Meta and Meta

Striving for Obscurity

Whitman famously celebrated that he contained multitudes. Me? I hate crowds.

69th Philosophers' Carnival

At Possibly Philosophy.

What the "Ought" Problem Really Is

You can't derive  an "ought" from an Id.

Watch Your Grammar

"Things can be different."
"Things could have been different."

Thus a change in tense transforms hope into regret.

Race to the Bottom

That being said, here is a piece of HRC criticism I can get behind.

I might quibble with the "reckless" charge ("negligence" seems more like it), but I wouldn't exactly call it unfair. Particularly given the stakes.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Force of Darkness

Shorter Michael Gerson:

There's no Republican-led "War on Science." And besides, science will lead us down dark paths if we don't stop it.

See Them Being Made

Since most of my (very narrow) commentary on Obama v. HRC has been in defense of HRC, I just want to make it clear I think the Democrats are running two spectacular candidates. My preference is for HRC over Obama, but only marginally.

The reason I've spent all my time defending HRC is because of what has struck me as a peculiar anti-HRC bias in the liberal blogosphere (or the small proportion of it I read). The kinds of claims I see emanating from this quarter strike me as downright otherworldly.* Politics is and has always been an ugly business. As von Bismarck observed, the routines of the Wursterei aren't for everyone. And sausage-making's got nothin' on political campaigning.**

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NOTES

* For example, the claim that Hillary's panderly promise to lift a gas tax to gain votes in an election is somehow akin, say, to an incumbent's denial of anthropogenic global warming as a matter of policy (and that contra popular sentiment) -- a claim almost as ludicrous as the idea that tolling a gas tax will save consumers money at the pump.

**On this score, note that even St. Obama knew when to throw his beloved pastor Wright under the bus. Yes, in Round 1 Obama did make a valiant attempt to preserve his relationship with Wright while unequivocally distancing himself from Wright's most objectionable remarks. And that attempt testified to Obama's fundamental decency as a person. But whether on balance it testified to his ability as a political candidate... In any case, eventually Obama did what he had to do to preserve his political viability. Alas, such was his duty qua presidential candidate.

Out-Wright Lunacy

Of course anyone who pays the least bit of attention to the mainstream media knows what a complete nutcase Jeremiah Wright is. And if you didn't know just how radical and outside the mainstream he is, why, just consider the following rant:

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.

No wonder the Washing Post declared that the man who spoke those words "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people." Though they might have said the same about themselves.

(H/T Joshua Cohen and Glenn Loury at Bloggingheads.)

Oh, Just Grow A Pair

Michael Tomasky complains:

Twice this week now, Hillary Clinton has stood there smiling like the Cheshire Cat as the governor of North Carolina used the word "pansy" and then as a union leader in the same state, who more famously referred to her "testicular fortitude...."

OMG! HRC stood there while the governor called someone a pansy?! Why, she's benefiting from the standard Right Wing Talking Points!

Well, not exactly:

Gov. Mike Easley (D) raised some eyebrows when he said Clinton was so determined she made “Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.”

And could it be that a comment imputing "testicular fortitude" to a female candidate might actually have been intended to have a jocular effect? Nah, couldn't be.

(Via Brad DeLong.)

Ethical Universalism and the Problem of Natural Moral Variation

In my last post on ethical relativism, I argued that species categories are vague, and that ethical universalism must therefore be an empirical claim about the contingent constitution of members of Homo sapiens.