Jon Cogburn's Blog

Happy Birthday Gustav

I forgot to wish Hurricane Gustav a happy birthday yesterday. It's hard to describe the particular kind of awfulness of a week without  electricity in a swelteringly  hot, humid, pedestrian unfriendly city with high crime and poverty. It's hard to describe the alien landscape of fallen trees and debris and mutilated buildings. And your one year old has bad heat rash and you are terrified about him overheating, and stores where you might purchase pedialite or baby powder (he's never had heat rash before) are all shut and without power.

It really sucked, and the national media totally dropped the story after it was clear it was not going to be another Katrina (which even in Baton Rouge also really sucked). The reporters for ABC News stood in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and after the levees failed to breach pronounced Gustav "a fizzle;" Reuters said that it "lacked punch." 

Thanks to youtube though we have access to films that non-media types made. The first (from Thibodaux) shows the destructive power of wind strong enough to peel off brick facade.

And here's a nice photo essay of what Baton Rouge looked like for months after the storm. Before viewing this, it is essential to note that. (1) These are not just the worst of the worst. Any place you were in Baton Rouge you saw multiple vistas of scenes like those in these photos. (2) A large portion of these photos were taken weeks or months after the storm. You can tell because the roads are not blocked by huge trees.

The thing that's truly appalling to me is that after the storm there was a little bit of talk about actually burying the power lines the way they are in many American cities that don't even suffer the double whammy of periodic hurricanes and lots of trees. But that completely disappeared. The private companies that run all of the electricity now have dictated that yearly extended power outages for millions of homes due to storms (usually winter storms in the north east and mid west) are just going to be part of the equation in the United States. And the rest of us accept that as inevitable.

When did we become the country where everything is impossible? Somehow, countries with much less per capita GDP than us have vastly nicer power grids, telecommunication infrastructure, airports, health care, prisons (and at least Christians are explicitly supposed to be concerned about this), roads, hurricane and flooding protection, and public transportation. At the current rate of degradation it will be less than twenty years before we lose out in our comparative advantage in space development and our university system. It's really bizarre. No country with near the per capita wealth of the United States is anywhere near as murderously dysfunctional as we are on any of these metrics. But any time someone tries to substantially improve anything in the United States for the past twenty five years the collective wisdom solidifies around the theme that it's impossible.

When did that become our national ethos? Why did it become our ethos? In the vast majority of the above things we until very recently (through the early 1980s) were the envy of the world. Now Americans accept (and virulently defend!) mediocrity and worse as our birthright.

Ever since Hurricane Katrina I increasingly feel like I don't recognize this place. I still love it (every time I've travalled abroad I choke up when the border agent says "welcome home" when I finally get back). I mean, you don't stop loving a person when they become diseased. There's no reason it should be any different with countries.

trust your mechanic

Tomorrow morning I go to the doctor about something I should had looked into months ago. My right shoulder hurts all the time to varying degrees, and it has less mobility than the other one. I've bought a new desk, learned to use the wiji board on my computer instead of the mouse, taken a couple of bottles of ibuprofen, and tried all sorts of yoga things. Nothing's worked reliably. I hope they can fix this with surgery or physical therapy well before our new kid is born in late December/early January.

My friend Mark has a pretty healthy Cartesian attitude about doctors. Think of them as your allies against your body, which is going to betray you in all sorts of horrifying ways during your brief time on this planet. The good thing about this attitude is that if you can instantiate it, then you don't get too hung up on quaint notions like dignity while they poke and prod at you. The bad thing is that it's not really true, any more than your auto mechanic is your ally. . .

Also, your bodily dignity is not the only thing violated- (1) having to get permission in the other areas of your life to make all the different appointments, (2) having to mess with traffic to get to the various health-industrial complexes, (3) being assaulted by television during the long period in the waiting rooms, (4) being ushered into the examination room and having to wait there for interminable periods of time, (5) losing hope for humanity while surrounded by the downwardly mobile barbarians to whom Reaganist destruction (of small manufacturing on the one hand and unions on the other) has ceded this country (see this book for an explanation of how it worked out in rural America), (6) trying to communicate with an overworked doctor who spends most of his time negotiating with insurance companies and who might be compromised by pharmaceutical company payola, (7) trying to communicate honestly with the doctor when you are always suspect of trying to get the him to violate some bit of the war on drugs. Even if you can forget about the humiliation of removing your clothes and being poked at by a stranger, all of these things dehumanize and infantilize the soul.

My friend Ty tries to view these things as Buddhist meditations of some sort. The good thing about this is that it works. The bad thing is that it only really works if you've spent years in a monastery. I wish I had.

posting lite

Posting for the next few days will be light. I'm working my butt off to get a serviceable paper on the change in the alignment system from  Edition 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons to 4th Edition before the reading group starts.

I love it when philosophy has non-trivial consequences for stuff like this. If I'm right then the unassailable force of reason is going to lead to another revision in the system. Actually, the fact that this is every gamer's fantasy means it almost certainly won't, any more than my philosophically proven ideas for storylines are of any interest to the good people at World Wrestling Entertainmnet. That's fine, I'm just interested in getting closer to Truth anyhow.

I do, however, have a subset of good friends who ask me why I waste my time on such things. Now that I have tenure they bug me less about it I guess on the assumption that the point of tenure is to waste your time (and I write just as much philosophy that is not about popular culture in any case).

But it's not a waste of time! Norman Malcolm wrote that one of the most embarrassing moments in his life is when he and Wittgenstein saw a newspaper with a story about British attempts to kill Hitler. Malcolm said something to the effect of, "That can't be true. It's not in the British spirit to do something like that." Wittgenstein responded that he was filled with despair that someone who knew as much philosophy as Malcolm could say something like that (and it is to Malcolm's immense credit that he left the story for posterity).

Philosophy is supposed to creep out of the narrow confines of whatever dialectic in which you find yourself. It's supposed to creep up from whatever you are passionate about. And that does not just mean using it to have witty conversations. That doesn't just mean being less likely to say incredibly stupid things. It means getting it on paper, getting it reviewed, and rewriting it.

I hereby get off my soapbox. So know that refuting this will not knock me over.

the pessimistic thing I am thinking about today

The internet has done to the arts in capitalist societies something very similar to what happened in communist societies after the end of the Berlin Wall.

In Russia under communism  there was a lively underground art scene that included poetry, music, fiction, theater, painting, etcetera. In part because so much was censored, if you had the guts to produce this kind of stuff then people who had the guts to consume it were vitally interested in the products of your labor. But when the censorship stopped and people had more freedom to get things off the market, the underground art scene completely dried up, and most artists found they no longer had audiences for their work. In the long run Russia will almost certainly become less artistic as a result (though, of course, artistic achievement is the one thing you should never underestimate Russia on).

I think the internet is doing something similar in the West now. For example, as it gets easier and easier to get the kind of music, books, movies, etc. you want off the internet, you just become much less likely to want to listen to the C.D. of your friend's band, or read your friend's novel, or religiously go to open mike nights (which, to be fair in Austin in the late 80's and early 90's often also had free beer provided by the Shiner Bock company) for that matter. Prior to the internet, there was an analogous kind of censorship exercised by the big companies controlling distribution of artistic goods, and local communities had analogous underground arts movements. But it's quite different these days. Everyone has a myspace page and everyone else has their IPod.

Nineteen Eighty-Bore

As part of all the stuff I've been doing re: our impending move, I've spent a number of hours on hold with various companies (mostly utilities that were as recently as twenty years ago part of the best infrastructure in the world, but have now been surpassed by those of all of our former cold-war allies) the last few days.

The whole being-on-hold-experience symbolizes all that is rotten in the soul of our once great Republic: (1) The Absolute Betrayal of the Promise of Techmology- Computers, the internets, and whatnot were supposed to be part of the science fiction future where we spend most of our time rock and rolling all night and partying every day while our robot servants make and serve tasty food and cordials. That is, the computational revolution was supposed to make things more convenient, easier if you will. But instead, it's just the opposite. The automatic answering systems are irritating, add to the amount of time until you actually get to a person that can help you, and increase the likelihood that you get sent to the wrong person and the cut off. They make life less convenient for the vast majority of people, science fiction be damned. (2) The Sovietization of American Society- The logic of authoritarianism entails that agents of the system tramp on the neck of the populace just because they can (see previous posts about that one French waiter). What other reason must there be for instituting the now universal system where you hear astoundingly irritating advertisements continuously while on hold? The ones that are strictly adds are for a company you are already using. The non strict-adds are almost universally efforts to get you to use the companies' web-site (see (1) above) for services you are not calling about. That is, you wouldn't be on hold waiting for a human being if you could have used their damned web site. So in both cases, the information is useless; ergo- it exists only to put you in your place (Q.E.D.). And it is very effectively designed to do so. You can't do anything useful like read a book while on hold, because every time the add interrupts the music, you don't know if it is going to be the real person to whom you are trying to talk. And the interruptions happen approximately every twenty seconds, over and over again. (3) The Illusion of Choice- Apologists for capitalism constantly subject the rest of us to econiums concerning the massive, unimaginable amount consumer freedom with which we are blessed. If the United States is supposed to be anything for these people, it is the varieties of consuming experience made flesh. But this is a ridiculous lie. We don't get the choice to hear hold music not interrupted by the peppy, brain damaged/damaging, advertisements. We don't get a choice to have companies not force us to whittle away hours of our life on hold. For that matter, we don't get the choice to reject a state that privileges tax cuts so much over public infrastructure that the electrical grid fails catastrophically every winter in the Northeast-Midwest and every summer storm season in the American South. No, that's just the way it is, and voting for Obama or McCain isn't going to change it one whit. The only choice we get is to complain about it on a blog, so one of your friends who doesn't care about the future of our Republic says, "You're like an unfunny version of Andy Rooney." (4) The Arbitrariness of It All- In every single one of the companies I've dealt with, once I got to talk ot a person, I was put on hold again while they were helping me. But the hold music while you are talking with someone (as opposed to the interminable period before you get to a real human) does not have the advertisements inserted within. Why is it one way before you are talking to a person, and a different way once you have talked to a person? There is no rational reason for the difference. Yet it is universal. As George Bush is fond of saying, we are all existentialists now.

reply to brute

Neal Hebert posted a very nice editorial here and this jerk named "Bob Weir" posted a response here. Weir's response contained so many irritating conservative tropes in such a short space that I had to respond. I submitted the response on the Daily Reveille website, but thought I'd reproduce it here for everyone's enjoyment.

------------------------------------------------
I for one want it to be noted that, contra Mr. Weir (didn't he also play guitar for the Greatful Dead?), Neal Hebert does not have a "little head."  Though I have not been priveledged to measure it, I can attest that physically, Mr. Hebert's head is what you would expect from good Acadian stock. Metaphorically? It's hard to say, the conceit of much of his humorous writing is of a person with a gigantic head, but the very fact that it is a humorous conceit shrinks it back down. So instead of the Goodyear Blimp you have a head-sized (are you listening Mr. Weir?) fascimile of the Goodyear Blimp. One with frizzy hair on top.

Seriously, Weir's comments are submental, a disgrace to the uniform he claims to represent. First, whether or not people would want to serve with Hebert has nothing to do with Hebert's claims. Second, Weir's attack on Hebert's fighting skills (did you know that Neal Hebert is a specialist in drunken monkey kung fu style, Mr. Weir? Huh? Did you?) and masculinity is entirely based on Hebert's opposition to this war. Since most of the readership of this august publication have college degrees, and since it would be wasted on a blustering fool like Mr. Weir, I won't explain the logical fallacies involved in the above.

Mr. Weir says that he will kill anybody who negotiates with terrorists. So you are going to kill General Petreus? *All* military strategists agree that a large part of the surge's success is due to the creation of Sunni Awakening Councils. This is where we pay money to the Sunni terrorists so that instead of attacking us they police their own areas. This "negotiating with terrorists" is central to General Petreus' counterinsurgency strategy. So Mr. Weir has announced in a public forum that he intends to kill General Petreus. I hope the FBI's web spiders are smart enough to catch this exchange (they are!).

If you want to note just how laughable Weir's claim to speak for active duty military and veterans are, just note that of all the presidential candidates, Barack Obama has received the most amount of money from active duty military members. Why? Because most active duty military members can't stand what Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld etcetera's incompetence and moral evil have done to the United States Military. So Mr. Weir's pretense to speak for the military is as laughable as his dumb bluster and logical fallacies.

Finally, I honor your service Mr. Weir. Would that you did the same by respecting the Constitution you and your sons swear to uphold when you are given your first rank (hint, killing people you disagree with politically is not kosher in free societies).

Jon Cogburn

full of bile

Sorry no blogging for a few days. The book is due in two weeks and we're trying to make it perfect.

Also, I had another what I think are gall bladder attacks two nights ago, and still feel crappy as a result. These (if that's what they are) aren't the most painful experiences in the world as some people describe them, though for sheer sustained pain over hours at a time they are up there. It's hard to say though, I tend to be a real wimp about distracting minor inconveniences and basically stoic about big things. One thing I'm not stoic about is the fact that tomorrrow's visit to the doctor begins a what might be a prolongued bout of dealing with American health care industry.

Things I'm already dreading: (1) getting referred back and forth between specialists and testing places ad infinitum, (2) the fact that when they do a test the lab technician doesn't tell you anything and then you get a call on the phone a few days later, (3) the fact that your mortality chances can go way up if you get a doctor that overprescribes treatement (e.g. mandates surgery when you don't need it), (4) the way doctors are for the most part so terrible at explaining anything and treat you as if you are an idiot when they do, (5) the way American healthcare today embodies the army's ethos of "hurry up and wait," but instead of being surrounded by comrades you are surrounded by very sick and often very irritating people, (6) the fact that droning televisions have colonized hospitals and doctor's offices,  (7) the fact that I have to drive myself all over the damn place even though I feel like crap, (8) the fact that my insurance company only gives me access to certain doctors, greatly exacerbating the driving, (9) being on hold forever with the insurance company, which does not have the basic decency to just stick with Muzak but instead interrupts it with blood pressure raising voice recordings that could initially be mistaken for the operator, so you can't even read a book while on hold, (10) the fact that all the talk about "patient autonomy" in medical ethics is a complete sham; there is no autonomy as long as these jerks withhold medicine unless you do what they say, (11) the fact that it is so difficult to get decent pain medication because of the unconstitutional war on drugs, and (12) the fact that I can't help out with Thomas very well when I'm indisposed.

The War on Drugs aspect of this is abominable. If you have reoccurring pain that is yet to be diagnosed, it is very difficult to get pain medicine unless you happen to go to the emergency room during the occurrence of the pain. The reason for this is that (along with imprisoning terminally ill people for smoking cannibis) Bush's minions have arrested and de-licensed doctors for "overprescribing" pain medication (in many cases to people made suicidal from chronic pain). But then when you go to the emergency room, they do triage and at no point consider pain management to be relevant to dealing with the emergency. As a result you can wait for five or more hours before anyone even sees you. And then they don't give you anything for the pain until you've been diagnosed, which can take much longer.

In grad school I had these weird blisters in my throat so excruciatingly painful they made me cry. At the point the pain was unbearable I hadn't eaten for two days and was having real difficulty drinking (it started as a sore throat and just got worse). When I went to the emergency room I waited for five hours, and then when a doctor finally saw me they said it was probably "some kind of bacteria" and that I'd have to stay the night for dehydration if I couldn't drink this big glass of water.  And they would not give me any pain medication until I drank the water, which took me another hour to do from agonizing sip by sip. When hours later I was finally able to get the pain medication, surprise, surprise, it was much easier to drink.

Is it so crazy for me to think that part of the reason the United States leads the industrialized world in preventable deaths in hospitals is because of the Puritanical attitudes towards anything that might alleviate pain?

Maybe, just maybe all this needless suffering and death has prevented Rush Limbaugh from getting his drugs. But why should the rest of us who are not going to abuse pain medication suffer and die for Rush Limbaugh? We shouldn't, the system is crazy and only exists to make Republican couch potato bullies feel better about themselves for sticking it to the hippies and the nigras (Nixon was quite explicit about gaining votes from whites in this way, as were Reagan's strategists). And sadly, it's one more case where Democrats are too cowardly to stand up and do what is right. As Kinky Friedman says, "Drugs won the drug war." It is a depressing measure of political dysfunction in this country that we can't declare defeat and stop inconveniencing the vast majority of people who are never going to have a drug problem.

Sorry for going on so long. If you had the prospect of another gall bladder attack spent in the emergency room without pain medication, you'd be pissed too. If it's any consolation, at some point in your life you almost certainly will have to deal with the asininity of the American health care system at a time when you are of course least prepared to do so.

I should be in a good mood because my gall bladder gets to be measured with ultra-sound today. My fortune cookie last week said, "Face problems with dignity." I realize the above whining has the potential to anger the fortune cookie gods.

it all makes sense now

Why is it so damn hard to open recently purchased items these days?  Anything packaged in hard plastic is hellish to get open now; the plastic coverings are welded together so seamlessly that I've now injured myself twice opening consumer goods.  I realize that I'm clumsy, but other people can't like this either.

Here's a new law of economics I propose (tentatively titled "The Bastard Principle")- Whenever an economic or political unit can (without too much loss of profit), make people's life more difficult, they will do so. 

In addition to injury inducing packaging, this is also why flying is so horrible in the United States now.  These jerks make plenty of money, but their state supported monopoly on transportation gives them the chance to make the rest of the country massively uncomfortable.  By The Bastard Principle, it is inevitable that they will then do it for no reason whatsoever.

Some day a Nobel Prize will be awarded for providing a deep quantitative explanation for The Bastard Principle (long after I'm deceased).  I'm not confident that such an explanation will tell the whole story.  Does it not seem more likely that there are evil divinities that enjoy people being inconvenienced, and whose sense of irony leads them to particularly enjoy it when the inconvenience is in the name of convenience (air travel, plastics, fast food, etc.).  These divinities are clearly able to grant favor upon politicians and business leaders who use their power to make the rest of us frustrated and irritated.  As a "person of faith" this is the only way I can explain the last thirty years in this country.

In any case, by the time my contribution to Economics is recognized, the monetary award for the Nobel Prize will be useless, because the only thing money will be able to buy is jars of allergens, samples of famous people's feces, harmful bacteria, deafening noise makers, clothes and furniture so ill-fitting that they cause back injury, and medicines that directly raise your blood pressure and make you angry.  This being said, people will stand in line for hours to purchase that stuff.

lies, damn lies, and Christian right lies (part 1)

Check out H.M Silcox's new post in her new blog The Thought Depot, where she addresses the canard that our founding fathers somehow wanted the state to help out organized Christianity. You get this again and again as a professor.  Since the permissions for commenting on H.M.'s blog are so strict that you have to have a google account,  I leave my thoughts here.

Since Madison was the primary author of the U.S. Constitution, it is the height of sophistry for "originalists" to side with the Einsenhower backsliding on this issue.  In my experience, originalists know next to nothing about history, including the Counter-reformation and its Thirty Years War- which in terms of slaughtering civilians and devastating cities were unparalleled in the West until technology made these things much easier and more anonymous during the late nineteenth (rifling) and twentieth (strategic bombing) centuries. 

Unlike the right wingers who profess to adore them, our founding fathers were not historical ignorami, and this is precisely why they would have packed Eisenhower et. al. back to Merrie England (after seizing their estates and distributing them to war veterans, and if you don't think this is true, you need to read some books about the revolution that created these United States).

Before giving some good quotes from real Americans (and by real Americans I mean like in Hulk Hogan's theme song), I would like to note that I try really hard to be a good Christian.  Among other things, this involves: (1) trying really hard hard to obey Jesus' injunction to keep my praying to myself, unlike the scribes and hypocrites, (2) trying really hard to be historically informed (including about the history of the Bible and the warfare and genocide that organized religion periodically perpetuates), (3) believing that the Kingdom of God is here and now and not identical to any nation or church, and (4) trying really hard not to be a tool.  By my perspective, one of the cruelest ironies is that so many "people of faith" actually support commingling religion and state.  If you have to pray in public (and nobody can follow all of Jesus' commands all the time) start by thanking God for our two great Thomases, Paine and Jefferson.

Thomas Paine-
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.

Thomas Paine-
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

George Washington-
Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religions.

James Madison-
The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles.

James Madison-
In the course of the opposition to the bill in the House of Delegates, which was warm and strenuous from some of the minority, an experiment was made on the reverence entertained for the name and sanctity of the Saviour, by proposing to insert the words "Jesus Christ" after the words "our lord" in the preamble, the object of which would have been, to imply a restriction of the liberty defined in the Bill, to those professing his religion only. The amendment was discussed, and rejected by a vote of against.

James Madison-
The appropriation of funds of the United States for the use and support of religious societies, [is] contrary to the article of the Constitution which declares that 'Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment'

Thomas Jefferson-
I have examined all the known superstitions of the Word, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature.  They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology.  Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned.  What has been the effect of this coercion?  To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the world ...

Thomas Jefferson-
The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind ... to filch wealth and power to themselves.  [They], in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.

John Adams-
It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service [of government] had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses....

Millard Fillmore-
I am tolerant of all creeds. Yet if any sect suffered itself to be used for political objects I would meet it by political opposition. In my view church and state should be separate, not only in form, but fact. Religion and politics should not be mingled.

Ulysses Grant-
Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separated.

Rutherford Hayes-
. . .religious sects ought not to interfere with the Government or with political parties. We believe that the cause of good government and the cause of religion suffer by all such interference.

James Garfield (to see the validity of this point, note that the fortune raked in from credulous people by Scientology every year is tax exempt)
The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.

Warren Harding-
In the experiences of a year of the Presidency, there has come to me no other such unwelcome impression as the manifest religious intolerance which exists among many of our citizens. I hold it to be a menace to the very liberties we boast and cherish.

John F. Kennedy-
I believe in an America where the separation of Church and State is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

refuting some down-low forms of bigotry

[NOTE: IT IS INDICATIVE OF A DEEP AND FRIGHTENING FAILURE IN OUR CULTURE THAT THIS SHOULD HAVE TO BE EXPLAINED.]
It should be transparent to any educated person that the revisionist fan of the Confederacy is on par with the Holocaust denier.  But from my experience as a college professor, I have learned that we are not educating people very well, or maybe some people don't want to be educated.  I don't know, but here goes.

The official declaration of causes of secession for Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and South Carolina are on line here. [Note that the "ordinances of dissolution" by the other states are very short and give no explicit reason for secession; Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee all seceded after Lincoln called for troops in reaction to the original secessions, and were conceived by their authors to be taking sides in a war already about slavery for the same reasons given by the original seceding states.]  Please open the link above and then hit "control f" and then type "slavery" in the window, and read what the authors of the catastrophe thought.  You can also read the transcript of some of the secession debate in the South Carolina legislature archived here. After all the verbiage about rights, you will see that the main reason (explicitly stated as such) was the southerners' fear of being part of a country where non-slave states were in the majority (due to the entry of new states into the Union).  In this context, the secessionists warned that states had to secede before slavery was made illegal by the United States.

The background of all of this was Bleeding Kansas (good book here, wikipedia article here), the incredibly vicious civil war in Kansas over whether slavery would be legal in the new state.  The ultimate 2 to 1 electoral defeat of the pro-slavery "border ruffians," was the trigger to secession of the southern states

Prior to secession a text of New Orleans preacher Benjamin Morgan Palmer's vile, yet incredibly influential, "Thanksgiving Day Sermon" (archived here) was widely distributed throughout the slave states. In it, he argued that the threat to slavery mandated secession.  After going on about how much Jesus likes slavery this horrible person actually has the evil temerity to argue that the "providential trust" God has placed in South was, "to conserve and perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing."  Sadly, as history was to show, the citizens of the slave owning states were all too ready to listen to Palmer's satanic sophistry.

Please also consider the Confederacy's Vice President Alexander Stephens infamous, "cornerstone" speech (archived here) which stated that the new confederacy "rest[ed] upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition."  In reference to this "great truth," he went on to say, "This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."  Has Lady Philosophy's name ever been invoked with more vanity and evil?

Some apologists for the Confederacy at this point in the argument change the subject, saying that even if the elites' reasons for seceding were primarily and almost exclusively focused on slavery, the common soldiers' were not (most of them did not own slaves), and moreover that the cause of the common soldier in the Confederacy was somehow grand and noble.  First, it should be noted that this response is somewhat incoherent, unless one can specify what the common soldier's cause was.

Second, the response is antecedently implausible, evincing the same kind of naivety as pre Frankfurt School/Gramscian Marxists who were confident that the working classes would refuse to fight in World War I because the ideology of the war was so much against their interests.  Like the common soldier of World War I, all the evidence suggests that the vast majority of non-slaveholding Confederate Soldiers enthusiastically embraced the pro-slavery ideology that caused the civil war.

One might ask how we could possibly identify the governing ideology and relevant views taking as common sense by soldiers of the Confederacy.  First, note that such a rhetorical question assumes that the objective study of history is impossible (unsurprisingly, this selective skepticism, that is setting such ridiculously high standards for historical knowledge that disagrees with one's prejudice, is also the trademark argumentative strategy of the Holocaust denier).  Second, note that the same historical techniques used to understand the thinking of the average World War I soldier have been used to understand the thinking of the average Confederate Soldier.  And it ain't pretty.

Harvard historian Monica Goodling's excellent book on this issue (you can order it here) presents the result of her research into letters and diaries of soldiers on both sides (illiterate soldiers during this period dictated their letters home).  The norm she discovered is that the average Union and Confederate soldier overwhelmingly explicitly saw slavery as the primary justification for fighting.  Interestingly, poor Southern whites explicitly viewed their position of state enforced superiority to black people as what they were fighting for.  Goodling shows that morale initially stayed high in Confederate troops, even after the Union started racking up victories.  However it dropped precariously when manpower issues forced the Confederacy to try to put slaves (those willing to fight were to be freed for their service) on the front lines at the end of the war.  At this point the white Confederate soldiers tended to see the fight as not worth making, since their prerogatives over the slaves were so badly slighted by having to fight alongside them.  The hundreds of thousands of African American Union soldiers by the end of the war did not have this effect on Union morale, because the abolitionist cause was the cause of the average Union soldier.

The best thing about Goodling's book is that it does not rely entirely on after-the-fact memories or writings by officers, but rather rests upon a trove of documents concerning the non-rich people doing the vast majority of the killing and dying.  On the Union side, the soldiers were way ahead of the northern political establishment in explicitly viewing the fight in terms of abolition, rather than just preserving our country.  Over a year prior to the Gettysburg Address the common Northern soldier (to his great credit) saw the fight as a fight to end slavery, and throughout the war common Confederate soldier (to his immense shame) saw it as defending slavery.  Again, while it is true that most of the Confederate soldiers did not own slaves, the psychic benefit derived by having a whole race of others treated vastly worse than themselves was both explicit governing ideology and common sense to the soldiers. 

Note that nobody is saying that all the Confederate soldiers were fighting for slavery.  Most soldiers in most wars fight for their buddies.  But just as most American soldiers early in Vietnam believed that we were there to defend a free people against communist aggression, and most German soldiers early in World War I believed ardently in the reasons given by German elites for their aggression, there is very strong historical evidence that most Confederate soldiers internalized the reasons given by their elites to fight.  That these reasons involved defending a society where the poorest white soldier got to feel superior to a whole race of people he interacted with, made it that much easier for the white soldiers to internalize the reasons.  To believe otherwise is naive and contradicts Goodling's evidence.

In Minima Moralia Adorno asks himself how many times he heard casual comments in pre-World War II Germany that implicated genocide. He agonizes at how many times he did this, said nothing, and continued to be polite.  Those who lie about slavery and the Confederate Flag are morally equal to Holocaust deniers, and the rest of us have a moral obligation to treat them as such.

Why am I incensed because some of my students and ex-students go in for the canards about the glorious cause of the Confederacy and lies about the Confederate Battle flag?  Here's one of many reasons.  The person in the picture to the left of this text is Michael Donald. He was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1981 in my childhood Alabama.  My high school friend Ellie Dees' father Morris brought a lawsuit against the Klan on behalf of Donald's mother.  For his pains, Dees' office was bombed and snipers shot at him.  Donald's family's life was ruined, and Mr. Dees has had to have twenty-four hour a day armed guards because of the violent people that waive that symbol of slavery and apartheid. 

As a child, I watched one of the last large scale Klan marches in Montgomery, Alabama.  The ubiquity of the Confederate Battle Flag among these racist terrorists told me all I needed to know about it.  Nothing I have learned since (e.g. that its modern mass resurgence as a symbol began when George Wallace flew it from the roof of the Alabama statehouse as a symbol (that everyone got) against desegregation on the day Bobby Kennedy visited; that pro-segregation politicians in the south in the 1950's signalled this by flying the flag, etc.) contradicts what I learned that horrible day.  None of the historical evidence presented here contradicts what I learned on that day.  The flag symbolizes slavery and apartheid.  It symbolizes a society that institutionalized rape by the elite.  It symbolizes the mass murder, terrorism, and torture necessary for maintaining slavery and then apartheid.  It symbolizes the cause of Michael Donald's murder.

In this regard, the moral obtuseness of the student waivers of that flag is astounding and despicable.  What kind of person would think that the psychological trauma at giving up a not-so-noble myth about the supremacy of his heritage is any way comparable with the pain and destruction (still) caused by slavery and Jim Crow?. 

To have truth and reconciliation after hundreds of years of slavery and a hundred years of Apartheid you need truth. Until we have truth, the American South (my home and the home of my people) will continue to be last in every meaningful measure of people's health.  Until elites decide they would rather live as equals in a better society than be on top of a bad one, we will continue to be last in everything.  Until those of us who are not elites decide we will no longer get a psychic charge from feeling superior to those lower down than us, we will continue to be last.  Those of us moving our state past this dysfunction (black, white, latino, asian, rich, poor, everybody of good will) can only do this if we follow Adorno and stand up for truth, even when it requires rudeness, even when we think it may not matter. It does matter.

things that irritate me about intellectuals

In my spare time I read a fair amount of history.  I'm always driven by the question, "How could that possibly have happened?" applied to something antecedently implausible.  In the past I've gone through binges of reading about: (1) the fall of the Roman Republic and the early Empire, (2) Israeli military victories, and (3) Stalin.  Recently I've been reading about the Holocaust.  One aspect of it that I still don't get is the appalling length to which members of the professional and academic classes throughout the German speaking world pitched in (e.g. a doctoral dissertation was awarded for someone's research on the best way to remove gold from teeth).  I think I understand how illiterate peasants on the cusp of starvation can be manipulated to pogroms and genocide, but I don't get how educated members of what was then the most cultured, refined,  and scientifically advanced society on earth could so enthusiastically do Hitler's work.

One way I'm approaching this study is to to think more deeply about irritating tendencies of today's intellectuals.  As a tenured university professor I'm both well and badly equipped to do this:  well equipped because I'm surrounded by intellectuals who possess the irritating habits, and badly equipped because I certainly possess many such tendencies myself.  Anyway, here's a go at a few.  Please add in the comments.  First however, note that these same vices are held by non-intellectuals.  But intellectuals have less excuse because they should know better.

(1)  Many intellectuals unreflectingly assume that one's moral status is largely a function of what one purchases and consumes.  This typically manifests itself in some combination of: vegetarianism, recycling, green friendly products, and boycotting certain stores (Wall Mart).   For people who espouse these things to define their moral personhood in terms of being a virtuous consumer is almost always inconsistent, as the espousal is usually tied to a desire to separate themselves from the consumerist herd.  Well, like the crowd chants in unison in Monty Python's Life of Brian, "We are all individuals."

(2)  Many intellectuals unreflectingly assume that one's moral status is largely a function of what one believes.  So one is a good person if one believes in "diversity," irrespective of whether one has studied reasoned defenses and critiques of affirmative action.  This really disturbs me!  Now clearly, there are some beliefs that are so morally hideous that believing them does reflect on your character.  This being said, most of the political beliefs relevant to American discourse are things where there are good and informed people on both sides of that debate.  It amazes me how intellectuals can lose sight of this.  I have more than one colleague who told me he didn't like to visit his family because his family members are Republicans.  That really is sickening and depressing.  The old blues song is right, nobody in the whole world loves you as much as your Mother does.  To miss out on this part of the human experience because of your irrelevant and badly reasoned political opinions is inconceivable to me.

I think (1) and (2) are normal human reactions, exacerbated by the fact that most intellectuals are so narrowly specialized in modern society.  To many people who work sixty hours a week teaching and researching something very narrow (e.g. oyster reproduction), it's very tempting to opt out of your responsibility as a literate person to be informed about both sides of debates and also very tempting to think that meaningless gestures such as what you purchase renders you a good person (irrespective of how egregious your Type A personality vices are).

(3) Intellectuals tend to view issues of which they are not specialists in black and white terms.  This is the least excusable, but perhaps most understandable.  Most research involves attempting to adjudicate disagreement by presenting evidence for one side over another.  It's very hard to get published if your paper doesn't have this kind of relevance to some outstanding debate.  This leads the people who know the most about some issue to think about it in the most simplistic way.  Then when you get outside of one's area of research, the same tendency is there but with something you don't know that much about.  Applied to politics, this tendency is atrocious.  Since Europe and the United States have done some very bad things, for many intellectuals it follows that the opponents of Europe and the United States must be very good.  Thus: (a) have people like Stalin, Chairman Mao, Ernesto "Che" Guevarra, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, Arafat, and leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah been excused of their own wickedness, and (b) the (for nations this powerful) historically unprecedented good things done by the United States and her allies have been completely ignored.

Note that I am not saying left = bad, right = good.  Intellectuals such as David Horowitz are a mirror image of that which they decry.  Any sufficiently informed, reflective person will be "left" about somethings and "right" about others, keep an open mind, and seek out the best criticisms of their own views.

(4)  Intellectuals tend to be suckers for people who promise the iron fist.  Stalin, Chairman Mao, Ernesto "Che" Guevarra, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, and Arafat all have in common massive thuggery.  I think many intellectuals lionize these people for the same reasons I think many intellectuals watch but don't play sports.  Adolescence is hellish for most people, but it is probably most hellish for intelligent people, who tend to be more sensitive and less physically powerful.  Junior high school and high school in the United States tend to be run by dumb people for dumb people.  If you doubt this, note that they always cut the arts programs and band before they cut the football team, even though arts and music are the only proven environmental determinants of I.Q.  Many smart people are somewhat damaged by the experience, and some of them get the psychic revenge of the couch potato bully.  In common culture the couch potato bully tends to be reacting to the fact that after high school he is no longer the king of his domain, and in fact usually ends up having bosses from the same class that he tormented earlier.  This kind of couch potato bully supports the worst aspects of Rove/Bush, but in current academia the couch potato bully tends to go overseas.  The pinnacle of this is Noam Chomsky's support for the Khmer Rouge and recent support of Syrian and Iranian backed terrorists doing their best to reduce Lebanon to a dictatorial fundamentalist satrapy.

I don't know if this explains how the most advanced country in the world at the time could unleash WWII and the Holocaust, but I think it explains some of it.  Any more ideas? 

Pope Benedict agrees with me that driving S.U.V.s is usually a sin

The Vatican today released 10 commandments of road usage, which are:

• You shall not kill.
• 2. The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm.
• 3. Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.
• 4. Be charitable and help your neighbor in need, especially victims of accidents.
• 5. Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.
• 6. Charitably convince the young and not-so-young not to drive when they are not in a fit condition to do so.
• 7. Support the families of accident victims.
• 8. Bring guilty motorists and their victims together, at the appropriate time, so that they can undergo the liberating experience of forgiveness.
• 9. On the road, protect the more vulnerable party.
• 10. Feel responsible towards others.

Louisiana is one of the most Roman Catholic areas in these United States.  She also has a plant that produces HUM-Vs in Shreveport.  I haven't read the whole report yet, but the Pope critiques automobiles for lending "themselves to being used by their owners to show off, and as a means for outshining other people and arousing a feeling of envy."  In addition, Commandment 5 clearly prohibits buying a big vehicle because it makes you feel more powerful. Commandment 9 is also inconsistent with the way most S.U.V./light truck drivers operate their vehicles (weaving in and out of traffic and tail gating clearly violates it).

Before anyone responds with the predictable and moronic trope that they need a light truck/S.U.V. for safety reasons, please take note that the rates of fatality, brain damage, and paralysis are greater for drivers and passengers of light trucks and S.U.V.s than they are for cars.  What makes people feel safer in these giant vehicles is that they are also far more likely (than car drivers) to cause fatalities, brain damage, and paralysis to other drivers.  Thinking that you are safer because you are more likely to inflict grievous harm is a kind of Kahneman/Taversky fallacy.  It's generally a valid inference in a hunter gatherer society, but not statistically sound.  Unfortunately, the way in which our current society counter-exemplifies it leads to 50,000 deaths (and over a million serious injuries) a year.

It's nice to see the Roman Catholic Church treat this issue with the moral seriousness it deserves.   

[Note:  Though not Roman Catholic, I've been a big fan of Pope Benedict ever since I found out about how animals responded to the then Cardinal Ratzinger and also about his pet cats in the Vatican.  If, or when, he is sainted, I think that he will intercede for pet owners and animals.]

telephone hold madness

If you need any more evidence to the conclusion that our society is going to hell in a handbasket, just try calling your insurance company, your pharmacist, your airline, or even your university, and then desperately try to keep from losing your mind while you wait on hold.

In the old days you would get either halfway decent classical music or, much more likely, Muzak (older pop hits magically regurgitated through a Lawrence Welk strings 'n horns with a smidgeon of "light jazz" sensibility).  In the case of Muzak this was clearly substandard.  Unfortunately, none of us knew how lucky we were.

In the current era, the music you hear is just as likely to be non-Muzakified ballads of the "Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong" or "You're Having My Baby" stripe.  Somehow, the hellions in control of all this manage to pick the few songs in existence that are actually much worse prior to Muzakification!  But if that were the only indignity forced upon your ears, things would be fine. 

Far, far, worse is the fact that every thirty seconds or so a recorded voice comes on.  The voice either:  (1) gives advice of which only the stupidest people would need avail themselves (I actually once heard one begin with the following- "Did you know alcoholic beverages and pain medication don't mix?" and in a crazy making peppy voice to boot), (2) advertisements about how great the company is (if you're on the phone, you are already using their damn services), or (3) a reminder that you are on hold (who that is on hold doesn't know it?  With Descartes, I refuse to believe that people are that stupid).   

Far, far, worse than the content of the subnormal messages is the fact that the voices prevent you from reading a book or doing something else while on hold.  If you try to do that, then every time the recorded voice comes on it jerks you into sapience, and for a brief second you wonder if you are talking to a human.  The more times this happens, the higher your blood pressure gets.

I don't know what's happened.  Why do we put up with this?  Has everybody in this country taken crazy pills?  Why didn't we get a chance to vote to see if we wanted this?  I thought this was a democracy.

J'accuse!

One of the most depressing things about humanity is our inability to bracket out our preconceptions and truly assess the virtues of various positions.

Though I am a Libertarian Democrat, I'm fed up with Libertarians citing the classical argument that higher minimum wages increase unemployement.  All such economic arguments require massive simplification of the relevant factors, and as a result sometimes are empirically disconfirmed.  This one surely has been.  Every single city and state in the United States that has in the last twenty years raised their mininimum wage above the national minimum wage has seen unemployment decrease below the national average.  This is very simple.  When poorer people have more money, they spend it, which stimulates local economies and causes more employement.  Given all the other variables, trickle up economics in this case defeats the classical prediction.  So the classical model (or the manner in which it has been applied) has here been disconfirmed, yet conservatives and libertarians refuse to let facts interfere with their theory.

Many of the students I teach are in the period of trying on identities, which often involves trying on belief sets.  This is a normal part of growing up.  People grow out of it when they have done enough things to be able to (without psychic trauma) identify themselves in terms of the kinds of things they do (e.g. accomplishments and ethical behavior) rather than what they believe.  The depressing thing is that  many people get stuck in the phase of identifying themselves in terms of belief, and in addition the emotional satisfaction of the identity appropriate to that belief set ends up being more important than the plausibility of the relevant beliefs.  I have students on the right or left that fancy themselves iconoclasts, and as a result only serilously read things that support their self perceived iconoclastic views.  Again, this is probably a normal part of being young (and literate).  However some of them never get past this.  An example would be someone who believed there was a conspiracy behind the J.F.K assassination and only read books claiming that there was a conspiracy, or if (as is unlikely with such people) he or she read books debunking the conspiracy theories he or she would read them vastly more critically than he or she read the conspiracy books.

Self styled iconoclasm is a kind of fundamentalism, and as such is anti-thetical to the way of the philosopher.  People who love wisdom should as much as possible bracket their background beliefs and humbly study both sides of issues which concern them.  For the philosopher this cannot be limited to some narrow philosophical domain (such as the epistemology of perceptual reports or the semantics of modality) but must also include ethical, religious, and political beliefs.

The philosopher's faith is that if you do this and remain humble: (1) your resulting beliefs will be more likely to be true, and (2) in addition to true belief you will come to possess wisdom and understanding.

I'm not neurotic. You're desensitized.

the set of things that (with varying degrees of justification and in no particular order) bother me more than they should include:

(1) televisions in public places, (2) people chewing gum, (3) people not being still (i.e. fidgetters, leg bouncers, etc.), (4) people chewing loudly, with their mouths open, or biting into chips loudly, (5) people wearing hats and/or sunglasses indoors (with the exception of spies and sufferers of glaucoma), (6) people forcing others to hear music, (7) televisions droning in the background when i'm at someone's house, (8) people who are able to read, but don't, (9) the fact that the overwhelming majority of modern people spend most of their time consuming media and almost no time creating it, (10) almost all bop jazz, progressive rock, angst-rock, gangsta rap, contemporary country, contemporary r & b, and classical music after Bartok, (11) the practice of referring to women as "ladies," (12) (in the words of Charles Bukowski) "unorignal macho energy," (13) sports obsession, (14) celebrity obsession, (15) people who are vain and passive aggressive at the same time, (16) blaming one's unhappiness on environment (with the exception of crime victims, the hungry, the very ill, the bereaved, and political prisoners) instead of on what one does, (17) cliche'd misuse of the phrase "beg the question,"(18) the phrases "at the end of the day," and "the fact of the matter is. . ." (19) misuse of quotation marks and apostrophes, (20) hideously cramped and ergonomically torturous airline seats , (21) people talking on cell phones so that others hear their conversation, (22) people who use religion for anything other than comfort in tragedy and helping themselves be kinder people, (23) supbar bathrooms in public places (including bars), (24) having to wait for indeterminate amounts of time for things that are not pleasant (i.e. dentists, doctors, government processing), (25) fast food and everything that goes with it, (26) people who do any of the following in a car: eating, talking on a cell phone, putting on makeup, reading, fiddling with the stereo, watching television or movies, yelling at their kids, arguing, (27) people who are horrible to their children, (28) people who own animals and shouldn't [i.e. anyone who lets a dog (pack animals!) go miserably crazy from being alone in the back yard their whole life], (29) lack of sidewalks, bicycle paths, and pedestrian crossing signals in modern American cities, (30) people clipping their fingernails in public, (31) people throwing trash on the ground, (32) people who are into being "cool" and as a result can't be ridiculously passionate about anything, (33) fraternities and sororities , (34) the interstate highway system and everything that goes with it, (35) people who are in a hurry, (36) Dwight Eisenhower and his apologists, (39) American leftists who appropriate the terminology of the oppressed to describe themselves, (40) Reagan and the two Bushes.

(possibly bad) wisdom for the young

(1)  If anyone ever asks what side you're on, tell them you are on the side of truth, beauty, and the sublime.  And make it so!

(2) Don't trust people who would rather make a point than make a buck, people who would rather feel better than be better.

(3)  Never presume to speak for God. For that matter be very careful when you even speak about God.  Follow Jesus' commandment to keep your praying private.

(4)  Satan's greatest deceit is not convincing people that he doesn't exist; it's convincing the morally retarded that he is God. 

(5)  If you are upset that people treat your art like dog poop, take solace in the fact that they don't hit you with a newspaper and rub your face in it.  It could happen!

(6) (From somebody else).  Nobody that is cool for more than ten minutes of the day is really cool.

(7) (From Brian Stableford). You can only play the hand you're dealt, and maybe you can't win even if you play it well, but if you play it badly that's still what you did.

(8)  Some joys have to be payed back with an outrageous amount of interest, e.g. (a) use of chemically concentrated drugs such as cocaine, methedrine, or opiates, (b) abuse of non-chemically concentrated drugs, (c) passive ego annihilation (e.g. T.V. watching, music as aural wallpaper), (d) casual sex. . .  On the other hand, some joys return dividends, e.g. (a) moderate wine consumption and the conversation/reverie that goes with it, (b) ego annihilation through creating music, painting, stories, etc. (c) ego annihilation through meditation and learning, (d) romantic love. . .  Much human tragedy comes from the fact that it takes no effort to experience the first kind of joys, while the other kind requires discipline.