The Infanticide Discussion

The infanticide discussion just lit up again, this time with a comment by a guy who shares my name. He makes an excellent and reasonable contribution.

In my opinion, the enormous popularity (“enormous” in the context of my humble blog) of the infanticide discussion indicates that it’s a far more important topic than I originally thought. The passionately argued responses have not convinced me that my open and skeptical approach to the apparent moral consensus is unmerited. Rather, they make me even less sure of a system that is so willing to inflict criminal punishments for crimes whose purpose and definition people are so afraid to consider in the open light of day.

Why should we be so comfortable with defining an act as a crime and punishing those who commit it if we are afraid even to open the discussion of why that act should be a crime in the first place? Arguments like “it’s obviously wrong” or “we’ve always done it that way” are intellectually unsatisfying and, because they result in some of the strictest punishments we mete out, morally troublesome.

At any rate, the discussion is never closed.

Law Review Membership

The email hit my inbox about an hour ago:

Congratulations! You are now a member of law review. Please find your official letter in your box at school Friday morning.

Until now, I was a law review candidate. Membership is bestowed upon those individuals who write a publishable scholarly paper. It’s hard to believe that my paper is both publishable and scholarly; it seems pretty lame as I look back on the finished product.* The conclusion I drew seems either silly and obvious or dangerously oversimplified. The only way to make it better, in my opinion, is to write another paper that will be impressive enough to eclipse the first one.

However, at the moment it seems more likely than not—a term of art, not to be confused with “highly likely”—that I will be published in an upcoming volume of the San Joaquin Agricultural Law Review.

*Well, almost finished. I still need to make corrections from my cite-checking notes.

One Goode Turn Deserves Another

How about this letter, Representative Goode?

Dear Voter,

Thank you for your recent communication. When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing In Day, I will have no religious text in my other hand. I do not subscribe to using the Bible in any way. The Christian Representatives from every other state were elected by the voters of their districts and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt a secular position on politics and governance there will likely be many more Christians elected to office and demanding the use of the Bible. We need to stop religious influences totally and end the “religious tolerance” policy pushed hard by liberals and allowing many persons who worship that brutal “god” Yahweh to live in this country and use their beliefs to harm others. I fear that in the next century we will have many more Christians in the United States if we do not adopt the strict education policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values essential to the civilized future of the United States of America and of the human species and to prevent our resources from being swamped.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are on the wall in my office. A Christian student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about the Bible. My response was clear, “As long as I have the honor of representing the citizens of the 54th District of California in the United States House of Representatives, The Bible is not going to be on the wall of my office.” Thank you again for your email and thoughts.

Sincerely yours,

Imaginary Legislator

No, I didn’t think you would like that one. But your religion is just as dangerous as the one you denounce. Maybe your Bible-toting brethren are not setting off bombs, but they are certainly attempting a massive project of similar aims: to bring down Western civilization and replace it with a theocracy. You make your moves by pandering to the fearful, xenophobic, and unthinking partisans that comprise a small but persistent sect of Christianity, getting elected to Congress, and whipping up division and controversy instead of advocating open and candid conversation about how we ought to govern our society, or promoting free and open inquiry by those constituents of yours.

All the books in the world, all the extraordinary research in science and medicine, the brilliant ideas in philosophy and mathematics, and still you insist on keeping that bizarre collection of ancient texts in your other hand, as though nothing worthwhile has been written in the last two millennia. (In case you haven’t noticed, we have made some remarkable progress in since the time of the Bible. Oddly enough, none of those technological, scientific, or cultural advances can be found in your precious book, except in creative re-interpretation by intellectually dishonest “scholars” who have no qualms about turning texts on their head and pretending things have always been thus.)

Those Muslims you fear are organizing “terrorist” cells, stoking the passionate fires of sectarian hatred, and setting off bombs. Your religion uses methods of transmission and institutional maintenance that are ostensibly nonviolent but nevertheless psychologically devastating. Millions of lives have been crippled or even destroyed by the invisible weight of theological oppression that is so pernicious and pervasive that even its victims have a difficult time perceiving its presence until they are finally out from underneath it. Personally, I would rather consider three thousand innocent people killed in a terrorist attack than consider the countless individuals throughout history whose lives, whose potential for freedom and achievement, have been crushed under the wheels of Christian theology. I was there once, walking down a narrow road, seeing the opportunities for different perspectives, but afraid to turn aside and pursue them freely, because people like you made me believe that your old book and its keepers had all the answers. They were wrong and I am glad I figured that out.

If you want to practice your religion, then practice it; but you are not many steps removed from the enemies you fear. Do not try to hijack my nation’s government and its vast resources to serve your petty, tribal god. Our government, despite its flaws, is a system that remains rooted, for the most part, in the practical problems of ensuring peace in commercial and civic intercourse. Our system works best when it follows the needs of an evolving society made up of creative entrepreneurs who fuel a diverse economy with hard work and innovation; it does not work well when shoehorned into the other-worldly agendas of religious believers who think they know the future.

Go ahead and participate in politics and governance while you practice your religion. Christians in government is one thing; Christianity as government is quite another. The same could, and should, be said of every religion and quasi-religious ideology. You want to swear on a Bible? Go right ahead. But let the rest of us swear on whatever other silly artifact we choose, or none at all. Or maybe you should take your testicles in your other hand when you swear in; it would probably be more honest.

Bionic Hand

This is amazing. [FIXED]

A Boozy Little Beggar Who Could Think You Under the Table

A couple nights ago, in celebration of my having a bit o’ time here during the Christmas break to read for pleasure, I descended upon the philosophy section at the local Borders bookstore. (Yes, you may guffaw. “He reads philosophy for pleasure?!”) My goal was to find something challenging, modern, and compact (say, something by Heidegger)—so that I could put it in my jacket pocket and carry it with me everywhere for easy access while, say, standing in line at the store.

The model for this idea came from when I was in college and had a small paperback copy of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil that I carried around in my pocket. The small size of the book combined with Nietzsche’s writing style, which puts each thought into a short, separate section, to make for an excellent way to read philosophy. If you are sitting down with a difficult philosophical work and reading it start to finish like a novel, you are probably not getting much from it; philosophy usually needs to be read in smaller “bite-sized” chunks so that you can ponder each one before moving on to the next.

So imagine my frustration to find that the only similarly sized philosophical works were things by Rousseau, Mill, and, of all people, Ayn Rand. (There was a nice little edition of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, but that really wasn’t what I wanted. Ethics are nice and inspiring and all, but I can’t read Aurelius without questioning the underlying assumptions.) Yes, this is where you can insert the following line from The Princess Bride: “Have you ever heard of Socrates? Plato? Aristotle? Morons!” But change them out for Rousseau, Mill, and Rand, none of whom impress me much. (And no, I am not one of those people who believes that philosophers should be avoided because “discredited” or “proven wrong” or “superseded” or whatever. I am just not in the mood for those particular ones right now.)

Really, why are there no affordable, compact editions of Heidegger? The only ones I can find are those monstrosities that university presses put out—the ones that are gigantic, with huge margins to write in, lengthy prefaces by scholars explaining or apologizing for the defects in the work, and hefty price tags. Is that what the world has come to? The only people who dare to read an influential but difficult philosopher are people who want a big book that will need to be rested on a table while read, instead of carried in one’s pocket to digest in pieces while on-the-go?

Granted, something like Being and Time is a lengthy work that probably wouldn’t fit well into a small paperback, but why not break it up and make separate books of each chapter? Collect ‘em all, kids! (I would.)

Why am I stuck in a society where people are willing to lug around Bibles that they can barely understand or to buy up enormous quantities of intellectually questionable paperback fiction to read on airports and in waiting rooms, but nobody apparently thinks it worthwhile to publish small-form philosophical works? Why not combine those two tendencies with a secular sensibility and publish books that feed the minds of the people? (Yes, I am aware of the Penguin Great Ideas series, and it’s fantastic, but not quite what I’m looking for.)

Anyway, the quest continues. Maybe Amazon can help.

(Extra points if you can tell me where the title to this post comes from. Even more if you can do it without resort to Google.)

Grades Begin

The first of the fall semester grades posted today. I received a score of 90 on the Real Property midterm. There is no listing yet posted for the entire class, so I don’t know the top score. My partner received a score of 87 and one other person we know received a score of 88.

If those grades do not sound particularly spectacular, recall that my school assigns grades on an absolute scale, not a variable one, to better approximate scoring on the bar exam (and to foster cooperation and collegiality between students, rather than cutthroat competition; if we are graded absolutely rather than comparatively, then there is no need to try and knock each other out of our rankings). Having a score in the 90s is not a particularly common occurrence; aside from a single 100 (in an elective with a first-time adjunct professor and an easy class), this is my first 90. It should come in handy when the grades for Business Associations and Constitutional Law come down the pike, as the professor who teaches those two classes is well-known for low scores that adversely affect one’s grade point average.

Quiet Court

This article will probably not interest anyone but legal community types, but you might want to take a look anyway.

The [United States Supreme Court] has taken about 40 percent fewer cases so far this term than last. It now faces noticeable gaps in its calendar for late winter and early spring. The December shortfall is the result of a pipeline empty of cases granted last term and carried over to this one.

The number of cases the court decided with signed opinions last term, 69, was the lowest since 1953 and fewer than half the number the court was deciding as recently as the mid-1980s. And aside from the school integration and global warming cases the court heard last week, along with the terrorism-related cases it has decided in the last few years, relatively few of the cases it is deciding speak to the core of the country’s concerns.

I am curious to know what non-legal folks would think of this. If you’re up for it, read the article and leave a comment here with your thoughts.

Confucian Comeback

Here is an interesting phenomenon:

Noticeably absent from many civics courses [in Chinese schools] is the history of Chinese communism and Mao Zedong. Instead, the works of Confucius, who emphasized community harmony, are thought to help in producing more obedient and peaceful citizens.

Many parents enthusiastically support the return to core values in the classroom. Having come of age closer to the Cultural Revolution—when schools were shuttered and philosophers like Confucius were reviled as anti-egalitarian—they want their children to understand their cultural heritage.

Step forward? Step back? One wonders. It is difficult to imagine a society succeeding at “producing more obedient and peaceful citizens” without completely blocking out all Western influences. On the other hand, there is this scholar who seems to believe that Confucius is more accurately characterized as “not a backward dogmatist intent on maintaining the status quo at all costs, but a whistle-blower, a moralizing evangelist responsible to the people and to heaven for speaking out against existing evils and abuses.” He compares Confucius with Old Testament prophets.

At any rate, we ought to keep an eye on China. They’re going places.

For Crying Out Loud

Christians are pissed that Mary Cheney is pregnant. Way to tip your hand, guys. You’re still “pro-life,” right? Bring babies into the world no matter what, right?

Unless mommy is a lesbian, apparently.

Clearly, the important thing is not preserving life; it’s preserving the proper indoctrination of children. Let the heterosexual rapists impregnate women, force the women to give birth, and then expect them to give up unwanted children for adoption by white-bread, white-fleece, white-faced Christians. But homosexual women, no; sorry, you don’t even get to be pregnant. You have to go out, get married, and do that thing we don’t want anyone to see on television (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Could we get a little consistency here?

Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Ideologues

This sick propaganda was one of the ads that popped up on my Gmail page a few minutes ago: “Why Mommy Is A Democrat.” Some sample lines from his bizarre children’s book:

“Democrats make sure we all share our toys, just like mommy does.”

“Democrats make sure we are always safe, just like mommy does.”

“Democrats make sure children can go to school, just like mommy does.”

Right. So you should choose the party that will be like a mommy, and base the decision on its claims to noble ends (or ends that would appeal to a child), without a thought to the validity of its means. It’s manipulative and cynical. Better to teach children to think critically and independently so that they have the ability to disagree with the rest of us and come up with their own creative solutions to the problems they encounter.