America the aesthetically unobjectionable

Today we Americans celebrated our common heritage by charring the entrails of hoofed mammals and blowing up quadrants of the sky. As ritual sacrifice goes, it’s all a bit solipsistic and gluttonous, but then so is the nation thus aptly signified.

On Monday, Barack Obama gave his ‘what patriotism means to me’ speech, cleverly completing his long-delayed 4th grade social studies project while simultaneously reassuring heartland America that he is neither a black separatist nor John Kerry. The precise content of this speech wasn’t particularly important, provided the audience understood that Barack Obama loves apple pie, his grandma, puppy dogs, and you, my fellow Americans, you. So put down the pitchfork.

Patriotism, somewhat trivially, means love and loyalty to one’s nation. But this is often far from trivial in the individual case. Is a patriotic citizen of Montreal loyal to Quebec, to Canada – or even to the global Francophony? Where belong the loyalties of refugees in the permanent camps across the river from the West Bank? To the perpetually zygotic Palestinian state? The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan? The Dar al-Islam?

Most Americans enjoy the conceptual luxury of having been born, raised, and indoctrinated within and by the same fairly discrete political entity. But even this doesn’t quite solve the problem. To what, exactly, is a patriotic American loyal? To the government? To a myriad of federal bureaucrats, to a clutch of vain ephemeral politicians, to some monstrously scenic granite forewalls in Washington DC? Or to the history? To George Washington’s wooden teeth, to the pocket contents of Lincoln’s fatal theater jacket, to the hot tub where Franklin Delano Roosevelt expired in a most agreeably patrician manner?

The certified correct answer, of course, is that a patriotic American is loyal to American ideals, just as a patriotic __________ is loyal to __________ ideals. So said Obama on Monday: “patriotism is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people. Instead, it's also loyalty to America's ideals, ideals for which anyone can sacrifice, or defend, or give their last full measure of devotion.”

The mildly Socratic among you have already formulated the next step: what, exactly, are American ideals? Celebrity worship? Cheap gasoline? Equal rights for all, so long as it doesn’t mean that I have to live next door to those people? At this point in the dialectic, serious politicians bleat safely vacant platitudes about freedom, family, and fortune.

And this is all we really expect of our candidates; except for the tin foil hat constituency, none of us really worry that the next president will decide, free-agent style, to go home with the other team at the big diplomatic summit. In political practice, affirmations of patriotism are ultimately about non-weirdness. Obama’s patriotic avowals aren’t promises to avoid defecting to Pakistan or Sweden. They are signals to Middle America that he won’t personally officiate at gay marriages in San Francisco or gleefully pass out bricks at the next big-city race riot.

So for politicians, patriotism actually has little to do with love of country, and everything to do with exhibiting the dispositional profile of your standard Midwestern bank teller. But what about the rest of us? We whose aspirations do not necessitate the adulation of throngs or the sweaty-palmed groping of the levers of power, might patriotism mean anything more to us? Should it? Those are difficult questions. Let’s go have a beer and watch the public shaming of the stars’ obsolete monochromatic twinkle.

the lecture of my dreams

That was really weird.

I'll be lecturing on personal identity this afternoon. I've taught this material twice before, although it's been about a year since the last time. So the prep consists basically of straining to remember how I presented it before (since most of my lecture notes were lost in the Great Harddrive Failure of 2007). As I fell sleep last night, I had started to think about this...

So in my last dream of the night, I was walking into the lecture hall. This itself is odd, since the class only has 10 students. But in my dream, there were now several hundred people in a two-tiered lecture hall. And apparently I hadn't done any preparation. So I had to give the lecture off the top of my head.

This is where it just gets fascinating. I actually did a half-decent job for awhile. I was genuinely giving this lecture, in my dreams. But all of a sudden I could not remember some technical terms ('numerical identity' was one) and I could actually feel myself mentally straining to recover the words. Even odder, I announced the name of some important Principle, but then couldn't remember what it actually says. (It had something to do with Parfit. But now I can't remember what the name was, and I suspect it doesn't actually exist.) Gradually the focus of the dream narrowed from the giant lecture hall to a sheet of paper on the lectern, where I repeatedly tried and failed to write down the forgotten concepts.

Then the cats woke me up, demanding breakfast. Immediately upon waking, I thought numerical identity! and a few other answers. Very quickly, a rough sketch of the lecture structure popped into my mind.

I find this incredibly interesting. I think I actually got to watch my brain recover explicit memories!

the american entrepreneurial spirit

Suppose you are 21 year old man living in Fort Worth Texas and want to start your own record company. But you don't have any money. What do you do?

Answer: you go to your girlfriend's house and steal her mother's checkbook. Then you write out a check to yourself for 360 billion dollars. Because that's probably enough to start a record company, right? Then you go to the bank and cash the check!

Also, when you go to the bank to cash your forged check (worth about 3% of the entire US GDP), make sure that you bring along your gun and your marijuana.

the full story at MSN

what the hell??

I'm putting together a powerpoint for a talk I'm giving next week, and I needed images of a few philosophers. So to Google Image Search I turned. And amongst the results appeared the following:



Yeah. That is Immanuel Kant and a Ford Pinto. What? The image context doesn't help: a car-nut message board topic concerning the "Meanest Looking Car Ever in History". Is the Ford Pinto made more mean-looking by the presence of Kant's gigantic glowering head?


A bit of procrastinatory web searching turns up several plagiarism websites offering "The Ford Pinto and Kant's Categorical Imperative" essays. So here's my hypothesis: some business ethics textbook somewhere uses the Ford Pinto as a case study, and includes this image. (By the way - oh my goodness, do I hope to someday catch an ethics student turning in a plagiarized essay. Oh, I can't imagine what fun I'll have with such a student!)

Does anyone have any better theories about this image? I mean, I know that the Ford Pinto only acted from maxims that could be rationally willed universal, but there must be something more to it. Noumena?

no dandies please, we're american

Well, at least we know that Homeland Security has its priorities in order. If Osama bin Laden shows up in Newark wearing a top hat, he will not be permitted to enter the country!

Last month Sebastian Horsley, a British "dandy" attempting to promote his drugs-and-prostitutes memoir, was denied entry to the United States on grounds of "moral turpitude". Evidently his self-confessed past drug abuse disqualifies him from participation in the visa-less entry program between the United States and United Kingdom.



Or perhaps it's because he says things like this: "Add the platform shoes I sometimes wear, and I’m well over 7 feet tall. I figure most people are born to be talked down to.” (NYT)

Or maybe it's because he decided to commemorate the 2000th anniversary of Christ's death on the cross by travelling to the Philippines and having himself crucified - without anesthetic - and then posting the video on youtube.

Or, possibly, it's because when explaining the difference between himself and Oscar Wilde, he says, "Wilde was an aesthete. Unlike dandies, aesthetes care about food and wine. And they breed. The only place a dandy would push a pram is into the river." (globe and mail)

Whatever the reason, the entire thing is quite ridiculous. To me, he sounds like an irritatingly self-absorbed and useless person. (Which, so far as I can tell, is precisely how he wants to be perceived.) But this hardly seems a reason to deny him entry to the United States. Americans allow Silvio Berlusconi to come and go all the time!

Whatever you think of Horsley, you have to acknowledge the supreme Wildean wit in this, his declaration to Customs officials while being directed to his deportation flight: "I am the only thing of value in your country, and I am removing myself immediately!"

It's 3am. Do you know where your demagogue is?

One bad thing about being in Paris: I'm six hours ahead of EST, so I'll be asleep by the time today's primary results come in. I have to wait until tomorrow morning to find out who won!

But, still, it's a fascinating day. According to Bill Clinton, Hillary is out unless she wins both Ohio and Texas. According to other Clinton campaign surrogates, Obama is out unless he wins all four states (Rhode Island and Vermont are also voting). The Clinton campaign appears to have decided that the best way to win the expectations game is to expect absolutely every possible state of affairs to transpire, simultaneously. Soon we'll hear Howard Wolfson declaring that Obama can only win if Grover Cleveland wins the Pennsylvania primary. (At which point, of course, Cleveland will win the Pennsylvania primary, but the Clintons will sue to block the results on the grounds that his geographic last name gave him an unfair advantage.)

At this point, it seems unlikely that Clinton will drop out, unless she loses both Ohio and Texas by wide margins. Personally, my patience for her has begun to run out. I started off the year unsure of my vote, then I somewhat reluctantly voted for Obama. Now I'm confident I made the right choice. Honestly, the decisive evidence for me is below.

Bush/Cheney 2004 ad



Clinton 2008 ad

delegating responsibility

Evidently Hillary Clinton will now insist that the Michigan and Florida delegates be seated to vote at the Democratic convention. She needs their votes, as they are big states, and she won both by large margins.

The problem is that the party decided long ago - with the agreement of all the candidates, including Clinton - not to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida, because these states violated rules governing the timing of primaries. Officials in Michigan and Florida were warned not to hold their primaries before February 5, but they went ahead anyway. (These rules were in place to stop the primary season from drifting inexorably earlier - without them, we might have had Iowa and New Hampshire before Christmas.) As punishment, the party took away all their delegates, and got the candidates (except Dennis Kucinich) to agree not to campaign in the states.

In Michigan, Clinton was the only major candidate whose name even appeared on the ballot (Edwards and Obama had theirs removed). She won 55% of the vote. In Florida, she flirted with campaigning, despite her pledge not to. She beat Obama by 17% there. Now she wants the Michigan and Florida delegates to be allowed into the convention after all. Michigan would have 128 delegates and Florida 185 delegates. Large majorities of each would be assigned to Clinton (Obama, whose name was not on the ballot in Michigan, would receive none at all from that state). This may be enough to tip the delegate count in Clinton's favor, despite Obama's current lead.

Here's what I'll say. If Obama continues to hold the delegate lead, and if Clinton ultimately secures the nomination by getting the Michigan and Florida delegates seated, then I will not vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election. Claiming the delegates from illegitimate elections - elections with only one candidate on the ballot, or in which voters had every reason not to vote - is a shameless abuse of democracy. If the Clinton campaign is willing to do this to win, then I do not want them in the White House.

I agree that the Michigan and Florida delegates should have been counted. But once all of the candidates agreed to these rules and the elections were run, it stopped being appropriate to fiddle with the process. If Clinton wants the delegates from Michigan and Florida to count, she should encourage these states to run their primaries (or caucuses) again, now that the Feb 5 rule has passed. Of course, it's extremely unlikely that she would do quite so well again in both states. But it's about the principle, right?