The new campus

I went to the new place to get a lot of my paperwork processed. It was a gorgeous day, so I snapped some photos in between administrative tasks. Here’s a sampling.

Knoxville Unitarian Church Shooter

I want to say something very, very simple about the man who allegedly shot up a Unitarian church in Knoxville because of his hatred for “liberals.” First of all, two people lost their lives in this terrible crime. Second, this man does not represent Christians, Conservatives, Southerners, or Tennesseeans (most of whom are liberals in the most common understanding of the term) in the slightest. This man (presuming he is guilty) is a CRIMINAL. Turning the murder of two people into a metaphor for something larger is unacceptable. I sincerely expect that most sane people will agree with me that this ma deserves a fair trial and probably a mental examination. Beyond that, it is dangerous to hypothesize about his motives and their meaning, for we are more likely to fill in our own biases.  If I had the power, I would ask for all liberals to not convict Christian Consrvatives of a crime the did not commit, and I would suspect a great many of them would have put their own life in peril to restrain such a person. If I had the power, I would also ask for all Christian Conservatives not embrace the acts of a criminal simply because you will have to swallow the odd leftist comment about “you people.” We all agree that we don’t want to start shooting each other,” (especially those of us who don’t have an ideology who are int he crossfire) can we please own up to that?

Justice Department’s Illegal Hijinks

The Washington Post reports that the Inspector General’s report indicates that high ranking Justice Department officials routiney violated civl service and Federal ethics standards in their hiring and promotion practices. I have two initial reactions to this. The first is that the impropriety of the Machiavellian literalness (see Harvey Mansfield’s books on “Taming the Prince” and “Manliness” to see the intellectual underpinnings) of this administrations governing philosophy has ecome sickeningly clear. Second, it would be nice if the Washington Post article would refer to what the report is and who wrote it somewhere within the first four paragraphs of the story as opposed to referring to it as “a report” for the first half of the article.The online version could really stand to lik to the actual report since it is available to the public.

For a direct link to the PDF of the report, click here.

Forever in your debt…

The Federal Deficit has skyrocketed. The Vice President was on record as saying “deficits don’t matter.” I suppose we will find out.

Randy Pausch

Dr. Randy Pausch passed away yesterday. His famous “Last Lecture,” an intellectual exercise that turned literal in his case, turned him into a living Mitch Albom tale for many Americans. Between the youtube links and the best-selling book, his impending death became a phenomenon for the American public. I do not mean any disrespect in saying this, in fact, I mean quite the opposite. The Christian ethic in general tends to be one in which people suffer privately and also give anonymously. I remember that one of my earliest graduate course conversations was defending the view of Aristotle that it is important to do such things in plain sight. Anonymous virtue and anonymous suffering have the disadvantage of hiding them from view, and sometimes it is helpful for us to look to others to see a real person carry these things. In showing us his thoughts on his own life, I’d like to think that Dr. Pausch both gave publicly and suffered publicly in a way that clearly, a lot of people were thankful to catch a glimpse of.

Yes, he got money in return for the book, and he recieved fame as a result of his lecture, but I think one must have a rather ludicrous view of money being corrosive to turn such facts into something negative. The lecture itself is characterized by childhood dreams that were ambitious in their reach, and yet innocent in that they were dreams born of aspiration rather than driven by psychological injury. Perhaps more than anything, in such a competitive, cynical world where faith in even values like liberalism and truth are on shaky grounds, people were inspired and excited by a person who just wanted to be the person he thought would be a good person and made it happen. Rather than the American dream of, “you can be whoever you want to be,” I think that Pausch more represents the Aristotelian dream: “you can live a life happy, as if accompanied by a good spirit.” It is a very good dream.

More Minneapolis Photos

Democratic Authority

Via Public Reason, Episteme has a great big symposium on the arguments presented by David Estlund’s Democratic Authority.

Working

I’m trying to get back in the habit of posting something every weekday, but today I am too far behind trying to get my section done for a law review article I am working on, so I’ll try and put something interesting up tomorrow. Go see The Dark Knight, in case you happen to be the person who hasn’t done so already.

LHC Mania

21 Days until the LHC gets turned on in Geneva!  I don’t understand science particulalry well, so I found claims that the LHC might destroy earth a little troubling.  But then, I read some more, and have come to realise that this seems to be a poor exercise in public reason. I am not sure what will happen when the LHC is turned on. Neither do the physicists. If they did, they would not say there is a miniscule chance of danger. They are saying miniscule because they cannot think of any danger they could create given the world as they understand it.

My favorite argument against the LHC is the one which takes the form: “According to Hawking’s theory of the universe, black holes will burn off Hawking radiation… but Hawking’s theories are disputed.”  Of course, as I understand it, you have to agree with Hawking’s theories about the universe to expect mini black holes MIGHT be created in the first place.  I don’t know much about cosmology, but I do think it seems like an unreasonable premise to be worried about a theoretical risk because you do not trust the cosmological understanding that generates the risk in the first place–I don’t think that you can sort of grocery shop what you do and don’t think quantum physics implies the way that critics are doing… maybe I’m wrong.

Mostly, I am thinking about Hume and inductive reasoning. The LHC seems to me to be a revelatory moment that we link our actions to expected outcomes with a strength much closer to habit than reason as to be a little upsetting.  Why do I think typing on my keyboard won’t destroy the universe?  It’s not because I can mentally rule out all possible catastrophic chains of events coming from writing this as much as because I do it all the time, and in fact, lots of people do it all the time and it seems to be a pretty safe physical collision almost every time (save carpal-tunnel syndrome and writing inflamatory messages).  I am not initially scared of a super-collider because I know that it will be dangerous. I am initially scared because I do not know what it does.  Even in acquiring enough information to believe that it is safe for the best possible reasons, and knowing that there is an inductive pattern of the same objections against smaller colliders that have all not destroyed earth, knowing that it might work does not provide the same comfort as experience. In that way, it is a great bogeyman of doomsday proclamation to threaten all future experience with destruction from an experiment that could not be more alien to me. Once I am honset about that, it becomes easier to come back to reason to restore my faith in it as how to make public decisions.

FISA Flowchart

This has been posted a lot of places, but I want to post it here in case someone has not seen it, and also so I can search my own blog to find it. It is two flowcharts that show the changes made to the FISA process in the new compromise bill.