A Ku Indeed!

As far as I can tell, for both sides of the aisle Supreme Court nomination hearings are sideshows used to rack up political clout with one’s constituents. Questions are asked of nominees that nominees will never answer (for obvious reasons) simply to make political points, which then often get rebutted by colleagues on the other side of the aisle, who also want to lodge some good talking points for future town halls and constituent mailings.

All right, I get all that. But Grassley seemed to go off the reservation completely with one of his questions, video below.

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I was listening to an NPR story this morning on psychological research investigating sociopaths and their reactions to moral situations. The core findings of the research didn’t prove anything new — sociopaths seem fully capable of  cognitively recognizing moral situations, but fail to have emotional reactions to those situations. However, a further point about moral understanding and responsibility came up that I found interesting.

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Passage 7a27 is interesting. Mencius says:

Those who are starving find their food delicious; those who are parched find their drink delicious. They have no standard for good and drink because their hunger and thirst injure it. Is it only the mouth and belly that hunger and thirst injure? Human hearts too are subject to injury. If one can prevent the injury of hunger and thirst from being an injury to one’s heart, then there will be no concern about not being as good as other people.

I’m not sure exactly how to read this argument, as I can see two possibilities.

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Robert Stacy McCain writes about the near absence of conservative (print) reporters in the American Spectator -

One of the reasons why there are so few conservatives in America’s newsrooms is because the profession of journalism is relentlessly derided by those who claim to speak for the conservative cause. No kid who grew up listening to talk radio could possibly believe that becoming a reporter is a worthy ambition. (To be a talking-head pundit on cable TV, yes; to be a mere reporter, no.)

Some of what McCain posits as the reasons for conservative dislike of print journalism strikes me as reasons anyone across the political spectrum would dislike journalism, but I wonder if his main contention is right: do conservatives have a special disdain for print journalism? It makes me think a bit about the alleged lack of conservatives in academia, which I’ve heard some argue is due largely to the cultural animus conservatives seem to spend a lot of time hurling at academics.  After all, if you’ve heard all your life that academics are worthless at best and dangerous at worst, why would you want to join their ranks?

For a long time I have read the standard Confucian line about “looking into oneself” when one’s (supposed) virtue failed to achieve it’s desired aims in others as fundamentally a lesson in humility. When you think you are being virtuous towards others, but they do not act virtuously in return, it’s best to look into yourself and find out what you could do better next time. It’s a pretty standard message in Confucius and it makes some sense. After all, getting into the habit of blaming others for failing to respond to your own virtue is likely to degrade your own virtue as you would likely begin to cultivate a habit of pettiness through finger pointing and blaming others instead of yourself (I think of the teacher who blames the students all the time for this or that failure within the course; such a person over time effectively shuts off from any useful dialogue about improvement and cultivates an arrogance in its place).

Today I was reading Mencius when the same standard line about blaming the self came up in Book 4A. After reading it, I began to wonder whether I’ve been right all this time about the underlying reasoning for pushing the “blame yourself” approach. Now I’m thinking that Mencius is saying that you should look to blame yourself because you really are to blame for the failure of virtue you are focusing on. So it’s not (just) to cultivate humility and open yourself up to a continual self-correction dialogue — he really thinks that you are to blame on some level.

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Taken from Sullivan:

DiA entertains a depressing thought: “I’m trying, and failing, to think of an instance where voters on any side have been persuaded by a reasoned opposition on any issue. It might happen with individual voters on particular issues, largely of the technical variety—if someone sits down to figure out whether they support a bond issue, maybe—but I can’t think of a single issue where an argument, however elegantly expressed, has tipped the balance.”

As someone who teaches argument for a living, I tend to concur.

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This summer I’ve volunteered to do a few lectures for a summer scholar program (in its third year) at my university. The program basically invites to campus a number of local middle school students (7th and 8th grade) who (a) come from disadvantaged backgrounds and (b) have been identified as having solid academic promise. This is the first time I’ve worked with the program, so I’m starting from the ground up on how to approach the lectures and discussions. I’ve never worked with students of this age, so I’m looking for any suggestions any of you might have on a few key questions (I list two specific ones below the fold). (more…)

Yesterday was Parker’s 5th birthday (man, they grow fast). For the adults, I made a whole slew of things from scratch (pizzas, special marinade burgers) but most notably — I made three cheesecakes. Took forever, but it was worth it. I put the pics under the fold, with some brief explanations.

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Ross Douhat put up a post on the difference between Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens when you compare their well known atheistic stances. Most of the way, nothing really stood out, but this part got me thinking;

Whereas Dawkins and co. are appalled by the belief in God, Hitchens is far more appalled by the idea that anyone would want to obey Him. Every true romantic needs a great foe, a worthy adversary, a villain to whose destruction he can consecrate himself. Never one for half measures, Hitchens just decided to go all the way to the top.

After reading this, it got me thinking about something that had never really crossed my mind. Note that Douhat’s claim is that it’s not really the belief in God that irks Hitchens, it’s deference and obedience to the divine. Whether this is true of Hitchens’ position, I can’t say – but the way Douhat frames it, it sounds like Hitchens isn’t so much bothered by the fact that people believe in God – he’s bothered that people who believe in God obey God.

Now of course I can see not obeying if you don’t believe, but could you (really) believe in God and not obey? For some reason this seems to raise an intuitive alarm for me, though I’m not sure specifically why it does or how to argue or defend it (I’m still thinking about it). Part of what seems to be at the core of my intuition here is a belief that not obeying God reduces to a failure to really (fully, anyway) believe in God. Sort of a kind of Platonic argument in a way (in the way that Plato explains the bad)– to refuse to obey can always be reduced on some level to a failure of belief. Perhaps this is why characters like Satan are always so interesting and perplexing to many people. After all, here’s the one guy who can be said without any doubt to know that God exists, but yet he does not obey.  Is that really possible, though? Is there a necessary connection between true belief in the divine and deference to the divine?

Yglesias has an interesting post up on Eric Cantor’s investments. Apparently, Cantor held (or still holds) Pro-Shares ultra short US treasuries. On a number of levels, this brings up some interesting questions. Like: should someone in a position to actually effect how US treasuries trade be allowed to hold investments in treasuries? Of course, it also brings up some interesting political questions, such as whether it looks good to be a member of Congress betting against treasuries.  Of course, Cantor could always spin the second issue, suggesting that he’s short treasuries due to what he takes to be the disastrous policies of Obama, not because he’s in favor of treasuries bottoming out. Still, the ethical question looms.

Breads are hard to make when you first get started — the whole process is frustrating. It takes a while to put together, you work on it like a scientist, meticulously measuring out this and that with total precision, and then in the end it’s so inedible that you wind up giving it to your dog, who then turns around and buries it in the backyard (that really happened). Worst of all, you can’t figure out what the hell you did wrong. Basically bread making is a lot of trial and error. I’ve been at it for 5 or 6 months now, and I can successfully report that I’ve got quite a bit down at this point. Without a doubt, I’d say I’ve reach a quality level that would be sell-worthy in an Italian store back in the Bronx. That’s saying a lot, but I’m very proud of what I’ve accomplished (and more proud that I haven’t gained 100 pounds). I’ve included a few shots under the fold of some recent creations. (more…)