It is entirely possible, and ultimately not even intellectually contradictory, to be supportive of a Constitutional right and simultaneously repelled by its exercise. To pick an example from another arena, one can strongly support the right of the Nazis to have a parade but be really, really offended by that same parade when it is actually held. Or, supporting the exclusionary rule limiting the way police conduct searches does not mean that one is particularly glad when apparently guilty people do not receive prison sentences for their crimes.
So too with abortion -- one can say, "Yes, a woman has a right to have this procedure, and damn, is it an icky and morally ambiguous procedure to have -- which is why neither I nor the government have the authority to make that awful choice for the woman in question."
In my recent experiences in Italy, I took note of the infrastructure and urban layout of homes and workplaces because, well, that's an interesting thing to observe. Bear in mind that Italy got to rebuild a lot of its cities and infrastructure essentially from scratch after World War II, aided by a lot of Marshall Plan money, and has gone from a marginal economic case pre-war to one of the leading industrial and economic powers of the contemporary world. So unlike us, they got an opportunity to build their cities to suit, although I wouldn't want to have gone through what they did in order to get that opportunity.
A lot of Italy is rural, pastoral, farmland and used as such, with small villages housing the people who service those agricultural areas (not necessarily the owners themselves). A lot of it is rugged hills and mountains, unsuitable for more than tiny villages.
The bulk of the people there live in communes of various sizes, ranging from large villages of a few thousand to world-class cities like Rome and Milan. The larger cities have suburbs and exurbs, perhaps with more famous names than in the USA but suburbs and exurbs all the same. Pistoia was once an object of contention and warfare for the Florentines, but now it's a place where housing is more affordable than in crowded and dense Florence, where a lot of the jobs are.
So there are commuter trains servicing these cities, but there are also a lot of autostrada and superstrada linking these cities to their satellite communities. As here, a lot of people drive to work every day instead of taking public transportation or living near where they work -- in part because there is only so much infrastructure, in part because the infrastructure is not always efficient or convenient, and in part because housing in the central urban areas is significantly more expensive than it is in outlying regions.
Also as here, there is a mix of industrial and service-based jobs, and particularly the industrial jobs are not located so much in the central business districts of a lot of the cities (those are reserved for financial, governmental, and tourism activities either by law or by economic pressure) but generally in the outskirts of the cities and near the infrastructure which supports it.
The result is not the "greenbelted" cities urbanites once dreamed of, but "graybelted" cities with their outer rings being the unattractive heavy and medium industries on the outside, a middle ring of mostly medium-density residential buildings (think apartment blocks or condominiums) and businesses servicing the residential needs of the inhabitants like retail stores and auto repair shops, and a central business district (we'd call them "downtowns") where the more prestigious white-collar jobs as well as the tourism and high-end urban housing can be found. Italy being Italy, the central business districts are as much historical as modern in appearance, but the industrial graybelt and the residential belt, pretty much everything is postwar construction and the bulk of it is from the 1960's or later, when Italy's economy really began to take off.
The most interesting analogue to Trumwill's point, though, is that there are a considerable number of people who will have a job at one point in the outer graybelt, but live in a different part of the residential belt entirely, with little access to public transportation to get from A to B (or A to C, if the spouse works as in most younger families these days). This requires the use of cars instead of busses or urban light rail or commuter rails.
Densely packing jobs into central business districts creates horrendous traffic, both for ingress and egress, and within the CBD itself. Europeans compensate for this by walking around their CBD's more than Americans would, but they also have more restrictions on auto use in their CBD's so it may not be a matter of choice. The cities are older and laid out on traditional lines; only rarely has a city been re-designed with traffic flow as a significant consideration and only the centers of cities seem to follow grids. The historical and cultural reasons for that are fascinating but off point here.
The pricing effect of all this is to push most middle-income earners out of the CBDs and deny them reasonable housing choices near their industrial jobs in the graybelts. The housing that strikes a reasonable balance between quality, price, and proximity to the services that make residential life livable, is all in the middle belt; the closer to the center you get, the more you're going to have to pay and therefore the more out of reach that kind of housing becomes for most people.
Allow me to echo my friend Trumwill: doing what you love is great, if you can pay the bills too. To attain happiness, one must meet at least minimum thresholds in a number of areas (see Maslow's hierarchy) and if you have to live in a crappy apartment and eat Ramen noodles all your life, your happiness quotient is going to top out no matter how intellectually fascinating your career path may be.
For every Spike Lee, how many other film students washed out of the entertainment industry and became insurance adjusters to pay the bills? It's possible to make a very good living and have a lot of success doing the things you love.
The model is professional athletics, Hoop Dreams style: how many kids even get to the level where a dream of being a professional athlete is even realistic to pursue, and of them, how many actually get there?
By all means try out what you really enjoy for a while to see if you're going to be one of those lucky few who has what it takes to make it big. Keep your eyes open and unsentimental about what it really takes to make it big if you're serious about it.
Picking the right path is a balancing act with many factors to balance, and money is one of those factors.
Pragmatism isn't particularly sexy. It involves compromise and intellectual flexibility, accepting unpopular and unpleasant dimensions to policies, and maybe worst of all, admitting that all you can really do about some kinds of problems is ameliorate them because they cannot be "solved."
So when you approach an issue pragmatically, those who have bought in to an ideology will dismiss your pragmatic approach as being from the other tribe, and dismiss you entirely. Ask a conservative -- she will tell you that a "pragmatist" is a "liberal" in disguise and therefore has nothing new or worthwhile to contribute to a discussion about whatever particular issue is on the floor. Ask a liberal -- he will tell you that a "pragmatist" is in league with the big corporations and the military, and therefore has nothing new or worthwhile to contribute to a discussion about whatever particular issue is on the floor. Ask a libertarian -- she will tell you that a "pragmatist" is really a "statist" and so on and so on and so on.
Ideology gives the amateur political policy interloqutor a set of problems to diagnose, a set of solutions to those problems, and a package of justifications for them. It's prepackaged and easy to use. It contains a promise of coherence and ultimate simplicity. Ideology not only divides the world into US and THEM, it assigns blame for the ongoing problems of X, Y, and Z to THEM, and offers a solution -- THEY should become more like US. This also gives a psychological balm to assure the ideologue's deep insecurities -- I don't want X, Y, or Z to happen to me, and as long as I'm not like THEM, it's less likely they will. Plus, there is more psychological balm that comes from being included in a group. This is part of why ideology is sexy.
My question is, how do you break someone out of this feedback loop? If you are in US, criticism of the unifying ideology or its policy implications will brand you as a traitor and you will be cast out (e.g., Bruce Bartlett); if you are one of THEM (that is, not US), then you will be dismissed as having nothing new or worthwhile to contribute to a discussion about whatever particular issue is on the floor. Even a practical demonstration of the failure of an ideologically-motivated policy will be dismissed by the true believer.
The world of law is built upon the infrastructure of the USPS. State-level civil litigation would utterly collapse without the post office; federal-level civil litigation requires the post office for all litigants initially and any litigant who lacks a computer. If the cost of delivery of my work product jumped from $.44 to $5.40 for a two-day FedEx, that would have a significant impact on my bottom line and my clients would whine even more than they do now about my high bills. FedEx is for fixing things when deadlines get missed and I get upset when I have to use it.
What matters is that the President review the bill which Congress passes and indicate his approval or disapproval of it in some permanent, recordable sort of way which other people can later objectively verify to determine if bill “X” was or was not thus approved into law.
But if that's not good enough for you, well, I may as well stick with the first argument, which at least had the benefit of being moderately amusing.
It certainly could be. But as long as local school districts are tethered to the states that ultimately regulate and control them, they will only have so much latitude in which to "compete" with one another, and in practice the apparently large supply of teachers compete with one another for the relatively scarce supply of jobs so intensely that the school districts would be foolish not to take advantage of that.
No it doesn't. As you know, I'm not much of a fan of changing the subject.
The proposition on the table here is not "Was Lincoln [or the USA] morally justified in using prolonged military force to prevent the secession of the south?" It isn't about Lincoln at all. The proposition on the table is "Next to George Washington, Bobby Lee was our greatest American." So please, let's keep the focus of your inquiry where it began -- the moral worthiness, or lack thereof, of Robert E. Lee and in particular his actions from 1861 to 1865 (and to a lesser but not insignificant extent, his subsequent career as a revisionist historian).
Whatever his other moral qualities, Lee fought for the creation of a nation that would have rendered slavery part of its fundamental law. Such a man is not worthy of so august an honor as that which you purported to assign to him.
Lee may be admirable as a tactician and for his skills as a professional soldier (he opted out of taking political office in the CSA) and leader of men. He possessed remarkable charisma, which resonates through the ages, and a fine mind with a good sense for history. Had some improbable political settlement of the slavery issue been found, he would likely have been an ornament to the U.S. military and served proudly. But that's not how it happened. How it happened is a civil war broke out, one with good guys and bad guys, and Lee chose to side with the bad guys.
Similar things could be said about Erwin Rommel (other than the choice to fight for the other side part). Just as there is not any such thing as a "good Nazi," there was not any such thing as a "good Confederate." The best one could say of Rommel was that he was "not quite as bad as the rest of the Nazis" but that is damning Rommel with faint praise and I'm not certain it would have been accurate anyway. One might claim that Lee was "not really all that concerned about slavery or politics," or "went along with slavery because he thought it was part of a larger package in which the good outweighed the bad," and those claims might or might not hold up to analysis. But that is also not the claim on the table. To cast Lee as a hero and to hold up his memory an object of veneration is a significant moral error.
To me, Lee is a tragic waste. So much potential, so much ability, so much intelligence, so much energy, which could and should have made America greater, sooner. Instead, he allowed a misguided sense of honor and ideology (getting back to the original post) to pervert all of that human power into prosecuting a morally indefensible cause.
I don't understand the ethic that because person A is morally imperfect, the equivalent or greater moral imperfections of personnel should be overlooked or forgiven.
Washington fought for freedom. Lee fought for slavery. That is the overriding factor in this moral calculus.
While I find it difficult to look at any war and be truly gladdened that it occurred, I find it similarly difficult to be saddened that a country—my country! How can a part of me not rise up in love at the thought that my country sacrificed so much for such an end?—stood firm and prevented the creation of a neighboring state with the founding premise that the white man is inherently superior and chattel slavery of Africans is the natural, and right order of things.
This surely must be the most David Foster Wallace-esque sentence I've read in a week. I'm guilty of the same sort of parenthetical indulgences.
Not having read Foote in his entirety I am ill-equipped to comment on the theme of increasing cynicism about honor and the acceptance of Grant's blunt and bloody tactics as a means to an end. I am reminded, however, of a passage in Macchiavelli's infamous Chapter 17 of The Prince:
I say that every prince ought to desire to be considered clement and not cruel. Nevertheless he ought to take care not to misuse this clemency. Cesare Borgia was considered cruel; notwithstanding, his cruelty reconciled the Romagna, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty. And if this be rightly considered, he will be seen to have been much more merciful than the Florentine people, who, to avoid a reputation for cruelty, permitted Pistoia to be destroyed. Therefore a prince, so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal, ought not to mind the reproach of cruelty; because with a few examples he will be more merciful than those who, through too much mercy, allow disorders to arise, from which follow murders or robberies; for these are wont to injure the whole people, whilst those executions which originate with a prince offend the individual only.
This difference in focus between micro-morality and macro-morality also strikes me as at least harmonizing with the tension between deontological and utilitarian ethics; without finding an appropriate balance between both, even the pursuit of good morality leads to results that can only be condemned. From what you describe, surely there is resonance between Macchiavelli's praise for the brutal Cesare Borgia and Foote casting Grant the Butcher as the hero, because they both ended conflicts when more "moral" attempts to do so had previously failed and merely prolonged chaos and violence.
I'm not sure where all this anger is coming from in your many posts, Aziz. If I misunderstood or misstated your position above, it was not my intent to do that and if that was the result, and you have my apology for that. [EDIT] Sorry, That wasn't strong enough. I did misunderstand and misstate your position. Arguing that being accused of bigotry is not all that bad is not the same thing as arguing that being accused of bigotry is not as bad as being the victim of bigotry. You have my apology for that.
While I think this thread is mostly played out and I for one am ready to move on to other things, I'm nevertheless interested in what you have to say and I hope you will consider my responses to your various points productively.
I do not think that "tone" is the most important thing in an argument. I say that substance is the most important thing. I do maintain that it is not productive to merely react emotionally to an argument you dislike. One ought to bring something substantive to the table if one chooses to respond to something with which one disagrees. If disputes are to bring us closer to the truth, they must engage on their merits.
One need not insult one's interlocutor in order to firmly and clearly argue against that person's contentions. An insult is typically counterproductive to the discussion's productivity and its persuasive power. There is a difference between "groveling for acceptance" and "refraining from insult." One need not downplay or soft-pedal one's argument while providing substance to it -- indeed, an argument with evidentiary and logical substance is the most powerful kind that can be offered.
5. Vagueness and ambiguity (what is a "long form" birth certificate?)
6. Article IV, Section 4 -- "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government" which would seem to suggest that voters can vote for whom they choose without unreasonable barriers imposed by the state against the exercise of their franchise.
7. Article II, Section 1 -- Eligibility clause; the law places an unreasonable barrier against a natural-born citizen from standing for election.
8. 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause -- all eligible citizens should be equally able to stand for election.
Productive argument imposes duties on both sides of a dispute.
My original post was a call for people to listen to the substance of what someone else offers in an argument, and to fashion their responses to address that substance. It was a reaction to people not reading arguments from a position of charity or with an eye to understanding what was actually being offered, and responding to what they incorrectly felt was being argued with vacuous invective.
The other extreme is hinted at by Aziz Ishak's comment, which is that "I should be able to say whatever I want, however I want it, and it is your duty to sift through my inarticulate mess of a proposition and interpret me in the best and most persuasive possible light." That isn't as far as Aziz actually goes in his statement, but it's where the road he's going down ends.
This is not correct, either. The proponent seeking to accomplish something must clearly articulate what is being proposed. Successful persuasion of others requires translation of one's raw ideas into expressions which the target audience will find persuasive. This is not censorship or even self-censorship. It's advocacy. Of course, if you don't care about being persuasive, then feel free to disregard the manner in which you express yourself. But otherwise, have a care for not only saying what is right, but also for how you say it.
Aziz Ishak's actual statement is that being called a racist or a bigot just plain isn't so bad. He's right from a logical perspective, but as we've seen over the past two days, logic is not the only level upon which people operate. There is a very high degree of moral opprobrium attached with attitudes of racism and bigotry in our culture. For the most part, our (relatively recent) cultural condemnation of bigotry has been a good thing.
So I think it's appropriate that, for instance, Tim defend himself against claims that he is a bigot, or more precisely, that his post advocated bigoted ideas. That's a nasty rock to have thrown at you and not responding in some way to it can create the impression that you willingly accept the moral opprobrium associated with racism. (If you want to see what real anti-Muslim bigotry looks like, take a look at some comments offered in response to one of my recent posts.)
It's also the case that one person throwing that rock tends to end the discussion. It's not hard to find instances of people who simply shut down and stop listening when they perceive racism. I can point to examples in this very discussion thread of people who simply will not listen to something that they perceive to be bigoted. Logically there is no reason to categorically terminate an argument because a disputant has offered a major premise that addresses issues of race, religion, national identity, and so on, the logical response to such a thing is to refute that premise. As we have seen, it's seductively easy for people to respond emotionally rather than logically to arguments that touch on these sensitive areas.
If you call me a "racist", you are using an appeal to emotion not to win the argument but rather to end it. So, I should strive to articulate myself in a fashion that does not render me vulnerable to accusations of racism, and you should not use a hair-trigger accusation of racism to avoid substantively responding to my argument. If we are to have a productive argument, both duties apply.
So say what you choose to say. I hope, though, that you will choose the path of productive argumentation instead of either the path of hysterical emotion or the path of provocative callousness.
If you insist on adding that label to a discussion, can I at least persuade you that merely calling an argument bigoted, no matter how accurate that label might be, fails to actually refute the proposition? Compare:
Pro: Muslims eat roasted babies. Salim is a Muslim, therefore, he too eats roasted babies.
Res: You're a racist!
with
Pro: Muslims eat roasted babies. Salim is a Muslim, therefore, he too eats roasted babies.
Res: Muslims don't eat babies, and you're a racist for saying that!
Can you please do at least that much? (Even then, what people will hear is "You're a racist" and not "Muslims don't eat babies," but at least your own statements will contain something that logically advances the argument.)
There is fourth meaning, however, which you probably ought to avoid, despite the fact that it was a generally accepted use of the English language at one time.
If the logical leap from P to Q is incorrect, then your response should be to refute the major premise:
Pro: Muslims eat roasted babies. Salim is a Muslim, therefore, he too eats roasted babies.
Res: But it is not correct that Muslims eat roasted babies. Islam abhors cannibalism as an atrocity. You can't draw that conclusion about Salim based on his religion. If Salim is a Muslim and he truly does eat babies, then he is deviating from the teachings of his religion, not following them.
That's not good enough for you? You have to go the extra step and say "...and you're a bigot for suggesting what you did"? Then you have to go the extra step beyond that an say "...and the website where twelve other people post is guilty of bigotry by association with you?" What does that add to the discussion?
Oh, I don't know. Canada has had a fragmented, minority government there for quite some time, with the PM teetering on the brink of disaster every time he turns around and one of its largest provinces consistently threatening to break away and provoke a civil war over the continued viability of its national union in conflict with cultural and linguistic separatism, and concession of functional political autonomy to the ethnic and linguistically separate residents of the near-breakaway province of Nunavit. What's more, the religious conservatives seem to be gaining power. Not to mention that scary socialized medicine they've got up there. Really, it's been nothing but problems since they found that oil.
On “Questions about abortion become less complicated as long as you refuse to recognize that they’re complicated”
It is entirely possible, and ultimately not even intellectually contradictory, to be supportive of a Constitutional right and simultaneously repelled by its exercise. To pick an example from another arena, one can strongly support the right of the Nazis to have a parade but be really, really offended by that same parade when it is actually held. Or, supporting the exclusionary rule limiting the way police conduct searches does not mean that one is particularly glad when apparently guilty people do not receive prison sentences for their crimes.
So too with abortion -- one can say, "Yes, a woman has a right to have this procedure, and damn, is it an icky and morally ambiguous procedure to have -- which is why neither I nor the government have the authority to make that awful choice for the woman in question."
On “Lebron James Is Only What You Want Him To Be”
Is LeBron James to the Cleveland Cavaliers as Brett Favre is to the Green Bay Packers? If not, why is the perceived ethical calculus different?
On “The Car & The City”
In my recent experiences in Italy, I took note of the infrastructure and urban layout of homes and workplaces because, well, that's an interesting thing to observe. Bear in mind that Italy got to rebuild a lot of its cities and infrastructure essentially from scratch after World War II, aided by a lot of Marshall Plan money, and has gone from a marginal economic case pre-war to one of the leading industrial and economic powers of the contemporary world. So unlike us, they got an opportunity to build their cities to suit, although I wouldn't want to have gone through what they did in order to get that opportunity.
A lot of Italy is rural, pastoral, farmland and used as such, with small villages housing the people who service those agricultural areas (not necessarily the owners themselves). A lot of it is rugged hills and mountains, unsuitable for more than tiny villages.
The bulk of the people there live in communes of various sizes, ranging from large villages of a few thousand to world-class cities like Rome and Milan. The larger cities have suburbs and exurbs, perhaps with more famous names than in the USA but suburbs and exurbs all the same. Pistoia was once an object of contention and warfare for the Florentines, but now it's a place where housing is more affordable than in crowded and dense Florence, where a lot of the jobs are.
So there are commuter trains servicing these cities, but there are also a lot of autostrada and superstrada linking these cities to their satellite communities. As here, a lot of people drive to work every day instead of taking public transportation or living near where they work -- in part because there is only so much infrastructure, in part because the infrastructure is not always efficient or convenient, and in part because housing in the central urban areas is significantly more expensive than it is in outlying regions.
Also as here, there is a mix of industrial and service-based jobs, and particularly the industrial jobs are not located so much in the central business districts of a lot of the cities (those are reserved for financial, governmental, and tourism activities either by law or by economic pressure) but generally in the outskirts of the cities and near the infrastructure which supports it.
The result is not the "greenbelted" cities urbanites once dreamed of, but "graybelted" cities with their outer rings being the unattractive heavy and medium industries on the outside, a middle ring of mostly medium-density residential buildings (think apartment blocks or condominiums) and businesses servicing the residential needs of the inhabitants like retail stores and auto repair shops, and a central business district (we'd call them "downtowns") where the more prestigious white-collar jobs as well as the tourism and high-end urban housing can be found. Italy being Italy, the central business districts are as much historical as modern in appearance, but the industrial graybelt and the residential belt, pretty much everything is postwar construction and the bulk of it is from the 1960's or later, when Italy's economy really began to take off.
The most interesting analogue to Trumwill's point, though, is that there are a considerable number of people who will have a job at one point in the outer graybelt, but live in a different part of the residential belt entirely, with little access to public transportation to get from A to B (or A to C, if the spouse works as in most younger families these days). This requires the use of cars instead of busses or urban light rail or commuter rails.
Densely packing jobs into central business districts creates horrendous traffic, both for ingress and egress, and within the CBD itself. Europeans compensate for this by walking around their CBD's more than Americans would, but they also have more restrictions on auto use in their CBD's so it may not be a matter of choice. The cities are older and laid out on traditional lines; only rarely has a city been re-designed with traffic flow as a significant consideration and only the centers of cities seem to follow grids. The historical and cultural reasons for that are fascinating but off point here.
The pricing effect of all this is to push most middle-income earners out of the CBDs and deny them reasonable housing choices near their industrial jobs in the graybelts. The housing that strikes a reasonable balance between quality, price, and proximity to the services that make residential life livable, is all in the middle belt; the closer to the center you get, the more you're going to have to pay and therefore the more out of reach that kind of housing becomes for most people.
On “Meanderings on the Liberal Arts Education and Humanities Major”
Allow me to echo my friend Trumwill: doing what you love is great, if you can pay the bills too. To attain happiness, one must meet at least minimum thresholds in a number of areas (see Maslow's hierarchy) and if you have to live in a crappy apartment and eat Ramen noodles all your life, your happiness quotient is going to top out no matter how intellectually fascinating your career path may be.
For every Spike Lee, how many other film students washed out of the entertainment industry and became insurance adjusters to pay the bills? It's possible to make a very good living and have a lot of success doing the things you love.
The model is professional athletics, Hoop Dreams style: how many kids even get to the level where a dream of being a professional athlete is even realistic to pursue, and of them, how many actually get there?
By all means try out what you really enjoy for a while to see if you're going to be one of those lucky few who has what it takes to make it big. Keep your eyes open and unsentimental about what it really takes to make it big if you're serious about it.
Picking the right path is a balancing act with many factors to balance, and money is one of those factors.
On “Somalia and Binary Thinking”
Pragmatism isn't particularly sexy. It involves compromise and intellectual flexibility, accepting unpopular and unpleasant dimensions to policies, and maybe worst of all, admitting that all you can really do about some kinds of problems is ameliorate them because they cannot be "solved."
So when you approach an issue pragmatically, those who have bought in to an ideology will dismiss your pragmatic approach as being from the other tribe, and dismiss you entirely. Ask a conservative -- she will tell you that a "pragmatist" is a "liberal" in disguise and therefore has nothing new or worthwhile to contribute to a discussion about whatever particular issue is on the floor. Ask a liberal -- he will tell you that a "pragmatist" is in league with the big corporations and the military, and therefore has nothing new or worthwhile to contribute to a discussion about whatever particular issue is on the floor. Ask a libertarian -- she will tell you that a "pragmatist" is really a "statist" and so on and so on and so on.
Ideology gives the amateur political policy interloqutor a set of problems to diagnose, a set of solutions to those problems, and a package of justifications for them. It's prepackaged and easy to use. It contains a promise of coherence and ultimate simplicity. Ideology not only divides the world into US and THEM, it assigns blame for the ongoing problems of X, Y, and Z to THEM, and offers a solution -- THEY should become more like US. This also gives a psychological balm to assure the ideologue's deep insecurities -- I don't want X, Y, or Z to happen to me, and as long as I'm not like THEM, it's less likely they will. Plus, there is more psychological balm that comes from being included in a group. This is part of why ideology is sexy.
My question is, how do you break someone out of this feedback loop? If you are in US, criticism of the unifying ideology or its policy implications will brand you as a traitor and you will be cast out (e.g., Bruce Bartlett); if you are one of THEM (that is, not US), then you will be dismissed as having nothing new or worthwhile to contribute to a discussion about whatever particular issue is on the floor. Even a practical demonstration of the failure of an ideologically-motivated policy will be dismissed by the true believer.
On “The Post Office’s Problems Aren’t Its Employee Costs”
The world of law is built upon the infrastructure of the USPS. State-level civil litigation would utterly collapse without the post office; federal-level civil litigation requires the post office for all litigants initially and any litigant who lacks a computer. If the cost of delivery of my work product jumped from $.44 to $5.40 for a two-day FedEx, that would have a significant impact on my bottom line and my clients would whine even more than they do now about my high bills. FedEx is for fixing things when deadlines get missed and I get upset when I have to use it.
On “The Percentage Sign as a Signaling Device”
I was just trying to have a little light-hearted fun. No offense intended, BlaiseP.
On “Secret Trials, Secret Laws”
I thought I did:
What matters is that the President review the bill which Congress passes and indicate his approval or disapproval of it in some permanent, recordable sort of way which other people can later objectively verify to determine if bill “X” was or was not thus approved into law.
But if that's not good enough for you, well, I may as well stick with the first argument, which at least had the benefit of being moderately amusing.
On “Introductions and Disclaimers”
I'm not really sure if New Zealand even exists. But a hearty welcome to the (possibly-fictitious) James K nonetheless.
By the way, where have you been hiding these days, Reynolds? I'm seeing a lot of books in the stores; has someone picked up the miniseries option?
On “Beyond Unions”
It certainly could be. But as long as local school districts are tethered to the states that ultimately regulate and control them, they will only have so much latitude in which to "compete" with one another, and in practice the apparently large supply of teachers compete with one another for the relatively scarce supply of jobs so intensely that the school districts would be foolish not to take advantage of that.
"
Tim has re-posted this question on his own blog, where others, as well as I, have responded to it. It's an incisive question, to be sure.
On “The Essay, Reborn”
Well, essays are what we do here, no?
On “Foote’s Civil War, Volume II: Tragedy and Just Causes”
No it doesn't. As you know, I'm not much of a fan of changing the subject.
The proposition on the table here is not "Was Lincoln [or the USA] morally justified in using prolonged military force to prevent the secession of the south?" It isn't about Lincoln at all. The proposition on the table is "Next to George Washington, Bobby Lee was our greatest American." So please, let's keep the focus of your inquiry where it began -- the moral worthiness, or lack thereof, of Robert E. Lee and in particular his actions from 1861 to 1865 (and to a lesser but not insignificant extent, his subsequent career as a revisionist historian).
Whatever his other moral qualities, Lee fought for the creation of a nation that would have rendered slavery part of its fundamental law. Such a man is not worthy of so august an honor as that which you purported to assign to him.
Lee may be admirable as a tactician and for his skills as a professional soldier (he opted out of taking political office in the CSA) and leader of men. He possessed remarkable charisma, which resonates through the ages, and a fine mind with a good sense for history. Had some improbable political settlement of the slavery issue been found, he would likely have been an ornament to the U.S. military and served proudly. But that's not how it happened. How it happened is a civil war broke out, one with good guys and bad guys, and Lee chose to side with the bad guys.
Similar things could be said about Erwin Rommel (other than the choice to fight for the other side part). Just as there is not any such thing as a "good Nazi," there was not any such thing as a "good Confederate." The best one could say of Rommel was that he was "not quite as bad as the rest of the Nazis" but that is damning Rommel with faint praise and I'm not certain it would have been accurate anyway. One might claim that Lee was "not really all that concerned about slavery or politics," or "went along with slavery because he thought it was part of a larger package in which the good outweighed the bad," and those claims might or might not hold up to analysis. But that is also not the claim on the table. To cast Lee as a hero and to hold up his memory an object of veneration is a significant moral error.
To me, Lee is a tragic waste. So much potential, so much ability, so much intelligence, so much energy, which could and should have made America greater, sooner. Instead, he allowed a misguided sense of honor and ideology (getting back to the original post) to pervert all of that human power into prosecuting a morally indefensible cause.
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That should be "person B," not "personnel." Damn, damn, damn this auto-correct function!
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I don't understand the ethic that because person A is morally imperfect, the equivalent or greater moral imperfections of personnel should be overlooked or forgiven.
Washington fought for freedom. Lee fought for slavery. That is the overriding factor in this moral calculus.
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Congratulations on:
This surely must be the most David Foster Wallace-esque sentence I've read in a week. I'm guilty of the same sort of parenthetical indulgences.
Not having read Foote in his entirety I am ill-equipped to comment on the theme of increasing cynicism about honor and the acceptance of Grant's blunt and bloody tactics as a means to an end. I am reminded, however, of a passage in Macchiavelli's infamous Chapter 17 of The Prince:
This difference in focus between micro-morality and macro-morality also strikes me as at least harmonizing with the tension between deontological and utilitarian ethics; without finding an appropriate balance between both, even the pursuit of good morality leads to results that can only be condemned. From what you describe, surely there is resonance between Macchiavelli's praise for the brutal Cesare Borgia and Foote casting Grant the Butcher as the hero, because they both ended conflicts when more "moral" attempts to do so had previously failed and merely prolonged chaos and violence.
On “Contra Tu Quoque, Or, Avoiding The Fourth Response”
I'm not sure where all this anger is coming from in your many posts, Aziz. If I misunderstood or misstated your position above, it was not my intent to do that and if that was the result, and you have my apology for that. [EDIT] Sorry, That wasn't strong enough. I did misunderstand and misstate your position. Arguing that being accused of bigotry is not all that bad is not the same thing as arguing that being accused of bigotry is not as bad as being the victim of bigotry. You have my apology for that.
While I think this thread is mostly played out and I for one am ready to move on to other things, I'm nevertheless interested in what you have to say and I hope you will consider my responses to your various points productively.
I do not think that "tone" is the most important thing in an argument. I say that substance is the most important thing. I do maintain that it is not productive to merely react emotionally to an argument you dislike. One ought to bring something substantive to the table if one chooses to respond to something with which one disagrees. If disputes are to bring us closer to the truth, they must engage on their merits.
One need not insult one's interlocutor in order to firmly and clearly argue against that person's contentions. An insult is typically counterproductive to the discussion's productivity and its persuasive power. There is a difference between "groveling for acceptance" and "refraining from insult." One need not downplay or soft-pedal one's argument while providing substance to it -- indeed, an argument with evidentiary and logical substance is the most powerful kind that can be offered.
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I won't be taking this bait, thank you very much.
On “Pop Quiz”
Responding to the original question, I'll add:
5. Vagueness and ambiguity (what is a "long form" birth certificate?)
6. Article IV, Section 4 -- "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government" which would seem to suggest that voters can vote for whom they choose without unreasonable barriers imposed by the state against the exercise of their franchise.
7. Article II, Section 1 -- Eligibility clause; the law places an unreasonable barrier against a natural-born citizen from standing for election.
8. 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause -- all eligible citizens should be equally able to stand for election.
I'm not sure I see the P&I clause argument.
On “Contra Tu Quoque, Or, Avoiding The Fourth Response”
Productive argument imposes duties on both sides of a dispute.
My original post was a call for people to listen to the substance of what someone else offers in an argument, and to fashion their responses to address that substance. It was a reaction to people not reading arguments from a position of charity or with an eye to understanding what was actually being offered, and responding to what they incorrectly felt was being argued with vacuous invective.
The other extreme is hinted at by Aziz Ishak's comment, which is that "I should be able to say whatever I want, however I want it, and it is your duty to sift through my inarticulate mess of a proposition and interpret me in the best and most persuasive possible light." That isn't as far as Aziz actually goes in his statement, but it's where the road he's going down ends.
This is not correct, either. The proponent seeking to accomplish something must clearly articulate what is being proposed. Successful persuasion of others requires translation of one's raw ideas into expressions which the target audience will find persuasive. This is not censorship or even self-censorship. It's advocacy. Of course, if you don't care about being persuasive, then feel free to disregard the manner in which you express yourself. But otherwise, have a care for not only saying what is right, but also for how you say it.
Aziz Ishak's actual statement is that being called a racist or a bigot just plain isn't so bad. He's right from a logical perspective, but as we've seen over the past two days, logic is not the only level upon which people operate. There is a very high degree of moral opprobrium attached with attitudes of racism and bigotry in our culture. For the most part, our (relatively recent) cultural condemnation of bigotry has been a good thing.
So I think it's appropriate that, for instance, Tim defend himself against claims that he is a bigot, or more precisely, that his post advocated bigoted ideas. That's a nasty rock to have thrown at you and not responding in some way to it can create the impression that you willingly accept the moral opprobrium associated with racism. (If you want to see what real anti-Muslim bigotry looks like, take a look at some comments offered in response to one of my recent posts.)
It's also the case that one person throwing that rock tends to end the discussion. It's not hard to find instances of people who simply shut down and stop listening when they perceive racism. I can point to examples in this very discussion thread of people who simply will not listen to something that they perceive to be bigoted. Logically there is no reason to categorically terminate an argument because a disputant has offered a major premise that addresses issues of race, religion, national identity, and so on, the logical response to such a thing is to refute that premise. As we have seen, it's seductively easy for people to respond emotionally rather than logically to arguments that touch on these sensitive areas.
If you call me a "racist", you are using an appeal to emotion not to win the argument but rather to end it. So, I should strive to articulate myself in a fashion that does not render me vulnerable to accusations of racism, and you should not use a hair-trigger accusation of racism to avoid substantively responding to my argument. If we are to have a productive argument, both duties apply.
So say what you choose to say. I hope, though, that you will choose the path of productive argumentation instead of either the path of hysterical emotion or the path of provocative callousness.
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...And that, folks, is why this issue concerns me so much.
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If you insist on adding that label to a discussion, can I at least persuade you that merely calling an argument bigoted, no matter how accurate that label might be, fails to actually refute the proposition? Compare:
with
Can you please do at least that much? (Even then, what people will hear is "You're a racist" and not "Muslims don't eat babies," but at least your own statements will contain something that logically advances the argument.)
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And, can you call a spade a spade? Yes, but you should be careful.
This is a spade.
So is this.
And this.
You can call those things spades.
There is fourth meaning, however, which you probably ought to avoid, despite the fact that it was a generally accepted use of the English language at one time.
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If the logical leap from P to Q is incorrect, then your response should be to refute the major premise:
That's not good enough for you? You have to go the extra step and say "...and you're a bigot for suggesting what you did"? Then you have to go the extra step beyond that an say "...and the website where twelve other people post is guilty of bigotry by association with you?" What does that add to the discussion?
On “Muslims and the need for reform or, at least, better PR”
Oh, I don't know. Canada has had a fragmented, minority government there for quite some time, with the PM teetering on the brink of disaster every time he turns around and one of its largest provinces consistently threatening to break away and provoke a civil war over the continued viability of its national union in conflict with cultural and linguistic separatism, and concession of functional political autonomy to the ethnic and linguistically separate residents of the near-breakaway province of Nunavit. What's more, the religious conservatives seem to be gaining power. Not to mention that scary socialized medicine they've got up there. Really, it's been nothing but problems since they found that oil.