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.: The Question of Conservatism,” interview by Josh Harlan and Christopher Kagay, The Harvard Review of Philosophy 3 [spring 1993]: 30-47, at 33)

My friend Alan Soble, who teaches philosophy at The University of New Orleans, fled New Orleans to escape Hurricane Katrina. He's now in Buffalo, New York (where he went to graduate school). Alan sent this before-and-after image of his study (click to enlarge):

I asked for permission to post the image. Here is Alan's reply:

it's a corner of my home, the "desk" corner. there are other photos of katrina's damage that are much more dramatic. a friend went there for me (I'm in buffalo), took the photos (for me, and for fema, later), and retrieved a few important items. it'll be bulldozed October 25.

what the photo doesn't show is the odor, the stink. my friend was always on the verge of puking while she walked (rubber boots, long cleaning gloves, mask on face) through the place.

sure, post it. my name makes no difference either way.

alan

Sad.

Addendum: I sent a link to this post to Alan. He replied:

maybe add a note to the effect that without my fema money, gathered from taxes, i'd be up a shithole right now, and that without the american red cross, i wouldn't be in a motel room right now, but on the street, and without the salvation army i wouldn't have a dozen cans of beef stew on the table, with a can opener to boot. the room, no dump, has a microwave and a coffee-maker.

I'm sorry you had to go through this, Alan.

Addendum 2: Alan wrote again:

and this, too, can be added (from my friend). see, i'm a lucky one.

"On the way to your apartment, I saw houses that had numbers on them written in the spaces of an X. The bottom of the X—that number was the number of dead bodies found in the house. Top of X—date they were found. I saw lots of numbers in bottom of X. Pictures can't relate the total devastation, worse than a ghost town, worse than third-world pictures."

Yikes!

10-23-85 . . . While walking to my car from my logic course this morning, I saw a familiar face. It was that of James V., one of my clients. “Jim!” I said. “Are you a student here?” For a moment he looked surprised; but then he smiled and said “yes.” I told him that I teach logic in the Philosophy Department, and that I’m still a student myself. At that he got a puzzled look on his face. “You mean you’re still studying to be a lawyer?” he asked. “No,” I assured him. “I’m already a lawyer, but now I’m working on a Ph.D. degree in philosophy.” That seemed to reassure him that I was competent to handle his D.U.I. case. We chatted for a couple of minutes and parted. Hmm. Wouldn’t you be surprised to find your lawyer at school, teaching something as bizarre as logic? Jim certainly did. As I said before, I move back and forth between two very different worlds.

This afternoon, just before five o’clock, I was in Judge [Clifford] Hofmann’s courtroom with a client. We were about to finish up the matter at hand when Judge Hofmann said “There; now you can go home and watch the ballgame.” What a surprise! I had no idea that Judge Hofmann was a baseball fan, but apparently he is. I told him that that was exactly my plan: to go home and watch the ballgame. We chatted about the teams for a minute or so, and then I left for the office. I’ve always liked Judge Hofmann, mainly because he calls me “Keith” instead of “Mr. Burgess-Jackson” or “counsel,” but now I’ve got even more reason to like him. He’s a baseball fan.

The [St Louis] Cardinals won again. They lead the [Kansas City] Royals in games, 3-1, and can wrap up the World Series tomorrow night in their home ballpark. I watched almost all of the game.

Here.

Delusion, n. The father of a most respectable family, comprising Enthusiasm, Affection, Self-denial, Faith, Hope, Charity and many other goodly sons and daughters.

All hail, Delusion! Were it not for thee
The world turned topsy-turvy we should see;
For Vice, respectable with cleanly fancies,
Would fly abandoned Virtue's gross advances.
Mumfrey Mappel.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

To the Editor:

Re "Lecture Plan for Dalai Lama Has Some Scientists Bridling" (news article, Oct. 19): As a neuroscience nurse caring for brain-injured people, I welcome any spiritual insights the Dalai Lama has for helping me understand and care for my patients.

Some neuroscientists are worried about losing credibility if they venture too far into spiritual matters. But if the brain is "still as dark as deepest space," shouldn't we consider sources of illumination from nonscientific sources?

Certainly, scientists need to approach research with caution. But we need to balance this with a willingness to venture into new ways of knowing that might benefit patients. Can we at least listen to what the Dalai Lama has to say?

Janet Thorson-Mador
Seattle, Oct. 19, 2005

Here.

1. I love the cool weather we’ve been having. It makes running almost pleasant. The word “almost” is important here, because running, for me, is never pleasant. From the moment I start to the moment I stop, it’s unpleasant. Distressing. Painful. If someone made me run, I would complain of being enslaved. But I happily inflict it on myself.

2. I’ve run 11 marathons. A year ago, I had to forgo marathon training because of back pain. My back has felt much better this year, so I thought I would go back to marathoning. Alas, it’s not to be. Thirteen days ago, I ran 13.2 miles at an easy (eight-minute) pace. I didn’t know until I finished that I was hurting my back. For some reason I can run 6.6 miles with no pain, but 13.2 miles hurts my back. I’ve been to the hospital twice for back pain, so I’m not going to risk a recurrence. I’ve abandoned marathon training. But I’ll keep running. In fact, I’m going to devote myself to the 10K (6.2-mile) distance. My 6.6-mile loop, with its three hills, is perfect training for 10K races. I’m lucky to live in an area where I can do a 10K race almost every weekend during the fall, winter, and spring.

3. I felt strong today, largely because of the 55° weather. I went out easy, but gradually picked up the pace. By the finish, I was sprinting. My mile pace for the 6.6 miles was 7:32.30. I should be able to get that under seven minutes in a month or so. It’s been hot and humid until recently. I did a 7:25 pace a few days ago, but today it’s much windier. You can never make up with a tailwind what you lose with a headwind, which is to say that you run fastest with no wind at all. My personal record (PR) on this course is 6:39.85, set on 14 February 1997. I’m 48.5 years old now, but I think I can do this course at 6:50; and if I can do this course at 6:50, I can do a 10K race at 6:40. (My PR for a 10K race is 6:32.10.) Stay tuned.

4. One thing I love about running is that it involves a clear separation of mind and body. I experience my body as a separate entity when I run. It must be listened to, obviously, but it can be driven. Sometimes, however, it wants to go, the way a horse wants to run. When this occurs, I ease up on the reins and let it go. It feels as though I’m being taken for a ride.

5. Running is far more difficult than bicycling, as I think anyone who has done both will attest. I enjoy riding. I hate running. Every second of it. But god, I love having run. There is no better feeling in the world.

Hibernate, v.i. To pass the winter season in domestic seclusion. There have been many singular popular notions about the hibernation of various animals. Many believe that the bear hibernates during the whole winter and subsists by mechanically sucking its paws. It is admitted that it comes out of its retirement in the spring so lean that it has to try twice before it can cast a shadow. Three or four centuries ago, in England, no fact was better attested than that swallows passed the winter months in the mud at the bottoms of the brooks, clinging together in globular masses. They have apparently been compelled to give up the custom on account of the foulness of the brooks. Sotus Escobius discovered in Central Asia a whole nation of people who hibernate. By some investigators, the fasting of Lent is supposed to have been originally a modified form of hibernation, to which the Church gave a religious significance; but this view was strenuously opposed by that eminent authority, Bishop Kip, who did not wish any honours denied to the memory of the Founder of his family.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

To the Editor:

Re "Breaking the Ice Up North," by Scott Borgerson (Op-Ed, Oct. 19):

Since the Arctic is becoming vulnerable to exploitation because of our burning of fossil fuels, it would be appropriate if we restrained our lust to take advantage of the disappearing ice around the North Pole.

Human beings, who have already transformed much of the planet's surface, are now on the verge of plunging into the few areas that remain pristine: the deep sea, the surviving rain forest, the Arctic.

As governments and energy companies froth at the mouth contemplating the potential wealth of these regions, it would be wise to consider what would be lost forever by the plunder of these spectacular and fragile regions.

We have reached the point where we must learn to check our appetite for unsustainable resources or have it checked for us in potentially apocalyptic ways.

David Hayden
Wilton, Conn., Oct. 19, 2005

Here is Charles Krauthammer's column about Harriet Miers. I think highly of Krauthammer, but his claim that Miers is unqualified to serve as a Supreme Court justice puzzles me. She's eminently qualified. But then, what would Krauthammer know about judging? He's a medical doctor. By the way, if conservatives sabotage the Miers nomination, President Bush will punish them by nominating Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. President Bush is a proud and stubborn man. He will not take kindly to being thwarted by people who are ostensibly on his side. Nor should he.

Here is an updated bibliography of R. M. Hare (1919-2002). I now have Adobe Acrobat, which allows me to turn Microsoft Word documents into PDF files. The latter are much easier to upload than the former, and, for what it's worth, they look nicer.

Addendum: Here is Balliol College's webpage for Hare.

Here.

Here.

Zoölogy, n. The science and history of the animal kingdom, including its king, the House Fly (Musca maledicta). The father of Zoölogy was Aristotle, as is universally conceded, but the name of its mother has not come down to us. Two of the science's most illustrious expounders were Buffon and Oliver Goldsmith, from both of whom we learn (L'Histoire générale des animaux and A History of Animated Nature) that the domestic cow sheds its horns every two years.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here is an interview with Harvard professor (of government) Michael Sandel.

Addendum: Did you notice that Sandel used the expression "it seems to me" 19 times in one short interview? The man lacks conviction! Imagine subjectivizing every statement: "It seems to me that it's almost seven o'clock. It seems to me that that's the time the World Series game begins. It seems to me that I'm hungry. It seems to me that there are potato chips in the kitchen. It seems to me that it's getting dark outside."

To the Editor:

The nomination of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court becomes more troubling with each passing day.

The most recent revelation—that she once supported not only the idea of a Texas state ban on abortion but also a federal constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion (except to protect the life of the mother)—speaks of a willingness to upset the political equilibrium of our democracy completely.

Whether she expressed such a view because she sincerely meant it or because she found it politically expedient is irrelevant. This kind of character and this kind of thinking have no place on the court, which must carefully weigh those issues affecting the whole of our society.

I am doubly saddened by this nomination because I strongly believe that the court needs another female voice, but it is neither wise nor clever that the voice belong to Ms. Miers.

Gary Giardina
New York, Oct. 19, 2005

His opposition to capitalism was strictly of the romantic kind and his final political thinking lacks a credible vision of social change and cultural transformation. In several key respects Nietzsche remained an idealist and a moralist. As a result his thinking can instruct us only so far.

(Keith Ansell Pearson, How to Read Nietzsche [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005], 116)

Harmonists, n. A sect of Protestants, now extinct, who came from Europe in the beginning of the last century and were distinguished for the bitterness of their internal controversies and dissensions.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

Here is Peggy Noonan's latest column.

To the Editor:

Re "As Young Adults Drink to Win, Marketers Join In" (front page, Oct. 16):

While the beer industry works to regain market share by promoting beer games, college students pay the stiffest price of all: their health.

Binge drinking on college campuses is no game. A government study this year found that more than two of every five college students is a binge drinker.

Each year, drinking by college students, ages 18 to 24, contributes to an estimated 1,700 student deaths, 600,000 injuries, 700,000 assaults and more than 90,000 sexual assaults.

In 2001, 2.8 million college students drove a car while under the influence of alcohol.

It is ludicrous to think that drinking games encourage responsible drinking.

We propose a new game for college students, "MADDly in love with my life," in which college students engage in fun, safe and healthy activities that lead to successful futures.

Glynn R. Birch
National President
Mothers Against Drunk Driving
Irving, Tex., Oct. 18, 2005

Did you vote this past November? You shouldn't have. See here.

Here.

Here.

Joel Feinberg was born on this date in 1926. He would have been 79 years old today. I've compiled a bibliography of Joel's publications, which I assume will be of use to scholars. See here. I hope one day to write a book about Joel's philosophical work. He was one of the most original and productive moral philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. (I use "moral philosophers" broadly, to include legal, social, moral, and political philosophy.) What's amazing is that Joel didn't begin publishing until 1960, when he was 33 years old.

Arrayed, pp. Drawn up and given an orderly disposition, as a rioter hanged to a lamp-post.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

Here is a New York Times story about Intelligent Design. Let me take this opportunity to criticize the name. The adjective "intelligent" conveys information only if there could be such a thing as unintelligent design. But that's incoherent. Design is necessarily intelligent; it is the work of an intelligent being. The teleological argument for the existence of God moves from (1) the universe appears to be designed to (2) the universe was designed. (The premise is said to make the conclusion probable.) This is why it's misleading to call it the argument from design. That begs the question. It's the argument to design. Intelligent Design should have been called The Design Theory. There. I got that off my chest.

To the Editor:

A historic controversy has been reawakened by President Bush's proposal to turn disaster relief over to the military. Robert D. Kaplan confuses this important issue further by stating that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, prohibiting the standing army from enforcing the laws of the United States, "was enacted in a rural America when natural disasters took a relatively small human toll, and such calamities were viewed more fatalistically."

This observation is totally irrelevant to the Posse Comitatus Act, which was a statutory recognition of an implicit constitutional prohibition. Our founders were republicans and believed the use of standing military forces in domestic affairs to be a threat to republican liberties. They thus explicitly recognized the role of citizen-soldiers in the form of the militia (today's National Guard) for this mission. They were right then, and they are still right today.

Gary Hart
Kittredge, Colo., Oct. 12, 2005

Read this post from Brian Leiter’s blog. See the part where he disparages Rowman & Littlefield, calling it a “5th-rate press”? You can see what he’s implying: that Francis Beckwith, whom he doesn’t like and is trying to humiliate, is a 5th-rate philosopher. Presumably only 5th-rate philosophers publish with 5th-rate presses. Note that it’s not a second-rate press, or even a third-rate press, or even a fourth-rate press. It’s a “5th-rate press.”

All of the following philosophers have published at least one book with Rowman & Littlefield (see here):

Allen Buchanan
Tom Rockmore
Robert K. Shope
Laurence BonJour
T. K. Seung
Richard Fumerton
John L. Pollock
Gregory E. Pence
Albert R. Jonsen
James Lindemann Nelson
William A. Niskanen
K. S. Shrader-Frechette
Drucilla Cornell
Nick Fotion
Susan E. Babbitt
Douglas Walton
Margaret Gilbert
Brad Hooker
Peter A. French
William A. Edmundson
James Rachels
Michael J. Zimmerman
Joram Graf Haber
Paul Guyer
Jan Narveson
David A. Hoekema
Robert K. Fullinwider
Tom Regan
Margaret Urban Walker
Mark Timmons
Tara Smith
Stephen Nathanson
Robert Audi
Nicholas Wolterstorff
John Kleinig
David Lyons
David Copp
David Zimmerman
Nigel Walker
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Jeff Jordan
Daniel Howard-Snyder
Christopher W. Morris
Robert L. Simon
Torbjorn Tannsjo
Richard DeGeorge
Gerald A. Press
Seth Bernardete
Richard Kraut
Evan M. Fales
Clark Wolf
Nicholas Rescher
Kenneth M. Sayre
J. N. Mohanty
John Heil
Irving Singer
Alan Soble
Ramon M. Lemos
Alasdair MacIntyre
Gregory Bassham
Howard Kahane
George Sher
Kenneth Kipnis
Diana T. Meyers
Robert Solomon
Martin P. Golding
Thomas W. Simon
Bart Schultz
David Schweikart
Lawrence M. Thomas
Douglas P. Lackey
Carl Wellman

This is just a partial list. There are many, many more. As any philosopher will tell you, the individuals on this list are among the best philosophers working today—in all fields. Won’t they be surprised to learn that they’ve published their work with a “5th-rate press”? What an insult!

Leiter might reply that he was taking liberties with words. You know, exaggerating for effect. If that’s the case, then how does anyone know that he’s not always taking liberties, both on his blog and in his published work? How can he be trusted? Leiter might reply that he was calling Beckwith a 5th-rate philosopher by calling Beckwith’s publisher a 5th-rate press. But if that’s the case, why not say it? Why be indirect? Why smear hundreds of superb philosophers by calling their work into question, when they have nothing to do with Leiter’s quarrel with Beckwith?

Brian Leiter is a sloppy thinker and a reckless writer, not to mention a bad person. He has poor judgment when it comes to identifying quality, whether in persons, in books, or in academic departments. Why anyone would take him seriously, on any matter of importance, is beyond me.

By the way, one of the philosophers Leiter insulted, William A. Edmundson, is currently guest-blogging for him! Either Edmundson doesn't realize that Leiter insulted him or he has a huge capacity for forgiveness.

In a democratic society, political philosophy doesn’t, of course, have any authority; but it can try to win the authority of human reason. There is no institutional judge of whether you succeed in that, any more than there is in science, or in any other rational inquiry. Yet that is the only authority political philosophy can recognize.

(John Rawls, “John Rawls: For the Record,” interview by Samuel R. Aybar, Joshua D. Harlan, and Won J. Lee, The Harvard Review of Philosophy 1 [spring 1991]: 38-47, at 41)

Here.

10-18-85 I have long thought that honesty is the best policy. Today this policy served me well. I was in the university bookstore to buy Allen Buchanan’s book Ethics, Efficiency, and the Market [Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985] when the clerk stated the price as “$10.95.” I couldn’t believe my ears. There were two books left on the shelf, and the one that I had looked at had a price of “$24.50” written on the inside cover. I was perfectly willing to pay this price for it. Just before I left the shelf area, however, I compared the two books and chose the one with the least wrinkled cover. Apparently, this other book had a different price written inside, and the clerk caught it. I immediately informed her that, to the best of my knowledge, the book cost $24.50. She went to check on it and came back with good news. It cost only $10.50! Now, I don’t know if [sic; should be “whether”] the price of “$24.50” had been written in by mistake or if [sic] the clerk simply admired my honesty. But I ended up with fourteen dollars more than I expected. What a pleasant surprise! I celebrated my good fortune by buying a cassette tape, Yes’s 1974 work Yesterdays [I now have this album on compact disc].

I’ve begun lecturing on categorical propositions in my logic course. After covering all of the week’s material, I decided to show the students how philosophers apply logic to real-world problems. I put Peter Singer’s “famine” argument on the board and asked the students to find fault with it—if they could. It’s an elegant little argument designed to show that we have a moral obligation to assist the starving of the world. Most students, I suspect, disagreed with the conclusion at the outset, but the argument itself is valid, and at least two of the three premises are self-evidently true. The only “escape,” then, is to deny the truth of the other premise. No sooner had we gotten to this point, however, than the bell rang, signalling [sic; should be “signaling”] the end of the lecture. Several students remained in the classroom, staring at the argument and then asking questions. This impressed me. I can’t wait to teach Introduction to Philosophy again in the spring. Logic is fun, and important, but I miss the give and take of argumentation with my students.

This morning, having spent nearly three hours holding office hours on the Old Main fountain and talking to Herb Skinner and Terry Mallory, I ran into J. C. Smith. I thanked him for criticizing my “On Writing” manuscripts and learned that he will probably be taking a teaching position at another university in the spring. This means that I may have the L.S.A.T. (law-school admissions test) lecture soon. J. C. has recommended that I be his replacement, but the university administration may select someone else. According to J. C., he told the testing administrator that even if the position is thrown up for grabs, “Keith will be chosen anyway.” What a flattering thing for him to say! As I told Terry later, J. C. is a good friend. He showed me around campus on my first day in Tucson, and he’s been helpful to me in many ways since. I’ll miss him when he leaves Tucson. [J-C. Smith has been a professor at Youngstown State University (Ohio) for many years. I have thanked him several times for all the help I received from him during our graduate-school years.]

This afternoon I spent five hours working in the law office. Compared to yesterday’s rather leisurely pace, today’s pace was frenetic. I drafted several letters and motions, filed documents with the court, talked to clients on the telephone, and interviewed two police officers. By 5:30 P.M., when I left the office, I had a good feeling inside—a feeling of accomplishment. No matter what I’m doing, I like to do it well. This evening I put things away and prepared for a busy weekend. The World Series begins tomorrow.

Harriet Miers is going to be Justice Miers soon. She will be Justice Miers for at least 20 years. During that time, conservatives who made disparaging remarks about her intelligence, credentials, character, experience, and aptitude for the bench are going to feel mighty embarrassed. Those of us who support the Miers nomination and believe that she will be a superb Supreme Court justice (perhaps one of the best) must not forget who opposed her. The list includes James Taranto, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, George Will, Michelle Malkin, Pat Buchanan, David Frum, William Kristol, and Robert Bork. They are making a horrible mistake, one that they will come to regret.

Brian Leiter describes this blog as "far right." I could respond in kind by describing his blog as far left, but he would admit to that. He says his views are "far out of the mainstream," and indeed they are. It's questionable whether he accepts the rule of law, since he views law as politics in disguise. He thinks we live in a fascist society. Am I on the "far right"? I admit to being a conservative (with libertarian instincts), and I suppose that puts me on the right. But I have well-known disagreements with other conservatives that make me wonder whether the qualifier "far" is appropriate. I believe in animal rights, for instance. How many conservatives believe in animal rights? Does Leiter believe in animal rights? I suspect he views animals as resources for his use, even though they are sentient, social beings. He probably eats meat from factory-farmed animals. (Most people, including leftists, do.) I'm an ethical subjectivist, not, like most conservatives, an ethical objectivist. In normative ethics, I'm an egoist. Most importantly, I'm an atheist. How many conservative atheists are there? In short, I'm a mixed bag. Describing me or this blog as "far right" betrays either ignorance or malice, or some ungodly combination of both.

Addendum: One wonders whether Leiter would describe Robert Nozick as "far right." I share most of Nozick's political views. Nozick was much smarter than Leiter, and a better person to boot, so I would be happy to be classified with him.

Hypocrisy, n. 1. The assumption or postulation of moral standards to which one’s own behavior does not conform; dissimulation, pretense. 2. The defining characteristic—and characteristic vice—of leftists.

See here.

It occurred to me today as I ignored a panhandler at an intersection that panhandling persists for the same reason that spamming persists: It pays. If nobody made purchases from spammers, the practice would cease. If nobody subsidized laziness by giving to beggars, panhandling would cease. Think of this the next time you're tempted to hand money to a mendicant.

See here for my dialogue with Beau.

Here.

Here.

How many times have you heard it said, usually by a leftist, that Intelligent Design is just the latest attempt by theists (and in particular Christians) to sneak religion into public schools? This is an example of poisoning the well, which is a fallacy. Instead of addressing the argument on its merits, the critic questions the arguer's motives. The implication is that the arguer is not concerned with the truth and can't, therefore, be trusted. But this game can be played by both sides. If proponents of Intelligent Design are improperly motivated, then so are its opponents. The motive of opponents is hostility to religion as such. Leftists will protest, saying they are not hostile to religion as such, to which I say: "If you don't want your arguments ignored, don't ignore the arguments of your opponents; if you don't want your motives questioned, don't question the motives of your opponents."

By the way, the same move can and should be made in another area. Conservatism and libertarianism are sometimes said (by leftists) to be motivated by greed. But if so, then liberalism and socialism are motivated by envy—another of the seven deadly sins. Why would only some political moralities be improperly motivated? Either all are or none is.

Philosophers are taught to focus on reasons, not motives—and to supply the best reasons rather than the worst. This is why any self-respecting philosopher should have criticized the leftist argument that, since President Bush was improperly motivated in invading Iraq, the war was unjustified. That's a non sequitur. First, there is no evidence that President Bush was improperly motivated. But even if he were, it would have no bearing on the morality of the war. Bad people can do the right thing, just as good people can do the wrong thing. I think this is another case in which hatred of President Bush led leftists astray. Their obsession with a person—and that person's motives—prevents them from thinking clearly about actions and reasons.

Close-fisted, adj. Unduly desirous of keeping that which many meritorious persons wish to obtain.

"Close-fisted Scotchman!" Johnson cried
To thrifty J. Macpherson;
"See me—I'm ready to divide
With any worthy person."

Said Jamie: "That is very true—
The boast requires no backing;
And all are worthy, sir, to you,
Who have what you are lacking."
Anita M. Bobe.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

To the Editor:

John Tierney ("Why Righties Can't Teach," column, Oct. 15) believes that the preponderance of liberals on campus can be explained by bias, conscious and unconscious.

He paints a picture of liberal scholars disparaging conservative research, of tenure and hiring committees looking askance at right-leaning colleagues.

But if this were a significant factor, wouldn't we see a difference between the makeup of a political science department and that of a mathematics department?

Mathematical scholarship has no political coloring. Politics doesn't appear on the résumé of a mathematician. Politics doesn't come up in job interviews. But from where I stand, mathematics departments are as liberal as any in academia.

Any explanation of liberals on campus has to explain bleeding-heart geologists, socialist computer scientists, tax-and-spend physicists and knee-jerk mathematicians. Bias can't do that. But one idea, not mentioned by Mr. Tierney, could.

Perhaps in the marketplace of ideas some ideas are winning—and some are losing.

James M. Henle
Northampton, Mass., Oct. 15, 2005
The writer is a professor of mathematics at Smith College.

Note from AnalPhilosopher: This man may be a mathematician, but he can't count. The relevant numbers are seven of 10 and nine of 14. Presidential victories by Republicans, that is.

I'm genuinely puzzled by the low ranking of Paul Krugman's* op-ed columns. See here. His column of this date is ranked 17th, well below Frank Rich's column. (How humiliating. Rich is not even a serious commentator.) It's not that all op-ed columns are ranked low. I've seen other op-ed columns ranked in the top five lately. For some reason, Krugman's columns aren't being e-mailed, as they used to be before The New York Times started charging to read them. Does anyone have an explanation?

In case you're wondering, I never e-mailed Krugman's column to anyone even when I was getting it free. Nor do I read his column anymore. Truth be told, I miss the old lunatic. There's nothing like a good leftist propaganda piece to stir the analytical, critical, and argumentative juices.

* "Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults" (Daniel Okrent, "13 Things I Meant to Write About but Never Did," The New York Times, 22 May 2005).

Philosophers are expert at batting down philosophical arguments, just as lawyers are expert at batting down legal arguments. Neither philosophers nor lawyers, however, have by virtue of their professional training and experience the ability to advise on issues of social policy. Everyone has the right to have and express an opinion on such issues. But philosophers, as distinct from (depending on the issue) physicians, public health professionals, physicists, economists, engineers, military officers, social workers, architects, and other professionals having relevant expertise, have no greater right than Everyman.

(Richard A. Posner, “What Are Philosophers Good For?” chap. 22 in his Overcoming Law [Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995], 444-67, at 446-7 [footnote omitted])

Push, n. One of the two things mainly conducive to success, especially in politics. The other is Pull.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

To the Editor:

Re "The Miller Case: A Notebook, a Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal" (front page, Oct. 16):

So a new day has dawned in the world of American journalism.

A free press used to mean that journalists were at least relatively autonomous from the government that they covered. When journalists sought to protect the identities of their sources, it used to imply that those sources, whether from government or private enterprises, were offering crucial information that would otherwise be kept from the public.

After reading The Times's coverage of Judith Miller's testimony and Ms. Miller's own account, I can only conclude that "freedom of the press" and "protecting sources" have entered into the lexicon of Orwellian Newspeak.

The press is apparently free to work in cahoots with government officials to take the country to war on false premises; and the sources a journalist is willing to go to jail to protect include government officials apparently engaged in disinformation campaigns.

If these are the principles that The Times stood behind, it is a sad day for the newspaper. But perhaps it is saddest of all for those of us who still think that the old ideas about the place of the press in an open society were pretty good ones.

Sara Murphy
New York, Oct. 16, 2005

Here is Rush Limbaugh's column about the Miers nomination.

Here.

Here.

Intellectual dishonesty is a special kind of dishonesty. It has to do with misrepresenting facts, distorting one’s opponent’s position, using diversionary tactics, and not acknowledging weaknesses in one’s own position. An intellectually dishonest person is not necessarily dishonest in other realms of life, but I suspect that in most cases, intellectual dishonesty flows from a more general dishonesty.

I’ve said many times that Paul Krugman is the most intellectually dishonest person I’ve ever known. Brian Leiter is a close second. The difference is that nobody outside law and philosophy has heard of Leiter. Many people outside academia have heard of Krugman. Krugman is dangerous. Leiter is merely laughable. Let me give an example of Leiter’s dishonesty.

The other day, Leiter wrote the following on his blog:

He [yours truly] started a blog called “The Conservative Philosopher,” recruited a dozen contributors, and then drove almost all of them away with his weird behavior.

First of all, I didn’t “recruit” contributors. People begged me to join. I may have asked half a dozen people, just to get the blog going, but the others heard of the blog through the grapevine and asked to be admitted as members. In several cases, I had never heard of the applicant. There were two criteria for joining: first, having a Ph.D. or D.Phil. degree in philosophy, and second, being a conservative. There was, unfortunately, no character test.

One of those I allowed to join, Max Goss, did not (and to my knowledge, does not) have a doctoral degree. I believe he had studied philosophy. Someone vouched for him, so I let him in. This was a mistake in two ways. First, I broke my rule about not allowing uncredentialed people to join the blog; and second, Goss turned out to be a vile person. Almost immediately, he was demanding that I make certain changes to the blog. I was taken aback by this, but didn’t say anything. Eventually, he became obtuse and belligerent. I decided to drop him from the blog. (He says he quit. It doesn’t matter.) This evidently angered some of the other bloggers, and they, too, sent me nasty e-mail messages demanding to be removed. One of Goss’s friends, Matthew Mullins, whom I had already kicked off my Ethics of War blog, and who was obviously nursing a grudge against me for it, began posting scurrilous comments on the blog. As soon as he posted a comment, I deleted it. He posted it again. I deleted it. It was clear that he was going to continue doing this, so I disabled the comments function. (This was before Chris Lansdown of PowerBlogs made it possible to require approval of accounts.)

My decision to disable the comments function was not popular with the other bloggers, but what was I to do: allow people to attack me on my own blog? You wouldn’t allow that. Leiter wouldn’t allow it. No reasonable person (not that Leiter is reasonable) would allow it. Two or three additional bloggers (whom I didn’t know beforehand) sent nasty e-mails to me, informing me that they were off the blog. Goss and Mullins then began to send e-mail messages to the others, disparaging me and trying to get them to leave. This was fine with me. I never tried to stop anyone from leaving. Of the 19 members of the blog, at its high point, only about six had posted regularly. Roger Scruton and John Kekes posted one item each in the many months they were members. Some members, believe it or not, didn’t post at all. I sent e-mail to everyone, informing them that I would gladly remove their names from the blog if they felt uncomfortable having their names listed. Both Scruton and Kekes told me they were happy to stay listed. After the malcontents left, there were about a dozen members remaining. As the days and weeks went by and some of the remaining members didn’t post, I assumed that they had no intention of posting and removed their names from the blog. There was nothing peremptory about this. A blog is a weblog, which implies regular posting. I didn’t want readers to think I was engaged in false advertising by listing people who didn’t contribute.

Today, there are three members: Bill Vallicella, Ed Feser, and me. I have not invited anyone else to join; nor has anyone requested to join. If Bill and Ed leave, it will become a solo blog. I, Keith, will be “The Conservative Philosopher.”

When Leiter says that I “drove almost all of [the bloggers] away with [my] weird behavior,” I have no idea what he’s talking about. Perhaps he thinks it’s weird to disable comments to prevent personal attacks. But by that standard, he’s weird, too, for he doesn’t allow comments on his blog; and when he does, for certain posts, he deletes those he finds unacceptable. (I know; he deleted one of mine many months ago, even though there was nothing personal about it.)

What we have here is an example of how Leiter works. When he takes a disliking to someone, for whatever reason (including being religious and being conservative), there are no limits—not even those imposed by decency—to how he treats him or her. Recall that he characterized Chief Justice John Roberts’s views as “depraved and repellent.” Have you ever heard anything so bizarre? Instead of getting both sides of the story, Leiter accepts the one that’s most damaging to the person he dislikes and allows those who hate that person, or who have grudges against that person, to speak through his blog (by linking to them). Now that you’ve read this post, you know that the situation is far more complex than he let on. He reduces it to my having “driven people away” with “weird behavior.” I don’t see anything weird about my behavior. Do you?

Leiter is abusive. I call him an “academic thug.” He knows that many philosophers read his blog to stay abreast of events in the profession. He knows that if anyone stands up to him, he can abuse him or her in front of the philosophical community. For example, Ed Feser, who is a superb philosopher and a wonderful person, was told by Leiter that he (Feser) was committing “professional suicide” by defending conservatism. Think about it. Here is a young philosopher whose only sin is to differ from Leiter on moral and political matters. Leiter tries to silence him. (One difference between Feser and Leiter is that Feser argues; Leiter, by his own admission, rants.) Another philosopher Leiter has abused, publicly, is Francis Beckwith. Beckwith’s sin? Being religious; or, more precisely, thinking that religion has a place in public discourse.

The reason Leiter abuses me is that I stand up to him. He can’t hurt me in any way, and he knows it. He has complained about me to his law-school dean, though nothing came of it. This was his way of silencing me. He has disparaged my university, which is one of two in the University of Texas system (the other being UT-Austin) to be listed as a Carnegie Doctoral/Research University. He continues to distort things I’ve said, intending, I assume, to humiliate me (and therefore harm my career). I will continue to reply to his misrepresentations and distortions. He thinks that if he abuses me before the philosophical community, most of whose members share his leftist views, I will stop writing about him. That shows how little he knows about me. When he chose to abuse me, he made a terrible mistake.

Please visit this blog on a regular basis—and do what you can to circulate this post throughout the blogosphere. I have much more to say about Leiter. By the time I’m done with him, his viciousness will be a matter of permanent public record—so that his children and grandchildren can see what a thug and an imbecile their father and grandfather was.

I'm still waiting for the folks at the Philosophy of Biology blog to explain where philosophers get evaluative expertise. See here.

The Corps of Discovery has reached the Columbia River (near present-day Pasco, Washington). See here. The crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains was arduous. By the time the party stumbled out of the mountains, all were frozen and famished. The Nez Perce Indians gave them roots and fish to eat, but it made the party sick. During this time, the Corps could easily have been vanquished. Indeed, Nez Perce lore has it that a decision had been made to slaughter the party, but that an old woman of the tribe who had had a good experience with whites (from the Pacific Ocean) dissuaded the Nez Perce from doing so. After convalescing, the Corps of Discovery made canoes out of cottonwood trees near present-day Orofino, Idaho, and proceeded down the Clearwater River, which empties into the Snake, which empties into the Columbia. Note that 200 Indians approached the party today. Again, it could have been disastrous, but Lewis and Clark were adept at diplomacy. Note also that the Corps was purchasing dogs for food. The diet of fish and roots did not sit well with them. Lewis, whose dog Seaman accompanied the party, wrote that he enjoyed dog flesh, while Clark could not bring himself to eat it (either because he was a softie or because he didn't like the taste).

Here is Tom Graffagnino's latest poem.

To the Editor:

Re "Questions of Character," by Paul Krugman (column, Oct. 14):

There is more involved than President Bush's philosophy of someone who "values loyalty above expertise" in his choice of advisers. Mr. Bush represents mediocrity in cognitive ability, that is, the process of acquiring knowledge by the use of reasoning, intuition or perception.

Unfortunately, mediocrity breeds mediocrity. He lacks an understanding of the "intellectual excellence" the position of a Supreme Court justice requires. He lacks an understanding of history and our future with regard to energy, education and foreign policy.

Our country needs more than a likable, honest guy to represent our country. We have been clouded by our fears about the war on terror. I feel sorry for Mr. Bush, and I feel sorry for the electorate who are unable to comprehend what qualities an American president should represent.

Warren Hammer
New Canaan, Conn., Oct. 14, 2005

Note from AnalPhilosopher: Isn't it precious for a chiropractor to be criticizing someone for being "cognitively mediocre"? Gee. I wonder why he didn't append his "credentials."

I'm 48 years old. My maternal grandfather, Harvey Burgess, died when I was one (in 1958). Today is his birthday. How old do you think he would be? I'll post the answer as an addendum tomorrow.

Addendum: 125.

Here.

The problems of the black community are generated from within. Don't take my word for it. After all, I'm white, and what can a white person know about this? Take the word of a black man, Leonard Pitts Jr. See here. Pitts has the following advice for his fellow black men:

Get educated.
Seek a career, not a job.
Don't make children you can't support.
Understand that support means money.
Understand that support means more than money.
Marry the woman.
Model manhood for your children.
Save some money.
Buy a home.
Build a life.

I couldn't have said it better.

Logomachy, n. A war in which the weapons are words and the wounds punctures in the swim-bladder of self-esteem—a kind of contest in which, the vanquished being unconscious of defeat, the victor is denied the reward of success.

'Tis said by divers of the scholar-men
That poor Salmasius died of Milton's pen.
Alas! we cannot know if this is true,
For reading Milton's wit we perish too.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

Brian Leiter would have you believe that he is a star (or at least a rising star) in philosophy. Is he? Let's take a look. According to Leiter's curriculum vitae, which is available online, he has published only nine refereed essays in philosophical periodicals, even though he earned his Ph.D. degree in 1995. One of the essays appeared in a periodical (Legal Theory) of which he is an editor. Make of that what you will. The essays were published in the following periodicals:

Journal of the History of Philosophy (15 pages)
History of Philosophy Quarterly (9 pages)
Australasian Journal of Philosophy (8 pages, coauthored)
British Journal for the History of Philosophy (32 pages)
Legal Theory (11 pages)
Ethics (35 pages)
Canadian Journal of Philosophy (20 pages, coauthored)
European Journal of Philosophy (20 pages)
Ethics (23 pages)

Leiter will protest that I've omitted many other publications. Indeed I have. But I'm talking about refereed essays in philosophical periodicals. These are essays that have made it through a rigorous (in most cases) review process, usually one that is double-blind. (The reviewers in double-blind review are kept ignorant of the author's identity; in addition, the author is kept ignorant of the identity of the reviewers.)

Nor do I count Leiter's publications in legal periodicals. As Judge (and Professor) Richard Posner points out in his book The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, "most legal scholarship is published in journals edited by students." This fact, Posner writes, "astonishes academics in other disciplines" (page 295). Among the factors that are taken into account by law-review editors (i.e., law students) are "the reputation of the author" and "whether the article is a 'tenure article' on which the author's career may be riding" (page 298). In any event, I'm concerned in this post with philosophical publications, not legal or other publications. Leiter is a philosopher by training and profession (although not, in my judgment, by temperament) and has an appointment in a Department of Philosophy.

Nine refereed essays (a total of 173 printed pages) in 10 years—eight essays if we count each coauthored essay as one-half—is hardly enough to qualify one as a star (or even a rising star) in a discipline. It is, in fact, quite undistinguished. One wonders how Leiter got hired and promoted. (Then again, his bizarre left-wing views would endear him to other angry leftists at UT-Austin.) Keep this in mind the next time you see or hear Leiter call a fellow philosopher a "mediocrity." It takes one to know one.

Addendum: I can already hear the tu quoque fallacies being committed. It will be said that I, Keith, have only so many refereed philosophical publications, yada yada yada. First, I have quite a few refereed philosophical publications (17, to be exact). See my curriculum vitae (and not the outdated one to which Leiter linked the other day—intentionally?). Second, this isn't about me. It's about Brian Leiter, the self-appointed "gatekeeper" of philosophy, the man who passes judgment (often harsh) on other philosophers and who meticulously records their wanderings in search of status, fame, fortune, and lighter teaching loads. Perhaps if he spent less time threatening students (see here) and more time writing philosophical essays, he'd have more credibility in his discipline.

Italian Paolo Bettini is one of the best Classics (one-day) riders in the world. Today he won the Giro di Lombardia, which used to be the 10th of 10 World Cup events. (Now it's part of the ProTour.) Bettini covered the 152.8 miles at an average speed of 25.73 miles per hour. See here for the story. Bettini has now won eight Classics races. He is approaching the great Belgian rider Johan Museeuw, who won 11.

Sycophant, n. One who approaches Greatness on his belly so that he may not be commanded to turn and be kicked. He is sometimes an editor.

As the lean leech, its victim found, is pleased
To fix itself upon a part diseased
Till, its black hide distended with bad blood,
It drops to die of surfeit in the mud,
So the base sycophant with joy descries
His neighbor's weak spot and his mouth applies,
Gorges and prospers like the leech, although,
Unlike that reptile, he will not let go.
Gelasma, if it paid you to devote
Your talent to the service of a goat,
Showing by forceful logic that its beard
Is more than Aaron's fit to be revered;
If to the task of honoring its smell
Profit had prompted you, and love as well,
The world would benefit at last by you
And wealthy malefactors weep anew—
Your favor for a moment's space denied
And to the nobler object turned aside.
Isn't not enough that thrifty millionaires
Who loot in freight and spoliate in fares,
Or, cursed with consciences that bid them fly
To safer villainies of darker dye,
Forswearing robbery and fain, instead,
To steal (they call it "cornering") our bread
May see you groveling their boots to lick
And begging for the favor of a kick?
Still must you follow to the bitter end
Your sycophantic disposition's trend,
And in your eagerness to please the rich
Hunt hungry sinners to their final ditch?
In Morgan's praise you smite the sounding wire,
And sing hosannas to great Havemeyer!
What's Satan done that him you should eschew?
He too is reeking rich—deducting you.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

To the Editor:

Fifteen years ago, the conventional wisdom was that a single woman over age 30 was more likely to be struck by lightning than to find a husband. I found this very depressing at the time. I thought it was a shame that these women would not easily be able to have children.

Now, at last, the Internet and medical technology allow women in their 30's and 40's to have what they really want—the baby, with or without a husband. Two parents who are also soulmates is one great option, but for the significant minority of women for whom this just doesn't happen, pity is no longer required.

The men our age can mine the ranks of nubile 20-year-olds, and we can quit praying for a lightning strike and get ourselves pregnant, and choose the characteristics of an optimal biological father to boot.

As so aptly stated in the article, "When push came to shove, the child was more important than the partner."

Ruth Beier
East Lansing, Mich., Oct. 13, 2005

Note from AnalPhilosopher: Have you ever read anything so selfish? The child's welfare isn't even mentioned.

Here is Harold Pinter's poem "American Football." Pinter was just awarded The Nobel Prize in [Anti-American] Literature. What he should have been awarded is a mouthful of soap.

Addendum: Pinter just received another award. See here. (Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the link.)

Here.

I'd like to thank Brian Leiter for linking to my blog, even if he is an academic thug and even if his views and values are risible. Leiter said that Chief Justice John Roberts's moral and political views are likely to be "depraved and repellent." That tells you all you need to know about Leiter. He is a punk, a scalawag, and a bully. As I said in a previous post, he fancies himself the gatekeeper of the professions of law and philosophy. In fact, he is the laughingstock of both. That he isn't told this reflects people's fear of being retaliated against, which is precisely what Leiter is doing to me. Think about it.

Addendum: Notice how Leiter tries to smear me by saying that people visit my site looking for anal sex. What does that have to do with anything? Am I responsible for who visits my blog? The word "anal" in my title refers to (1) analytic philosophy and (2) anal retentiveness, as anyone with any sense can see by looking in the sidebar. Do you see anything sexual about my blog? What a pathetic, vindictive, and repulsive man Leiter is. He is an embarrassment to his university, to his department, to his profession, and to his family. He ought to thank God for the tenure system. Evidently, his thuggishness wasn't known when he was hired and tenured.

Addendum 2: If you've been intimidated, threatened, stalked, or harassed by Leiter, please contact the Austin Police Department. Harassment is a crime in Texas.

Addendum 3: Leiter says I "demanded" to be removed from David Chalmers's blog list. That's a lie. What I did—and if Chalmers has any integrity he will vouch for this—is ask Chalmers (politely) why my blog was listed as a nonphilosophical blog when Leiter's blog, which contains at least as much nonphilosophical material (poetry, politics, ranting, &c), is listed as a philosophical blog. Chalmers agreed that Leiter's blog has a high percentage of nonphilosophical material, but thought that the departmental rankings and hiring announcements that appear on his blog justified keeping it listed as it was. I suspected that it had more to do with Chalmers's agreement with Leiter's left-wing politics than with rankings or hirings, so I asked Chalmers (again, politely) to remove the link. It seemed like a reasonable compromise. I didn't "demand" anything. I made a request. Chalmers complied with it. Do you think Chalmers would have complied with a demand, especially if my tone had been belligerent? See how Leiter distorts things to make others look bad? I could give dozens of other examples of this bizarre and repugnant behavior, but why bother? The man has no moral scruples and can't be taken seriously. Just read his blog for a couple of days and you'll see how he treats people. Either you're one of his sycophants (note the glowing words he has for the toady who wrote to him) or you're contemptible. There's no in-between. Speaking of how Leiter treats people, he loves to invoke the name of Joel Feinberg from time to time, as if Joel would approve of his behavior. I knew Joel Feinberg. Joel Feinberg was my friend, mentor, and correspondent for many years. I wrote the entry on Joel for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2d ed. Joel would not tolerate Leiter's disgraceful and disrespectful conduct for one second. Joel was a good and decent man. Leiter is a reprehensible thug.

Addendum 4: Leiter says he complained to someone in his law school about me. Ha! I never heard a word about it. But wouldn't I have heard something, if there had been anything to it? For someone as abusive as Leiter, he sure is thin-skinned. He misread and overreacted to a harmless blog post. I think he was trying to intimidate and silence me. Leiter would make a good KGB agent.

Addendum 5: Leiter loves to call those who disagree with him "bizarre," "odd," "irrational," and "juvenile." Read my blog and his blog for one week and tell me which of us is bizarre, odd, irrational, and juvenile. What's truly bizarre about this Leiterian technique is that Leiter admits to having views that are "far out of the mainstream." Let me get this straight. If you have mainstream views, you're bizarre, odd, irrational, and juvenile. Now I get it!

Addendum 6: If Leiter believes I've defamed him (I admit to insulting him), he needs to sue me. If he doesn't sue, then he should retract the claim that I've defamed him—or at least inform his readers of precisely what I said about him that is false and defamatory. For a law "professor," Leiter doesn't know much about the law. He might want to read my essay "The Perils of Error Analysis in Defamation Law," Communications and the Law 12 (March 1990): 3-18. I've forgotten more defamation law than he's ever known.

Addendum 7: Leiter thinks I'm obsessed with him. I can see why he thinks this. He's not used to being criticized, and he is, to put it bluntly, obsessed with status and reputation. (Who gives a damn which department has the best reputation? John Rawls could have written A Theory of Justice at any university in the country. That Leiter cares even one whit about this stuff shows how demented he is.) When he is criticized, he complains to his law-school dean ("Mommy! Keith is being mean to me!"), has his henchmen write letters in his behalf, threatens professional retaliation, and makes scurrilous personal attacks. That's not how normal people act. That's how megalomaniacs act.

Addendum 8: Leiter says he gets mail from people expressing rudeness toward me. I wonder why they don't send it to me. My address is prominently displayed on all of my blogs. Could it be that they're trying to ingratiate themselves with the "gatekeeper"? Truth be told, Leiter would not want to read the mail I get about him. Most of it has the form, "Thank you for taking Leiter on. Many of us have been abused by him and think he's despicable, but, since we don't have tenure, or since we're students of his, we can't say anything." Well, I have tenure, and I'm not afraid.

Addendum 9: By the way, Leiter misrepresented my readership. There are two types of visitor to my blog: repeat and first-time. Hundreds of new readers come to my blog every day, either by using Google or by clicking on links that appear on people's blogs or webpages. I've been averaging over 900 visits a day for the past few weeks, and I've averaged over 700 for many months. My readership is slowly but steadily growing. Leiter makes it seem as though I have 250 visits a day, with all the rest coming for pornography. Either he's too stupid to know what's going on or he's trying to deceive his readers. Click on the odometer to the left and examine my statistics for yourself. Don't take Leiter's word for it. He can't be trusted to get even little things right.

Addendum 10: I'm sorry. I keep thinking of things to say. Leiter says he blocked my e-mail. I roared when I read that. I haven't written to him in over a year. The poor guy is delusional. I've probably written to him fewer than 10 times in my life—about the same number of times he's written to me. Why would I write to him? I can say everything I need to say on my blog, and I do. I think Leiter resents being called a stalker (click the first link in this post for details), so he's trying to make it appear that I'm harassing him. That's called projection, folks. Leiter is a master of it.

Addendum 11: Some time back, I wrote to a former professor of mine who knows Leiter well. I asked him whether Leiter is "nuts." I was serious. I don't know how else to account for the things Leiter writes, both in his blog and in scholarly publications. The professor wrote back to say that Leiter is "complicated." Hint: That means nuts.

Addendum 12: Here's an example of Leiter's intellectual dishonesty. He says I treated R. A. Duff harshly "because [Duff] didn't give a favorable review to some of [my] work." That's preposterous. Here's what happened. I published an essay entitled "A Theory of Rape" as part of my anthology A Most Detestable Crime: New Philosophical Essays on Rape (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Duff reviewed the book for Mind. Before submitting his review to the publisher, Duff sent it to me. I noticed that he described my theory as "confused." I told him I'm not the least bit confused and explained why. He agreed. So what does he do? He changes the word "confused" to "wrong." In other words, I'm wrong, not confused. I wrote back to say that I can't be wrong about rape if I'm not trying to be right about it. My essay isn't an attempt to describe or reconstruct the law of rape; it's a proposal to revise rape law. Imagine someone criticizing Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation (1975) by saying that people don't think that way about animals. Singer would say that he's not trying to report or reconstruct people's beliefs about animals. He's trying to change their beliefs (and ultimately their behavior). He's engaged in revision, not reconstruction. Duff couldn't grasp this simple, familiar distinction. And yet Leiter praises him as "a first-rate philosopher of criminal law." If making a crude mistake like this is first-rate, then I'd hate to see a second- or third-rate philosopher! Incidentally, notice how, without knowing the details of what happened between Duff and me, Leiter sided with Duff. Why? Because Duff has status! Leiter is obsequious toward those who are above him in the philosophical hierarchy. He treats those beneath him with contempt, especially if they have the effrontery to disagree with him.

Addendum 13: In case there was no link to it in Leiter's post, here is my reply to the posts of Michael Sprague and Roberta Millstein on the Philosophy of Biology blog. I tried to be gentle with Sprague, since he's just a student.

Addendum 14: Leiter says I lied about him, but doesn't elaborate. Wouldn't it be nice if he told his readers what I said about him—precisely—that is false? Logically speaking, I can't have lied unless I said something false (with intent to deceive); and if I said something false, don't you think he'd sue me (or at least announce, pompously, that he's going to sue me) for defamation? Then again, Leiter and his fellow lame-brained leftists have been saying "Bush lied" for so long that they've forgotten what a lie is.

Addendum 15: Leiter says I'm "uneducable." Who talks like that, other than totalitarians? Come to think of it, let's all be glad Leiter is powerless. If he had power, he'd be Stalin rather than a sad little man in an academic office in a backwater town, crying out for attention.

Addendum 16: I could go on and on with this, but what's the point? Read Leiter's blog for a few days (or browse his archive) and judge for yourself what kind of person he is. You can judge a person by how he or she treats others.

Here is David Gelernter's essay about a classic book.

To the Editor:

Re "Democrats See Dream of '06 Victory Taking Form" (front page, Oct. 13):

The key to a Democratic success in next year's Congressional election is clearly in the party leadership's coming up with a campaign that does not concentrate on the Bush administration's failures but offers alternative programs to fix what it believes is wrong with the Republican agenda.

A suggestion by which the Democratic Party could command the greatest public attention for its positive agenda: It could within weeks call an extraordinary midterm convention to draw up its platform.

The convention would not need to be expensive. The delegates could be those who attended the 2004 convention. Their meeting would be open to the public and of course the press.

In sharp contrast to the secrecy of the Bush administration, it would let the public, if only remotely, share in the construction of the Democratic platform.

Although local issues might cause some candidates in next year's Congressional election to veer from the platform on comparatively minor issues, the basic principles of the party would be clearly apparent.

The voting population would for the first time in many years have an unobstructed view of those principles that differentiate the Democratic Party from those of the Republican Party.

Walter Cronkite
New York, Oct. 13, 2005

Note from AnalPhilosopher: My favorite part of Cronkite's letter is the final paragraph. Cronkite thinks Democrats lose because their principles aren't clearly displayed. Ha! If he really cared about the Democrat party, he'd want to keep its principles hidden from view. The more exposure Americans have to the worldview and values of Democrats—higher taxes, racial preferences, appeasement of our enemies, open borders, homosexual "marriage," coddling of criminals, abortion on demand—the greater the Democrats' margin of defeat. With friends like Cronkite, Democrats don't need enemies.

See here for one of the funniest letters to the editor I've ever read.

Have you noticed the vehemence of the denials that conservative opposition to Harriet Miers is rooted in elitism? That alone suggests that the criticism is legitimate. (Denial is always the first response to well-placed criticism.) What we have are some very well-heeled and refined people (at least in their own minds) who don't like it that President Bush chose a normal, plain-looking, hard-working, nonideological person from Texas—of all places!—to serve on the highest court in the land. They wanted a dashing, well-connected ideologue, and they didn't get their way. See here for Matthew Scully's op-ed column about Harriet Miers.

Damn, v. A word formerly much used by the Paphlagonians, the meaning of which is lost. By the learned Dr. Dolabelly Gak it is believed to have been a term of satisfaction, implying the highest possible degree of mental tranquillity. Professor Groke, on the contrary, thinks it expressed an emotion of tumultuous delight, because it so frequently occurs in combination with the word jod or god, meaning "joy." It would be with great diffidence that I should advance an opinion conflicting with that of either of these formidable authorities.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

As some of you know, I've been on a strict diet since 4 July, three days after I discovered, to my horror and disgust, that I had ballooned to 177 pounds. This morning, 15 weeks later, I weighed 156.5 pounds. Here's the progression:

07-01-05 177.0 (began 2,000-calories-a-day diet on 4 July)
07-08-05 172.0
07-15-05 169.5
07-22-05 170.0
07-29-05 168.5
08-05-05 167.0
08-12-05 165.5 (increased to 2,100 calories a day on 14 August)
08-19-05 164.0
08-26-05 165.0
09-02-05 163.0
09-09-05 161.0
09-16-05 161.0 (increased to 2,200 calories a day on 20 September)
09-23-05 159.0
09-30-05 157.5
10-07-05 157.5
10-14-05 156.5

Please note that nothing else in my life has changed, including my activity level. I eat the same foods as before—just not as much of them. Really, all the diet has done is inform me that I've reached my limit for the day. I used to keep eating until I was sated. Now I stop.

Addendum: My plan was to get down to 160 pounds. As you can see, I'm well below that. I think I'll go down to 155 pounds before increasing the daily caloric intake to 2,300. I weighed 155 pounds a few months after running my first marathon in December 1996 (when I was 39 years old). I consider that a good running weight. In case you're wondering, I'm rarely hungry. The diet forces me to eat more often, since I don't want to ingest most of my calories in one sitting. I've also learned which foods are high and which low in calories. (I had no idea, for example, that mayonnaise is loaded with calories.) I stay away from high-calorie foods.

Here.

The word “literally” is overused, misused, and abused. It should be used only when two conditions are satisfied:

1. The expression in question is sometimes or often used figuratively.

2. The speaker wishes to signal that the present utterance is to be taken literally rather than figuratively.

Here’s an example. A while back, I found fault with the reasoning of two contributors (Michael Sprague and Roberta Millstein) to the Philosophy of Biology blog. Doing so was like shooting fish in a barrel. (To be fair, Sprague is only a student.) Suppose I come across a barrel of fish while hiking. If I shoot them for my supper, I’m literally shooting fish in a barrel. The word “literally” does a job here; it signals to my audience that I really did what I say I did.

It occurs to me that the correct use of “literally” (to signal literality when the expression might be taken figuratively) is a retronym, like “analog watch” and “acoustic guitar.” Originally, I assume, “shooting fish in a barrel” was used literally. Then it began to be used figuratively. Thereafter, those who wanted to use it literally had to append “literally” to it to signal literality. Originally, all guitars were acoustic. Then electric guitars were invented. Thereafter, those who wanted to refer to traditional guitars had to append “acoustic” to “guitar” to signal their meaning.

You put your compact discs in alphabetical order by artist and in chronological order within each artist—and when you try to buy the entire corpus of each artist's work.

Hatchet, n. A young axe, known among Indians as a Thomashawk.

"O bury the hatchet, irascible Red,
For peace is a blessing," the White Man said.
The Savage concurred, and that weapon interred,
With imposing rites, in the White Man's head.
John Lukkus.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

Bob Hessen sent a link to this wonderful essay by economist Robert Dunn. Doesn't liberal hypocrisy sicken you? How many leftists live the high life while calling for wealth redistribution? They ought to put their money where their mouths are. While I'm on the subject, you might want to read G. A. Cohen's book If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?

Addendum: This quotation from Richard Posner is pertinent:

It is . . . on the score of life experience, rather than that of method, that modern moral philosophers fall farthest short of their predecessors. Lifetime academics, they never leave school. They take no professional risks until they get tenure. After that they take few professional risks, and never any personal risks. They live a comfortable bourgeois life, with maybe a touch of the bohemian. They either think Left and live Right, or think Right and live Right. (Richard A. Posner, The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory [Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1999], 80)

What Posner says about moral philosophers is true of academics generally. Note the asymmetry: If you think Right and live Right, you're not a hypocrite. If you think Left and live Right, you are.

To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman is rightly appalled, as we all are, at the savagery of the Sunni extremists ("Silence and Suicide," column, Oct. 12). But his description of the carnage as a product of a religious-based civil war only further proves why we should have never invaded Iraq.

The notion that we could help the Arabs by invading and occupying their country while they settled long-festering religious, cultural and political rivalries around us has proved no more legitimate than any other justification for this war.

But even had it been spot on, what gave us the right to decide that the death of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians is a price they should be willing to pay for our vision of their country?

Wittingly or not, Mr. Friedman has demonstrated that the Iraqi war is madness. Sheer madness.

Michael Curry
Austin, Tex., Oct. 12, 2005

To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman has it correct. There is a "right rationale" for the war in Iraq.

And anyone who takes the time to read the full letter from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No. 2 leader in Al Qaeda, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the group's top agent in Iraq ("Full Qaeda Letter to Iraq Ally Speaks of Group's Global Goal," news article, Oct. 12), will understand why we are there.

The letter talks about Al Qaeda's ultimate goal—to "extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq." Precisely what President Bush alluded to in his recent speech.

We are all in this global war for the long term, and the sooner we realize it, the better.

John Schlager
Springfield, N.J., Oct. 12, 2005

Did anyone see that my adopted Texas Rangers hired a 28-year-old (Jon Daniels) as general manager? Twenty-eight year olds shouldn't be allowed to vote, drive, or reproduce, much less run Major League Baseball teams. The world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Here is Peggy Noonan's latest column. The premise of her argument—which I reject—is that Harriet Miers isn't a good Supreme Court nominee. But why not? In what respect is she unfit or unqualified? Her intelligence is unquestioned. Her work habits are immaculate. She has experience as a practitioner at the very highest levels of the law. I'm starting to think that those who oppose her, including my fellow conservatives, don't understand the nature of judging. There's nothing magical about it. Cases come before the Court. A justice must read the briefs and make a decision. This requires attention (and fidelity) to the statutes, if it's a statutory case, or the Constitution, if it's a constitutional case. The judge's job is to resolve the issue before it, not shape the law by imposing some theory or vision on it. Judging is bottom up, not top down. It is not the least bit like the sort of theorizing law professors do. Judges don't say, "I'm a conservative, and this is how a conservative would resolve this issue." They're faithful to the law as written. Have conservatives bought into the liberal idea that judges are philosopher-kings, imposing a moral vision on a benighted populace? That way lies totalitarianism. I honestly don't understand the conservative criticism of Harriet Miers. Many of our best judges had no judicial experience prior to joining the Supreme Court. None. What does that tell you about the importance of prior judicial experience? President Bush should ignore the petulant whining from the right. Conservative critics are acting like spoiled children who didn't get their way. Harriet Miers is an excellent choice for the Court.

Addendum: Thank goodness President Bush shows no sign of caving in to conservative pressure. See here. He has nothing to fear from whiny, elitist conservatives. Nor does he owe them anything. He has chosen an exceptional person to serve on the Court, someone he is confident will be faithful to the text of the Constitution. That should be the end of it. That others would have chosen differently is neither here nor there. If you want to select Supreme Court justices, get yourself elected president.

Here.

Why do we refer to certain of our friends as “close friends”? Doesn’t friendship imply closeness? Could there be a nonclose friend? If friendship does imply closeness, then “close friend” is redundant. If it doesn’t, then friendship is no different from acquaintance. I think we make this mistake because of a parallel term: “close relative.” There are degrees of relatives. Some, such as my parents and siblings, are close (proximate). Others, such as my aunts, uncles, and cousins, are remote. A second cousin is even more remote, and a third cousin more remote still. Thus, the expression “close relative” is not redundant. It specifies the distance between the other and oneself, which can be useful information.

There is also the expression “best friend.” What does it mean, and how, if at all, does it differ from “close friend”? One difference between them is that, as we saw, there cannot be a nonclose friend, but it does seem possible for there to be a nonbest friend. A best friend might be a friend with whom one has a special affection or affinity. I might share a secret with one friend but not with others, for example, or I might make requests of one friend that I don’t (or wouldn’t) make of others. This doesn’t mean the others aren’t friends. It means I don’t make the same demands on them as I do my best friend. Perhaps we can think of it in terms of duty and supererogation. There are obligations of friendship. (“Obligation” has “lig” as its root. “Lig,” as in ligament and religion, means bind.) But some things are beyond the call of duty, even between friends. When I make these special calls on a friend, I may describe him or her as my “best friend.” Best friends, in other words, go beyond the call of duty. What do you think?

Dr John J. Ray continues to blog at a furious pace. See here. I wish John would write a longish post about blogging—about why he does it, what influence he hopes (or expects) to have, what he likes about it, what he dislikes about it, and so forth.

Here is a press release from the ironically named People for the American Way.

The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is using one of my essays without permission and without attribution. It's one thing to link to something that's posted on the Internet. It's another to reproduce it in its entirety without permission, especially when (1) I'm easily contacted and (2) I say, on my blog, that all material is copyrighted. Worst of all is that my name doesn't appear on the page. This is plagiarism, folks.

By the way, I repudiate the aims and methods of ALF. See here. The only method of belief revision and behavior modification I endorse is rational persuasion. I reject force, coercion, and manipulation.

May I ask a favor, dear reader? Please write to ALF to complain about its use of my essay without permission or attribution. Tell ALF that you will not support it until it does right by me. (This assumes that you might otherwise support it, which may not be the case.) I don't want to have to take legal action, but I will.

Addendum: I sent a copy of this post (together with a link) to ALF. The plagiarized page has been taken down. I'm glad to see that someone at ALF has a conscience (or perhaps a healthy fear of litigation). By the way, it's easy to find my essay on the Internet. All I have to do is copy and paste a string of words from the essay into Google, using quotation marks. Google will find any document that contains that string. As of this moment, all is well. I'll keep checking. It would give me a great deal of pleasure to sue the creeps at ALF, who have no respect for property rights.

This is the best thing I've read in some time. What goes around comes around.

Here.

Edward Kennedy has announced that he will support John Kerry for president in 2008, even if Hillary Clinton runs. See here. Kennedy is quoted as saying: "Every day, I think they [the American people] regret that John wasn't elected." It would be closer to the truth if he had said: "Every day, I think the American people thank God that John wasn't elected."

Here is a newspaper story about Paul Krugman. It's two years old, but perhaps you haven't seen it. I hadn't.

Here.

It is morally implausible . . . that justice requires individuals to be fully compensated for disadvantages that derive from unchosen features of their circumstances but not to be compensated at all for disadvantages that result from their voluntary choices. As [Elizabeth] Anderson has argued, it is morally implausible that choice should have that kind of significance or make that degree of difference. On the one hand, there are many unchosen personal attributes that may be disadvantageous but for which we do not, in fact, demand compensation from others. On the other hand, the fact that a person’s urgent medical needs can be traced to his own negligence or foolishness or high-risk behavior is not normally seen as making it legitimate to deny him the care he needs. Still less do people automatically forfeit any claim to assistance if it turns out that their urgent needs are the result of prudent or well-considered choices that simply turned out badly. We are neither so systematically alienated from the unchosen aspects of our own identities nor so uniformly confident of and identified with our role as choosers as to regard the presence or absence of choice as having this kind of make-or-break significance.

(Samuel Scheffler, “What Is Egalitarianism?” Philosophy & Public Affairs 31 [winter 2003]: 5-39, at 18-9 [footnote omitted])

Al Gore says he has no intention of running for president. See here. That's good, because we have no intention of electing him.

Addendum: Several of Gore's claims show that, like many leftists, he is detached from reality. Take his claim that President Bush has "taken money from the working families and given it to the most wealthy families." The very worst that can be said about President Bush is that he has allowed the rich to keep their money. Their money. To Gore, it's not their money. It's the government's money, or everyone's money, or the poor's money. Leftists have no conception of desert, entitlement, or personal responsibility. They want to equalize wealth, no questions asked. If you lack, you get. If you have, you give.

Age, n. That period of life in which we compound for the vices that we still cherish by reviling those that we have no longer the enterprise to commit.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

To the Editor:

Shame on Maureen Dowd (column, Oct. 8) for using the "M" word to describe Harriet E. Miers. Trust me, there were no mediocre women in law school in the 1960's, let alone women who graduated at the top of their class, who were among the first women hired in prestigious firms, who were among the first women to make partner in those firms and who were among the first women to lead their city and state bar associations.

Harriet Miers may have been noticed by the president because of her connections, but to have gotten to that position, as those of us who know her will attest, took a combination of sheer determination and a whole lot of excellence.

I met Ms. Miers in 1991 when we were members of the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association. In 1993, I opposed her in a debate at the association's annual meeting on whether the A.B.A. should have an official pro-choice stand on abortion.

Ask anyone who has worked with her or against her, in court or in a debate, and you will get the same response—Ms. Miers is a first-rate lawyer with a brilliant mind and an unsurpassed work ethic. There is nothing mediocre about that.

Sharon Stern Gerstman
Buffalo, Oct. 8, 2005

Meriwether Lewis died on this date in 1809. He was only 35 years old. The circumstances of his death remain obscure, but most historians believe that he committed suicide. (Some maintain that he was murdered.) See here for one historian's view.

This week's link is to The Harvard Review of Philosophy.

How much of the opposition to Harriet Miers is rooted in sexism? I don't have the answer, obviously, but I would be surprised if sexism played no role. There's still a double standard when it comes to sex, just as there is when it comes to race. In other words, sexism and racism are alive and well. James Taranto, for example, detects racism when Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid questions the quality of Justice Clarence Thomas's judicial opinions. (See here.) Why, then, does he not detect sexism when people question the quality of Harriet Miers's mind? This would appear to be another case of conservative hypocrisy. Nor is Taranto alone. Michelle Malkin thinks opposition to Miers has nothing to do with sexism. I wish it didn't, but I fear it does.

Addendum: Sexism need not be blunt or blatant. Like racism, it can be subtle. A person is sexist if he or she holds men and women to different standards when there is no relevant difference between men and women. Sexism is a kind of injustice (in the Aristotelian sense of treating likes differently or unlikes the same). The test for sexism is a hypothetical one. Ask yourself whether you would have the same attitude toward the person in question, or treat the person the same way, if his or her sex were different. If you wouldn't, then you're sexist. I think Harriet Miers is being held to a higher intellectual standard than a similarly situated man. Please don't misread me. I'm not saying that opposition to Miers is necessarily sexist. That would mean women can't be criticized. Nor am I saying that all or most of the opposition to her is in fact sexist. I'm saying that some of the opposition to her is in fact sexist. Michelle Malkin and James Taranto should admit this. Denying it makes them seem unconcerned with the truth.

Rat-hole, n. 1. The abode of a rodent of the genus Rattus. 2. That down which liberals, in pursuit of their egalitarian fantasies, and compassionate conservatives, as a demonstration of their "compassion" for the poor, conspire to throw your money.

I'm watching the first American League Championship Series game between the Chicago White Sox and the Los Angeles Angels. The announcers (on Fox) are Joe Buck, Tim McCarver, and Lou Piniella. McCarver and Piniella played Major League Baseball. A minute ago, with his team trailing, 3-2, in the bottom of the sixth inning, Jermaine Dye of the White Sox bunted. To listen to the announcers, this was perfectly idiotic. Why, Dye hit 31 home runs during the regular season. He's perfectly capable of hitting a home run, which would tie the game. Why would he bunt?

May I explain? If everyone expects Dye to swing for the fences, then nobody, including the third baseman, expects him to bunt. This means that he's likely to make it to first base if he bunts. That would bring the go-ahead run to the plate. Surely this is not hard to grasp. In a game situation, one must anticipate what one's opponent will do, knowing that the opponent, in turn, is anticipating what one will do. The study of game situations (strategic interactions) is called game theory. Buck, McCarver, and Piniella should take a course in it.

Zenith, n. A point in the heavens directly overhead to a standing man or a growing cabbage. A man in bed or a cabbage in the pot is not considered as having a zenith, though from this view of the matter there was once a considerable dissent among the learned, some holding that the posture of the body was immaterial. These were called Horizontalists, their opponents, Verticalists. The Horizontalist heresy was finally extinguished by Xanobus, the philosopher-king of Abara, a zealous Verticalist. Entering an assembly of philosophers who were debating the matter, he cast a severed human head at the feet of his opponents and asked them to determine its zenith, explaining that its body was hanging by the heels outside. Observing that it was the head of their leader, the Horizontalists hastened to profess themselves converted to whatever opinion the Crown might be pleased to hold, and Horizontalism took its place among fides defuncti.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

To the Editor:

A brief observation about "Want Social Condemnation With Your Justice? Tune In Judge Judy," by Adam Cohen (Editorial Observer, Oct. 9).

Some alleged socially conscious folks allow for different standards of behavior depending on social and economic condition. I do not. In my court—real or TV—I demand responsible behavior from everyone.

Social or economic condition—poor or rich—cannot be an excuse for bad behavior. It may be a reason but never an excuse.

Mr. Cohen may or may not like my style. That is his prerogative. But please, don't confuse that with "social bullying." I bully everybody!

Judy Sheindlin
Greenwich, Conn., Oct. 9, 2005
The writer is the TV personality Judge Judy and a retired supervising judge in New York City Family Court.

I'm a conservative, but my commitment to conservative principles would never override my concern for truth or fair play. I'm afraid that many of my fellow conservatives are hypocrites for opposing Harriet Miers. See here. You can't have it both ways: criticizing liberals for obstructing judicial nominations, while obstructing judicial nominations. In 1987, while a graduate student in philosophy, I argued in a State Bar of Michigan publication (The General Practitioner) that President Ronald Reagan, qua president, had a right to put whomever he pleased on the United States Supreme Court. This was a principled position on my part, since I emphatically rejected Robert Bork's values. (I no longer do, but that's neither here nor there.) I still believe that presidents have the right to put whomever they please on the Court (as well as on other federal courts). It's one of the perquisites of office. It's how the people put their stamp on the federal judiciary. Harriet Miers is eminently qualified to serve as a Supreme Court justice. Anyone who denies this has a strange conception of qualification.

Addendum: Qualification, like competence, is all or nothing. For a given task, a person is either qualified or not. When I say that Miers is eminently qualified, I'm not suggesting that qualification is a matter of degree. I'm saying two things: (1) that she's qualified and (2) that it's not a borderline case.

Here.

I'm a guitarist, so I appreciate good guitar playing. There is no better guitar solo than that on Steely Dan's "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," from Pretzel Logic (1974). Check it out.

Here is Brendan Miniter's column about the Miers nomination.

Here.

Here is the letter discovered by the United States that details Al Qaeda's strategy.

Another child grows up. See here and here.

Bob Hessen informs me that PBS is airing a series on socialism entitled "Heaven on Earth" (great title). See here for details, and check your local listings for viewing times. Thanks, Bob!

A former student brought this story about academic blogging to my attention. I found it interesting. It's probably not a good idea for untenured professors to blog, unless they do so anonymously. Whether one should blog anonymously is a separate question. As for one's blog cutting into one's scholarly time, why is this any different from being a chess player, marathon runner, parent, or opera buff? Different people do different things for enjoyment. The time I spend blogging is time I might spend with my children, if I had any.

I haven't been reading Paul Krugman's* New York Times op-ed columns. Have you? I can read them online by using my university's library, but I don't bother. Here is the list of Most E-Mailed Articles. As you can see, Krugman's column ranks 22d. You might think this is because op-ed columns are limited to subscribers, but Bob Herbert's column ranks 13th. Does anyone have a theory about why Herbert's column would be so far ahead of Krugman's? Before the Times started charging to read op-ed columns, Krugman's column was ranked in the top five, and often first. Could it be that Krugman's column was being e-mailed primarily by conservatives and libertarians rather than by liberals, and that most of those who have paid the fee are liberal? If so, then Krugman may have lost his audience of conservatives and libertarians. He is preaching to the liberal choir.

* "Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults" (Daniel Okrent, "13 Things I Meant to Write About but Never Did," The New York Times, 22 May 2005).

Here is Judge Richard A. Posner's blog post on federalism.

Hope, n. Desire and expectation rolled into one.

Delicious Hope! when naught to man is left—
Of fortune destitute, of friends bereft;
When even his dog deserts him, and his goat
With tranquil disaffection chews his coat
While yet it hangs upon his back; then thou,
The star far-flaming on thine angel brow,
Descendest, radiant, from the skies to hint
The promise of a clerkship in the Mint.
Fogarty Weffing.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Three of the four Division Series are over. The Chicago White Sox, the St Louis Cardinals, and the Houston Astros have advanced to their respective League Championship Series. The fourth Division Series ends tonight in Anaheim, where the New York Yankees play the Los Angeles Angels. It’s the fifth and final game. Because of Saturday’s rainout, the teams had to fly across country late last night and early this morning. Both teams will be tired, but at least they’re in the same situation. Los Angeles will have the advantage of playing at home, before friendly fans, but with so much on the line, I don’t expect it to make much of a difference. Both teams will be playing to their limits, since losing means going home for the winter. Postseason play is cruel. Produce or perish.

Keep your eye on Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees’ third baseman. He’s still the highest-paid player in baseball, earning over $25,000,000 per year. (That’s $17,146.77 per inning played during the course of the 162-game season.) He has won most of the individual awards in the American League, from a batting title to a home-run title to an RBI title to the Most Valuable Player. What has eluded him is a championship. He played for three years (2001-2003) for my adopted Texas Rangers. When it appeared that the team was going nowhere, he asked out. The team complied with his request, in part to get rid of his suffocating salary. A-Rod (as he’s called) thought that his best chance to win a World Series was with the Yankees. But a year ago, the Yankees didn’t even make it to the World Series, having lost a seven-game League Championship Series to their archrivals, the Boston Red Sox. If the Yankees lose tonight, it will be an even worse finish than a year ago. To this point in the series, A-Rod is doing poorly. He’s hitting just .182, which means he hits safely about one time in six plate appearances. He has never struck me as a big-time player, like Reggie Jackson, who seemed to rise to the occasion. If A-Rod continues his poor hitting tonight and the Yankees lose, the New York fans will blame him—and rightly so. What’s he being paid for, if not to lead his team to victory?

Prediction: Los Angeles 4, New York 2. Vladimir Guerrero hits a two-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning off Yankees’ closer Mariano Rivera.

Addendum: Los Angeles won, 5-3. Alex Rodriguez finished the five-game series with two hits in 15 plate appearances. He didn't drive in a single run. He is not a big-time player. As for my predictions, I said that Los Angeles would beat New York in five games. I nailed it. I said Houston would beat Atlanta in four games. I nailed it. I said St Louis would beat San Diego in four games. St Louis won in three games. My only gaffe was predicting that Boston would beat Chicago in three games. Chicago beat Boston in three games. On to the next round!

Here are some letters supporting President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the United States Supreme Court. While I'm on the topic of the nomination, suppose enough Republicans vote against Miers to keep her off the Court. What will President Bush do? The elite Republicans who oppose Miers think he will cave in to them. Ha! President Bush would be so infuriated (and rightly so) that he would nominate Alberto Gonzales. If Gonzales were rejected, President Bush would nominate a federal appellate judge with moderate credentials, just to spite the Federalist crowd. Have you ever seen such sore losers as those who oppose Miers? They act as though they're entitled to a candidate of their choosing, someone who went to an elite university and law school, who served on law review, who clerked for a Supreme Court justice, and who put in time at the Federalist Society. President Bush will not and should not give in to them. He's the president; they're not.

Here.

Here.

To the Editor:

Re "Seeing Creation and Evolution in Grand Canyon" (front page, Oct. 6):

There is no "debate," "growing" or otherwise, about evolution or the geology of the Grand Canyon. Well-trained scientists, using the techniques and methods of their disciplines, have concluded that it is millions of years old, with fossils of sea creatures from when the region sat under an ancient ocean.

While there are creationists who put forward alternative explanations, they fail to back up their claims with serious fieldwork or laboratory experiments, and they ignore scientists who respond to them.

Perhaps, as Genesis says, the world was created in six days 6,000 years ago, with the sun created on the fourth day after three days of light and dark, but there is no physical evidence for this. I respect the faith of those who hold this belief against all the evidence to the contrary, but it is a poor, blighted faith that must distort facts and science in order to believe.

Jack Needleman
Los Angeles, Oct. 6, 2005
The writer is an associate professor of public health, U.C.L.A.

September was a hot month in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex—the hottest since I moved here in 1989. The average high temperature was 95.2° Fahrenheit. The figures for June, July, and August were 93.7°, 95.6°, and 97.3°, respectively. Even the first five days of October were hot. But everything changed this past Thursday, when a cold front moved in. It was 76° Thursday, 70° Friday, and 73° yesterday. As a runner, I’m delighted with the change. Running in hot weather is miserable. But as a bicyclist, I prefer warmth. Yesterday, for example, I drove to Denton for the Power Rally. According to the newspaper, it was to be warm and sunny. You can imagine my shock, then, when it began to rain during the drive northward. It was dark at the time, so I couldn’t see the sky. I thought it was clear.

When I got to the rally location, the sun was rising. I could see that the sky was clouded over. “Maybe it won’t rain on us,” I told myself; “and maybe the clouds will dissipate.” I wore a long-sleeved shirt under my bicycling jersey and put on some white cotton gloves to keep my hands warm. After a long, hot summer, the air felt cold. When the rally began, at 8:00, there was no lead pack. Even though several hundred bicyclists were lined up at the start, riders straggled out alone or in small groups. The course for the first ten miles was scenic and enjoyable. My face smarted from the wind. About an hour into the ride, as I pedaled across the dam at Lake Ray Roberts, the first raindrops hit me. That was bad. Cold weather is one thing, but cold, wet weather is another. I had left my rain jacket in the car, thinking it was going to clear. I stopped at a rest stop after the dam, but once I resumed riding the rain picked up. Before long, my clothing was wet and my feet were soaked. I kept thinking I would ride out of the rain, but I never did. I was shivering during the final ten miles. All I could think about was getting in my car and turning on the heater for the drive home.

My average speed for the day was a respectable 16.98 miles per hour for 57.23 miles. I was tempted to cut out a small loop near the end, but I knew I’d regret it if I did. (I call this the Regret Principle. It tells me to do whatever will cause me to have the fewest regrets.) One reason I say my speed was respectable is that I never rode hard. My maximum pulse for the day was 135. Usually, I reach the mid- to upper 150s. I just kept a steady pace, whatever the terrain. The course, by the way, was near Aubrey, which is horse territory. I passed dozens of horse farms. Some of the houses were spectacular. One looked like a small version of the Old Faithful Lodge. Had the weather been better, I would have enjoyed the ride enormously. Perhaps next year it’ll be better.

Compared to the past two weeks, the wind wasn’t bad. Two weeks ago, in Crowley, the average wind speed was 17.4 miles per hour (caused by Hurricane Rita, which made landfall that morning). I fought the wind with two friends, Joe and Randy. During the second half of our ride, when we faced a stiff headwind, we took turns pulling. Each rider pulled for half a mile. He then went to the back and sat in for a mile. It made a world of difference. I averaged 16.98 miles per hour for 57.60 miles that day. A week ago, in Bonham, the average wind speed was 12.3 miles per hour. I fought the wind by myself. My average speed for the day was 16.64 miles per hour (for 66.04 miles). Yesterday, the average wind speed was only 4.5 miles per hour. The rule of thumb is that a headwind reduces your speed by half of its speed. Thus, if I’m riding into a 14-mile-per-hour wind, it will reduce my speed by 7 miles per hour. If I would be going 19 miles per hour with no wind, I’ll be going 12 miles per hour with it—unless, of course, I’m in a pack. Yesterday’s rally in Denton was my 24th of the year and my 368th overall. I have at least two to go before putting my bike away for the winter. Marathon training is under way. Two days ago, I did a fast 6.6-mile training run in my neighborhood. It felt great to be running in cool air again after several months of stifling heat and humidity. Tomorrow I go out for a long run of over 10 miles. I hope all of you had a strenuous weekend, with plenty of suffering.

One of the most amusing cases of the trial of a domestic animal was that of a sow together with her six pigs at Savigny-sur-Etang, in Bourgogne, France, in January, 1457. The charge against her was murdering and partly devouring an infant. The sow was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging, though her offspring, partly because of their youth and innocence and the fact that their mother had set them a bad example, but chiefly because proof of their complicity was not forthcoming, were pardoned.

(Walter Woodburn Hyde, “The Prosecution and Punishment of Animals and Lifeless Things in the Middle Ages and Modern Times,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 64 [1916]: 696-730, at 707 [footnote omitted])

Here is a terrific blog post by historian Thomas C. Reeves, who is a Senior Fellow at The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. (Thanks to Bob Hessen for the link.)

Erik Zabel has always been one of my favorite cyclists. When he wins, which is often, he does so gracefully. When he loses—even if he's a close second—he does so without whining. Zabel proves that great athletic accomplishment is compatible with humility and gentleness. Zabel trains hard all winter and races competitively throughout the season, from the spring Classics through the three-week stage races to the fall Classics. Today, Zabel won the prestigious Paris-Tours race, which used to be the ninth race in the ten-race World Cup. What makes this victory special is that it was Zabel's last as a member of T-Mobile. Next year, he moves to a new team. See here for the story of today's race. Here is an image of the tumultuous finish. Incidentally, Zabel covered the 157.5 miles at an average speed of 28.01 miles per hour. Congratulations, Erik!

As I predicted, the Houston Astros defeated the Atlanta Braves in four games in the National League Division Series. The fourth game, played today, went 18 innings. Chris Burke of the Astros ended it with a solo home run. Roger Clemens, who pitched three innings, got the victory. The Braves have now lost four consecutive Division Series (2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005). They have won 14 consecutive division titles (1991 to 2005, inclusive, minus the aborted 1994 season). But when it comes to the postseason, the Braves choke. How else to explain their record of futility? You would think that a team that has reached the postseason 14 times in a row would reach the World Series more than five times, and you would think that a team that has reached the World Series five times would win more than once (in 1995). One title in 14 postseasons. How much longer will Braves fans tolerate general manager John Schuerholz and manager Bobby Cox? I keep hearing it said that Schuerholz and Cox are geniuses. Do geniuses keep failing? Please don't say they haven't failed. Ask the Braves themselves whether they've failed. The objective of every manager, coach, and player is to win it all. Getting to the playoffs is just the first step, as becoming engaged is the first step to getting married. As for why the Braves falter in the postseason, I don't know. It may have to do with Cox. He has a low-key style that works well over the course of a 162-game season. But a team needs energy and enthusiasm in a short series, when everything is at stake. As I've said many times, both in this blog and to my friends, I'd rather my team not make the playoffs at all than make it and lose. If the Braves were my team, I'd be livid.

Addendum: Here are the gory details. The Braves have won 14 of 14 division titles. They have played in 11 National League Division Series, winning six. They have played in nine National League Championship Series, winning five. They have played in five World Series, winning one.

Addendum 2: I originally entitled this post "The Hapless Braves," but I thought better of it. The Braves aren't hapless. They're feckless.

Here.

Poker, n. A game said to be played with cards for some purpose to this lexicographer unknown.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof's cogent explanation of judicial activism reveals why many commentators and politicians, on both the left and right, betray an unfamiliarity with the rule of law in America.

Legislatures act through power; courts act through reason. A political candidate's views on the issues are germane. A judge's should be irrelevant.

To suggest otherwise, by quizzing a judicial candidate on his or her views of issues, blesses judicial activism. It sanctions, by implication, a future judge's deciding a case on what he or she believes rather than on what is perceived from legal authorities. In short, it dishonors the legal process.

William H. Izlar Jr.
Atlanta, Oct. 5, 2005

Here is P. J. O'Rourke's review of a new book by Leslie Savan.

Here.

Here.

Ostrich, n. A large bird to which (for its sins, doubtless) nature has denied that hinder toe in which so many pious naturalists have seen a conspicuous evidence of design. The absence of a good working pair of wings is no defect, for, as has been ingeniously pointed out, the ostrich does not fly.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

To the Editor:

An Oct. 7 editorial says President Bush's speech on Thursday "suggested an avoidance of today's reality that seemed downright frightening."

Thomas L. Friedman's Oct. 7 column calls the president's speech "excellent." Is Mr. Friedman the only person outside the administration itself who believes that "winning in Iraq is so important to the wider struggle against Islamo-fascism" (whatever that is)?

The war seems now to consist of a great number of Iraqis demonstrating their passionate, and often suicidal, determination to get the Americans to leave.

Now that it is painfully clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it is just as obvious that the war is being waged to protect and defend the failed policies of the Bush administration.

Richard Ellis
New York, Oct. 7, 2005

Here.

In the humanities, the most abstract field is philosophy—and no woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world’s great philosophical traditions.

(Charles Murray, “The Inequality Taboo,” Commentary [September 2005]: 13-22, at 15)

Here is the Wikipedia entry for Amarillo.

Paul Krugman's* op-ed column of this date is ranked 25th on the list of Most E-Mailed Articles. See here. The man must be seething with rage at The New York Times, which has effectively taken him out of circulation. As I said the other day, he should quit the Times and start a blog.

* "Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults" (Daniel Okrent, "13 Things I Meant to Write About but Never Did," The New York Times, 22 May 2005).

I'm on cloud nine. Not only did the Boston Red Sox lose the Division Series (to the Chicago White Sox), but they lost in three games. See here. Best of all is that the ignominious loss occurred in Fenway Park, horrifying legions of insufferable, narcissistic Red Sox fans. Thank you, White Sox! May it take 85 years for the Red Sox to win another World Series.

Addendum: You may recall that I predicted that Boston would win the World Series. That was my brain talking, not my heart. My heart is happy. I hope my prediction jinxed the hated Red Sox.

10-7-85 . . . The baseball season is over. A year ago, the [Detroit] Tigers were 104-58; this year, they finished at 84-77, some nineteen and a half games worse. I kept waiting for the Tigers to get hot this year, but they never did. Whenever the team won three or four games in a row, it seemed that Toronto did the same. The Blue Jays had a remarkable season. And so now, with the regular season over, it’s on to the playoffs. I predict that Toronto will defeat Kansas City [the Royals] in six games [Kansas City won in seven], St. Louis [the Cardinals] will defeat Los Angeles [the Dodgers] in seven games [St Louis won in six], and the Cardinals will win their second world championship in four years by beating the Blue Jays in seven games [Kansas City beat St Louis in seven games]. Wade Boggs and Willie McGee, incidentally, won their respective batting championships, while Darrell Evans of the Tigers, at age thirty-eight, led all major-league players in home runs with forty. Who says that old-timers can’t play?

To the Editor:

Many Christians and the majority of Catholics have no problem reconciling evolution with religion, a position endorsed by Pope John Paul II. But evolutionary scientists step well beyond science into philosophy and even theology when they assert that the theory of evolution leads to a materialism without God and so the incompatibility of science and religion.

When parents or teachers attempt to show that evolution and religion are not in conflict and that other ways to knowledge exist besides the scientific method, they are ruled out of court on an alleged violation of the separation of church and state. Thus we get the understandable if misguided attempt to insert intelligent design into the science curriculum, to counter the philosophical (and theological) bias of militant secular evolutionists.

Robert Bireley
Chicago, Oct. 1, 2005
The writer is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago.

Here.

Laurel, n. The laurus, a vegetable dedicated to Apollo, and formerly defoliated to wreathe the brows of victors and such poets as had influence at court. (Vide supra.)

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

See here.

I hope you're reading The Conservative Philosopher. Bill Vallicella has a post about Ayn Rand's misunderstanding of Immanuel Kant. Ed Feser has a post about metaphysics and morality. Bill and Ed are credentialed philosophers, so they know whereof they speak.

I'm still flummoxed by conservative opposition to Harriet Miers. Could it be that those who oppose her are expecting too much? Here is a paragraph from a New York Times story of this date:

But Gary Bauer, president of the Christian conservative group American Values, said that he remained unconvinced about Ms. Miers despite her religious views. "As of today, not one friend, associate, co-worker or White House official is able to produce one sentence she has written or spoken in criticism of Roe v. Wade," he wrote in an e-mail newsletter to supporters. "Her apparent silence is troubling—at least to me."

It's about abortion. Many conservatives care about little else. They want Roe v. Wade overruled. They want a nominee who will vote to overrule it. Not "might." Will. The problem with Harriet Miers, from their point of view, is that she's not on record as saying that Roe was wrongly decided. John Roberts wasn't on record as saying this, either, but other things he said, plus the fact that he's Roman Catholic, put the anti-Roe crowd at ease.

President Bush should ignore one-issue conservatives. Do I think Roe was wrongly decided? Yes. Would I like to see it overruled? Yes. But I'm concerned about many other issues besides abortion. I'm concerned about the war on Islamism. I'm concerned about affirmative action. I'm concerned about property rights. I'm concerned about capital punishment. I'm concerned about the institution of marriage. I'm concerned about the Second Amendment. I'm confident, largely because of President Bush's assurances, that Harriet Miers will resolve these and other issues in accordance with conservative principles. Conservatives who demand that a nominee have expressed a view that Roe be overruled are being unreasonable. Nobody who expressed such a view would be nominated, much less confirmed, given the current political climate.

Addendum: Here is support for my (hypo)thesis that abortion is driving the conservative opposition to Harriet Miers. Incidentally, isn't it hypocritical of conservatives to demand to know whether Miers will vote to overrule Roe v. Wade when they have been telling liberals for years that they have no right to know such things? Why is it permissible for conservatives, but not liberals, to use abortion as a litmus test?

Dependent, adj. Reliant upon another's generosity for the support which you are not in a position to exact from his fears.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

You've never locked your keys in your car.

To the Editor:

"All the President's Women," by Maureen Dowd (column, Oct. 5), made me heartsick. "Vestal virgins"? "Cheerleader"? "Workaholic bachelorette"?

I am an old 60's feminist, pro-choice, against this horrible war and opposed to nearly everything the Bush administration stands for. But is this name-calling what women of my generation fought a revolution for, to see the working habits of powerful women belittled?

Ms. Dowd doesn't mention that Karen P. Hughes is also a wife and mother who gave up her Washington life for a time for the sake of her family, nor does Ms. Dowd acknowledge the agonizing choices and sacrifices that must be made by women like Ms. Hughes, Condoleezza Rice and Harriet E. Miers.

These women devote themselves to careers and put in 16-hour workdays to make it to the highest echelons of political power (as do men who rise to their levels).

Please. There is plenty to attack at the policy level without reverting to the vocabulary of an era when women who didn't marry were known as "old maids."

Eleanor Bluestein
La Jolla, Calif., Oct. 5, 2005

Here.

Here is Peggy Noonan's column about the Miers nomination. She thinks it's a presidential misstep.

See here. (Thanks to Denny Bradshaw for the link.)

Here.

Conservative justice preserves established rights. Prosthetic justice adds further rights, rights to benefits which were not formerly counted due as a matter of right. In this way, with the development of the social conscience (and of the economic capacity of a society), the field of justice gradually takes in more from the field of charity. The character of the order of rights to be protected by conservative justice accordingly changes, the society becomes a more just society, and the nature of justice itself, both conservative and prosthetic, becomes clearer.

(D. D. Raphael, “Conservative and Prosthetic Justice,” Political Studies 12 [June 1964]: 149-62, at 161-2)

I just saw the following words on a large, professionally produced sign in Chicago's ballpark:

I'ts Our Time
Go White Sox

Has it gotten that bad?

10-5-85 . . . For the fourth time in 1985 I had a letter published in the Arizona Republic. This time the subject was comparable worth—the doctrine that wage scales for public employees should be set by objective criteria such as level of education, supervisory duties, and management abilities. Those in favor of a free-market approach to public problems are opposed to the doctrine of comparable worth, but I argued in favor of it. It seems to me that there is no more difficulty in setting wage scales than in devising rules for any bureaucratic agency. To adopt a free-market approach may appear to be value-neutral, but in fact it constitutes a value-laden choice. Comparable worth promises to be a major issue in the years to come. [Hardly anyone mentions it anymore.]

All of the baseball races are over, though the regular season contains one more day. Toronto [the Blue Jays], Kansas City [the Royals], St. Louis [the Cardinals], and Los Angeles [the Dodgers] will be moving on to the playoffs soon, after which two of the teams will meet in the World Series. The only team to repeat as divisional champion from a year ago is Kansas City. St. Louis won the World Championship in 1982, while Toronto has never before been in the playoffs. The Blue Jays, in fact, are the first Canadian team ever to appear in postseason play. I can’t wait to see some exciting playoff and World Series games. It’s just too bad that the [Detroit] Tigers won’t be involved. [Some things never change. As I type this entry, on 5 October 2005, I am watching a Division Series game between the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox. The picture on my Dell 42-inch plasma high-definition television is spectacular.]

Here.

If you're new to this blog, welcome. I have three other blogs that may be of interest. One of them, The Conservative Philosopher, is communal. The others are Animal Ethics and The Ethics of War. I don't post as often on these other blogs as I do on AnalPhilosopher, but I do post things from time to time, so you might want to check back on a regular basis (or browse the archives). By the way, I don't do any of this for money, although I recently placed small advertisements on Animal Ethics and The Ethics of War (mainly to see how much money it would generate). Blogging, to me, is a labor of love. If you'd like to read my columns for Tech Central Station, see here. The column listed first is the latest, chronologically. The column listed last is the earliest. It's been a while since I wrote a column. I hope to get back to it soon—once I figure out how to pack 25 hours of work and play into 24 hours.

Addendum: May I make a shameless plug? If you're a blogger, please consider switching to PowerBlogs. If you're not already blogging but considering doing so, take a close look at PowerBlogs before making a commitment. I'm delighted with the service I get from Chris Lansdown, who puts up with my crankiness, anal retentiveness, and perfectionism. He is a genuinely nice person, and very helpful. I'm sure this is true of everyone else at PowerBlogs as well.

The nomination of Harriet Miers to serve as a Supreme Court justice has revealed something interesting and important about the conservative movement: It has both a surface and a deep structure. The surface structure is what we see and experience on a daily basis. The deep structure, by contrast, is permanently hidden from view. The existence of the deep structure is inferred from what happens at the surface. Most of the time, we are unaware of it. We become aware of it only when strange things happen at the surface. For example, conservatives were of a single mind (or close to it) about John Roberts. Nothing about the nomination suggested any ideological fissures. They are, however, deeply divided about Harriet Miers. Some conservatives view her nomination as a betrayal, by the president, of his conservative supporters. Others, such as me, view it as a vindication of conservative principles.

The main divide between conservatives—or perhaps I should say one of the main divides—is social class. Some conservatives are part of the intellectual class. They are thinkers rather than doers. They have advanced degrees; they consume (and contribute to) the elite media; and they live comfortable, affluent, urbane lives. Other conservatives are part of the entrepreneurial, professional, or grassroots class. They are doers rather than thinkers. They build and run businesses; they participate in their communities; they work in government; and they value things like loyalty, genuineness, commitment, and sincerity.

Most of the criticism of Harriet Miers appears to be coming from the intellectual side of conservatism: law professors like Randy Barnett, pundits like George F. Will, and ideologues like David Frum. They seem bitter that someone like them wasn’t chosen. Perhaps they feel that they are being rejected by President Bush, whom they have long suspected of being anti-intellectual (or at least unintellectual). Most of the support for Miers appears to be coming from the entrepreneurial, professional, or grassroots side of conservatism: people like William Bennett, Senator Orrin Hatch, and Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht. Intellectuals look at Miers and see an ordinary person. Why should one of the most prized positions in government go to someone so undistinguished, intellectually? Entrepreneurs, professionals, and laypeople look at Miers and see an accomplished lawyer, a faithful public servant, and a devout Christian. What more could we want in a judge? Who better to pass on the constitutionality of federal and state statutes?

Perhaps the rift I detect is not a class rift but something else. I don’t think it’s a religious rift. I don’t think it’s an insider-outsider rift. I don’t think it’s a sex-based rift. It has something to do with differential valuations of the intellect vis-à-vis character and real-world accomplishment. The Miers nomination has simply brought the rift into view. In the long run, being aware of the rift will be a good thing, for it will generate reflection and discussion among conservatives. Conservatism can’t but emerge stronger for it.

To the Editor:

"The President's Stealth Nominee" (editorial, Oct. 4) says, "The normal model for a Supreme Court nominee is a judge, usually from a federal appeals court, who has served long enough to develop and demonstrate judicial excellence."

That has been the model until now. But selecting the Supreme Court only from judges is hardly the "normal model" when one looks back.

How can a judicial-appointment model possibly be "normal" if it cannot explain Justices Earl Warren, William H. Rehnquist, Tom C. Clark, Lewis F. Powell Jr., Byron R. White and many others who did not have previous service as a judge?

Nominees who have been judges should "demonstrate judicial excellence," as you say, and nominees who have not yet been judges should demonstrate legal excellence as practitioners, lawmakers, professors or government officials.

The record shows that Harriet E. Miers has demonstrated excellence during her extensive legal career.

Steve Charnovitz
Washington, Oct. 4, 2005
The writer is a law professor at George Washington University.

Gnome, n. In North-European mythology, a dwarfish imp inhabiting the interior parts of the earth and having special custody of mineral treasures. Bjorsen, who died in 1765, says gnomes were common enough in the southern parts of Sweden in his boyhood, and he frequently saw them scampering on the hills in the evening twilight. Ludwig Binkerhoof saw three as recently as 1792 in the Black Forest, and Sneddeker avers that in 1803 they drove a party of miners out of a Silesian mine. Basing our computations upon data supplied by these statements, we find that gnomes were probably extinct as early as 1764.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

Roger Scruton is a brilliant philosopher and a perceptive analyst of public affairs: political, religious, legal, moral, and aesthetic. About the only issue on which I disagree with him is the moral status of nonhuman animals. Scruton has an absurdly narrow conception of what a right is—and therefore of what sorts of beings can have rights. Here is Scruton's recent essay on "the political problem of Islam." Anyone who wants to understand the Islamic mind should read it, and everyone should (at least prudentially) want to understand the Islamic mind. Note Scruton's distinction between Islam and Islamism. It is a distinction worth bearing in mind as we decide what to believe and do after 9-11.

Addendum: Scruton cites this essay by Daniel Pipes. I was able to track it down.

10-4-85 . . . One of my students, Bob Scruton, is a wide-eyed babe when it comes to logic and argumentation. He has come by a few times during my office hours, and today he joked with Terry Mallory and me about my future children. “They’re gonna be killers,” he said. “You’ll have them arguing and debating with each other as soon as they’re born.” I had to laugh at these statements, but actually, Bob is right. I do plan to teach my children to think analytically and critically about things at an early age. After that, Bob went on a ramble about me. “It must be great to just whale on people like you do,” he said. “In class, for instance, you’ve got examples for everything. You must have thought about everything before.” Again, I was humored. “But I’m a lot older than you are, Bob, and I have thought about a lot of philosophical problems. However much you’re impressed by me, remember this: I’m even more impressed by the professors in the [University of Arizona] Philosophy Department. Some of them are brilliant. So you see, arguing ability is relative. Eventually, you’ll be able to hold your own against other people.” On and on we went, joking and arguing with one another. This is what philosophy is all about.

See here.

Baseball, n. 1. An immortal game played by mortal beings. 2. Life.

Here.

To the Editor:

Judith Miller evidently believes that she stood up for the worthy principle of preserving the confidentiality of her sources.

In reality, however, she has been standing up for a perversion of that principle.

Journalists are allowed to keep their sources confidential to ensure that whistleblowers who are not in positions of power may get the truth out to the public without fear of retribution.

Rather than protecting a whistleblower, Ms. Miller was protecting someone in the highest echelons of power, the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, who was apparently using his access to the press to exact retribution against a whistleblower, Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Preserving the confidentiality of sources is an important journalistic principle, but it should not apply to situations like this one.

Maureen Ratigan
Natick, Mass., Oct. 1, 2005

Richard Rorty, whose 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature shocked the Anglo-American philosophical world, is 74 years old today. See here for an encyclopedia entry on him. See here for an interview. See here for a recent book review by Rorty. I might add, for those who are curious, that Rorty's critique of analytic philosophy (see here for a taste) doesn't touch me, although I'm an analytic philosopher. He is attacking a particular type of analytic philosophy, not analytic philosophy generally.

Confidant, Confidante, n. One entrusted by A with the secrets of B, confided by him to C.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

I'm troubled by the knee-jerk reaction of my fellow conservatives to President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the United States Supreme Court. For God's sake, find out about the woman before attacking her! This is one unfortunate aspect of the blogosphere, by the way. The tendency is to write before thinking, just for the sake of writing. Here is a thoughtful blog post on the Miers nomination. (Thanks to Sally Boyd for the link.)

Addendum: Law professor Randy Barnett thinks Alexander Hamilton would be none too happy with the Miers nomination. See here.

Addendum 2: "In welcome news to the White House, Miers won the unqualified support of one of the Senate's top conservatives, Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. 'A lot of my fellow conservatives are concerned, but they don't know her as I do,' said Hatch, a former chairman of the Judiciary Committee. 'She's going to basically do what the president thinks she should and that is be a strict constructionist.'" (from a news story)

Addendum 3: Harriet Miers's religiosity is bound to draw the ire of the Left. See here. If it appears that she is being attacked because of her faith, it will make Americans side with her and further weaken an already weak Democrat party. Stay tuned.

Throughout his career, Nisbet analyzed the excesses and evils of the modern state in ways that caught the attention of thinkers across the political spectrum. Indeed, one authority said that Nisbet was “so resolutely unfashionable that he regularly came back into fashion.” Nisbet argues that the troubles of modernity stem from a head-to-head conflict between the values of tradition (for example, authority, hierarchy, community, and the sacred) and those of revolt (for example, rationalist conceptions of power, mandated equality, individualism, and secularism). In his 1953 classic, The Quest for Community (from a manuscript rejected by three publishers), Nisbet warns that the greatest social and political problem of our time is the deterioration of “intermediate association” and, pari passu, the growth and consolidation of a goliath state, the fingers of which touch and direct every man. Put differently, modern history has swept away the hoary communities of kin, region, and faith, and into the vacuum has come the total state.

(Robert G. Perrin, “Robert Alexander Nisbet,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 143 [December 1999]: 695-710, at 699 [italics in original; citations omitted])

10-3-85 . . . I had heard the rumors, but now I know that it’s true. David Lee Roth, the dashing but obnoxious lead singer for the group Van Halen, has left the band to pursue a solo career and has been replaced by Sammy Hagar, former lead singer and guitarist for the band Montrose. What a surprise! First of all, I hadn’t taken the rumors of Roth’s departure seriously; second, Hagar has a promising career of his own, with several successful albums to his credit; third, I had no idea that Hagar even knew Eddie and Alex Van Halen. But there it is, in the entertainment section of today’s newspaper [The Arizona Republic]. On the whole, I’m not disappointed with the news. Roth is a jerk, personally (from what I’ve heard), and I’ve always thought that if anyone in the band were expendable, it was Roth. I’m concerned, however, with the band’s sense of direction. Roth was good at energizing the band, and also at harmonizing on certain songs. I wonder if Hagar can do the same. But as long as Eddie Van Halen is alive and kicking, there’ll be good music coming from him. Eddie, in my opinion, is the most creative and technically skilled guitarist in the world today. [Roth turns out to have been essential to Van Halen’s success. In my opinion, the band went downhill after his departure. Hagar is far more obnoxious than Roth ever was.]

My friend Peg Kaplan posted a link to Robert P. George's encomium to John M. Dolan. See here.

I just discovered this blog via Donald Luskin's site. I love how it looks.

Paul Krugman's* op-ed column of this date (which I haven't read and probably won't) ranks 16th on the list of Most E-Mailed Articles. See here. That puts him behind even the unserious Bob Herbert. Bush-hatin' Paul can't like this new system. It cost him his readers! I'm starting to think that most of Krugman's readers were conservatives or libertarians rather than liberals. Conservatives and libertarians loved to read him because they found so many errors and distortions in his columns. Maybe liberals got tired of Krugman's incessant pandering to their prejudices.

* "Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults" (Daniel Okrent, "13 Things I Meant to Write About but Never Did," The New York Times, 22 May 2005).

1. A few weeks ago, I made predictions based on home and road performance to that point in the season. I predicted that San Diego, St Louis, and Atlanta would win their divisions. They did. I predicted that Houston would be the National League wild-card team. It is. In the American League, I predicted that Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston would win their divisions. Boston did not, but it did win the wild-card race. I wrongly predicted that Oakland would be the wild-card team. So I correctly predicted six of the eight playoff teams. What this shows is that Boston and Oakland played poorly down the stretch and that New York played well.

2. I messed up the other day when I said that a tie between Boston and New York would result in a one-game playoff. The teams did end up tied, but the divisional title went to New York on the basis of head-to-head play during the season. I suppose this is a fair way to break ties. It gives teams an incentive to compile good records against their rivals. As you may recall, I expressed hope that Cleveland would keep Boston out of the playoffs. It was not to be. The Indians fell apart during the final week of play. I read today that Cleveland lost an ungodly number of one-run games this year. That's a sign that the team is coming on strong. Watch out for Cleveland next year.

3. Here are my postseason predictions. For those of you who aren't baseball fans, there are three rounds of playoffs. The first round is best of five games. The second and third rounds are best of seven games. In a short series, the team with the best frontline pitchers has an advantage. I think Los Angeles will beat New York in five games. Boston will clobber Chicago in three games. The Red Sox are on fire after taking two of three games from New York in Fenway Park. Curt Schilling appears to be back to his old form. In the National League, Houston will beat Atlanta in four games, one fewer than a year ago. The Braves choke in the postseason. Nobody knows why. St Louis will beat San Diego in four games. Moving on to the league-championship series, I see Boston beating Los Angeles in six games. The Angels are tough, but the Red Sox are tougher. David Ortiz will single-handedly win two of the four games with clutch hits. If I were Mike Scioscia, I'd walk him every time. In the National League, Houston will beat St Louis in seven games with its fabulous pitching. Imagine having Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and Roy Oswalt on your side in consecutive games—with Brad Lidge to close things out. So it'll be Boston and Houston in the World Series. As much as it pains me to say it, Boston will win. In six games. Contrary to what you may have heard, good hitting beats good pitching.

Here.

To the Editor:

Nora Ephron has spoken for all of us who are in the same boat with her by connecting the dots that lead directly from the mess that Bill Clinton made of his life and his presidency to the mess that the country now finds itself in. But I don't think she went far enough.

When faced with ruin, Mr. Clinton, as was his wont, chose to see the scandal in terms of saving himself rather than his country and his party. He should have resigned and allowed Al Gore to succeed to the presidency.

If he had done the honorable thing, this country would not now be an international pariah because of a pre-emptive war of choice in the Middle East. Nor would we be saddled with an ever-growing deficit, a government run by crony capitalists, looming environmental disasters and, perhaps worst of all, increasing racial divisions.

Marshall De Bruhl
Asheville, N.C., Sept. 29, 2005

Here.

Ingrate, n. One who receives a benefit from another, or is otherwise an object of charity.

"All men are ingrates," sneered the cynic. "Nay,"
The good philanthropist replied;
"I did great service to a man one day
Who never since has cursed me to repay,
Nor vilified."

"Ho!" cried the cynic, "lead me to him straight—
With veneration I am overcome,
And fain would have his blessing." "Sad your fate—
He cannot bless you, for I grieve to state
The man is dumb."
Ariel Selp.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

President Bush has nominated Harriet Miers, a longtime friend and confidante, to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the United States Supreme Court. See here. Miers wasn't on my radar screen, and I don't know much about her, but I'm keeping an open mind. She appears to have had a successful career as a practicing attorney. She has never been a judge, although it's not unprecedented for a judicially inexperienced attorney to be named to the Court. (Neither Earl Warren nor William Rehnquist, both of whom served as chief justice, had judicial experience upon being nominated.) Many conservatives are freaking out over the Miers nomination. See here. I would urge them to settle down. Yes, there's a lot at stake, but let's not leap to conclusions. So far, I have seen nothing that troubles me about the nominee, except her age (60). President Bush should have nominated someone much younger. I do like the fact that Miers is a native Texan.

Addendum: Michelle Malkin is collecting links. See here. The reaction among conservatives is almost universally negative. I don't understand why. Some say they don't trust President Bush. Why not? He knows Miers well. He knows what kind of justice she will be. I also think there's some snobbishness involved. Miers is not an Ivy Leaguer, like John Roberts. She didn't clerk for a Supreme Court justice. She hasn't been a law professor. So what. She brings something just as important to the Court, namely, real-world legal experience. She's a practitioner, not a professor or a theorist. Law professors, especially those who have never practiced, tend to take an external view of the law, which inclines them to manipulate it. Practicing attorneys take an internal view of the law, which inclines them to respect it. As for this nomination being a case of cronyism, who cares? President Bush knows and trusts Harriet Miers. Should he have nominated someone he doesn't know or trust?

Addendum 2: These people are acting like snobs, which will only confirm the leftist belief that conservatives are elitists. One contributor is appalled that President Bush didn't nominate a blueblood. Please. We just got that with John Roberts. Do we want a cookie-cutter Court? Justice Miers will bring common sense, real-world experience, and judicial craftsmanship, rather than high theory, to the Court. I have seen nothing in her record that concerns me. Nothing.

Addendum 3: It occurs to me that many conservatives, especially those with academic credentials, have bought into the Dworkinian idea that the Supreme Court is made up of Herculean philosopher-kings whose task is to make the law the best it can be by some external moral standard. I reject this conception of judging, as should any right-thinking person. The law is not a plaything, to be manipulated by ideologues. It has a life, a logic, and an integrity of its own that must be respected.

Addendum 4: University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein weighs in on the nomination here.

Addendum 5: I'm pleased to see that not all conservatives are freaking out over the Miers nomination. See here.

It truly saddens me that The New York Times, which I once thought of as a great newspaper, has become a propaganda organ for the Left. See here. Did the Times think that it could preserve its reputation, credibility, respectability, and authority while going partisan? That violates Keith's Law. Nobody gets to break this law with impunity, although many—including journalists, economists, natural scientists, and philosophers—have tried.

The vast majority of people in the United States are religious. Most of them are Christians. See here. And yet, among the elites, religion is despised. If this were all, it might not be so bad, since the attitude of despising someone or something need not be expressed; but there is real hostility toward religion and toward the religious in the academy. Perhaps this has always been the case, but it seems more pronounced today. Atheists are becoming aggressive and uncivil. Has anyone else come to the same conclusion?

Many atheists appear to believe that only the unintelligent can believe in a supernatural being. Why, then, are 40% of scientists religious? See here. I don’t have hard data, but I suspect that at least half the members of the American Philosophical Association are theists. Suppose only 20% were. Wouldn’t that refute the proposition that religiosity and intelligence are correlated—for surely the members of the APA are among the most intelligent in the population? What can’t be disputed is that some of the greatest minds in the history of the world were receptive to the idea of a supernatural being. Nobody can dispute the intellectual greatness of Thomas Aquinas, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, John Locke, or Immanuel Kant. Yet all of them were devoutly religious. When atheists say (or imply) that there is a correlation between religiosity and intelligence, they are being stupid.

Another common mistake is thinking that Darwinian natural selection is incompatible with religious belief. Darwin didn’t think so (see here); why should anyone else? Take Darwinian natural selection just as it is. Add God. God created the world and everything in it. God created the laws of nature, including the laws of natural selection. God had a purpose in doing so. Perhaps certain accounts of human origins (such as that described in Genesis) are incompatible with Darwinism, but those accounts don’t exhaust religion. Nor must a Christian take them literally. Richard Swinburne of Oxford University is a high-powered, scientifically trained analytic philosopher. He accepts Darwinian natural selection. He’s also a Christian. And yet, if you listen to certain prominent atheists, you would believe that anyone who both accepts Darwinism and believes in a supernatural being has a bad case of cognitive dissonance.

I’m curious. Has anyone noted the academic hostility I’m talking about? If so, please describe it in a comment to this post. Name names. Provide links or citations. There is no place for hostility in the academy—as we are constantly being told by the PC crowd when it comes to race, sex, and sexuality. Perhaps if those who express hostility toward religion are exposed, they’ll stop being uncivil. By the way, I’m an atheist. I respect theists. Many of my friends are theists. I particularly admire Christians, who have given me the gift of Western civilization. I’m what the philosopher William Rowe calls a “friendly atheist.” A friendly atheist is an atheist who believes that a person can be justified in believing in God. Let’s be clear: Theism and atheism cannot both be true, for the latter is the denial of the former. But they can both be justified.* Belief in God is underdetermined by the data. Put differently, the world as we know and experience it is compatible both with God and with no God.

Addendum: That Darwin was an atheist as well as a Darwinist does not show that he was an atheist because he was a Darwinist, much less that he thought Darwinism committed him, logically, to being an atheist. I’m an atheist and a Darwinist, like Darwin. I could just as easily be a theist and a Darwinist, like Swinburne. If you have evidence that Darwin thought theism and natural selection incompatible, i.e., that he thought natural selection logically entails atheism, please bring it to my attention.

* “Two contrary opinions cannot both be true; but they can be both well founded in the minds of their more rational believers. A well thought out case, a well argued case, a well founded case, is not necessarily a true case. If it were, the regrettable consequence would follow that Ptolemy never had a well founded judgement that the sun goes round the earth. Whereas he certainly had a much better founded judgement that the sun goes round the earth than most of us have that the earth goes round the sun.” (Richard Robinson, “Argument and Moral Argument,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 70 [July 1961]: 426-9, at 427)

Here is Tom Graffagnino's latest poem.

To the Editor:

Re "Go Ahead and Drive Less, if You Can" (Week in Review, Sept. 25):

As a writer and editor of corporate, training, medical and technical communications, I confront an inexcusable waste of gas: the increasing refusal by various companies to allow telecommuting, even by independent contractors like me with decades of experience and fully equipped home offices.

Companies nonchalantly eliminate the best candidates by insisting that they work on-site (no exceptions even for disabilities) simply to keep an eye on them.

Having written happily for a corporate training firm in the Netherlands, declined work from a technical-medical publisher in South Korea and received inquiries from a real estate company in India, I know that foreign competitors show far more sense.

Imagine the energy savings if federal legislation made telecommuting the rule for certain job categories (outsourced or otherwise), requiring companies in each case to prove instead that on-site work was necessary.

Janice M. Cauwels
Maywood, N.J., Sept. 26, 2005

Gail Collins, editorial-page editor of The New York Times, admits today (see here) that the Times's correction policy has not been enforced. Frank Rich violated it. Paul Krugman violated it. Note that Krugman asked not to have to make a correction. What is his problem? If you get something wrong, say so. Taking responsibility for his errors won't undermine Krugman's credibility. If anything, it will enhance it. But maybe he doesn't care about his credibility. One needs credibility only to persuade those who don't already share one's beliefs or values. I think Krugman writes for those who already agree with him (i.e., whose minds are turned off). Goodness knows, his shrill, partisan rhetoric would never persuade anyone who doesn't agree with him.

Addendum: See here for Donald Luskin's take. Had it not been for Don, Collins might never have acted. She seems as stubborn and deceitful as Krugman.

King, n. A male person commonly known in America as a "crowned head," although he never wears a crown and has usually no head to speak of.

A king, in times long, long gone by,
Said to his lazy jester:
"If I were you and you were I
My moments merrily would fly—
No care nor grief to pester."

"The reason, Sire, that you would thrive,"
The fool said—"if you'll hear it—
Is that of all the fools alive
Who own you for their sovereign, I've
The most forgiving spirit."
Oogum Bem.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

Here is a story about Senator Hillary Clinton. I'm still puzzled by the belief that she's a leftist. She's a moderate. She's never been a leftist. Those who think she's a leftist simply ignore her positions on issues such as national defense, immigration, and capital punishment. Do you think leftists are happy with these positions? How can she be a leftist if she supports a strong military, wants to enforce immigration laws, and believes that murderers deserve to die? Also, keep in mind that she has never (to my knowledge) advocated a single-payer health-care system. Her health-care plan in the early 1990s was designed to ensure that all Americans have adequate health care, but it did not call for the sort of coercive system Canada has. It was to be a hodge-podge of public and private plans and partnerships, and there would have been no restrictions on the health care one can receive if one is willing and able to pay for it. When I look at Hillary, I see me. I think it's quite possible—even likely—that she'll be conservative in a few years.

Addendum: I am sick to death of the claim, which I continue to hear, that nothing Hillary says or does can be taken at face value. What the hell else is there to go by? Those who say that everything she says or does is calculated merely to get her elected president are letting their cynicism get the better of them. Some degree of cynicism is appropriate, even healthy, especially toward politicians, but dismissing or reinterpreting everything a person says or does goes too far. In fact, it becomes a closed system. If I believe that Hillary is ruthless, then I interpret everything she says or does as evidence of her ruthlessness. She votes to enforce immigration laws? Aha! She's doing it to make herself appear to be moderate (or conservative). She votes for the war in Iraq? Aha! She's doing it to make herself appear to be moderate (or conservative). She hangs around with Newt Gingrich? Aha! She's doing it to make herself appear to be moderate (or conservative). If you believe that Hillary is a leftist, then you must allow for evidence that undercuts the belief; otherwise, your belief that she's a leftist is dogmatic. I hate dogmatism.

Here.

Realism, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Here.

To the Editor:

I was shocked, shocked to see the parade of Democrats, liberals and progressives gloat and condemn Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, merely because he was indicted (letters, Sept. 30).

The traditional viewing of an indictment as a mere accusation, not constituting evidence; obtained after secret proceedings by grand jurors often under the thumb of the prosecutor (insert "ham sandwich" line here); and setting the stage for a jury trial in which the state has the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt and at which the defense is entitled to present evidence seems to be gone with the wind.

Peter Lushing
New York, Sept. 30, 2005
The writer is a professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Homer's Ithaca has been found. See here. (Thanks to my former student Carlos Serda for the link.)