Meta and Meta

State of the Union Regress

Cute maneuver by the Dems--applauding when Bush lamented that Congress "did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security."  (The Republicans booed in response to the Dems' hijinx.)

But did anyone notice the Freudian slip that came next? For President Bush then noted (face flushed with teen-like eagerness to deliver the clever riposte) that the Social Security problem (such as it is)  "is not going away"--whereupon the Republican side of the aisle rose triumphantly with even more raucous applause.

Yes: applauding the fact that problems aren't going away. I'm sure they didn't mean it.

Nothing but Links

• Michael Dirda reviews John Carey's What Good are the Arts? ("Art should be 'something done, not consumed, and done by ordinary people, not master spirits.' It should result in community, not a fatuous sense of superiority.")
• Media Matters lodges a pair of posts contrasting the attention paid by the "liberal" media (the WaPo and NYT being proxies) to the NSA wiretapping story, on the one hand, with that paid to Whitewater and Monicagate, on the other. (Via Leiter Reports.)
• The Raving Atheist notices an accent on the wrong sylLABle in the American Atheists' position paper regarding the Alito nomination.
• Michael Kinsley wonders why kicking the Democrats when they're down is such a popular game--even for Democrats.

Man's Inhumanity to Man

The Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein is caught up in a case of hyperliteralism.

Bernstein excerpts part of an interview with Steven Spielberg in Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: [George W. Bush] repeatedly emphasizes that the enemy is evil incarnate and the enemies are not human beings. The effect of this dehumanization of terrorists ...

Spielberg: ... is that you also no longer have to treat them as humans.

Whereupon Bernstein challenges his readers: "[C]an anyone come up with a single example of when Bush has said that the 'enemies are not human beings?'"

This is, I don't know how else to say it, so dumb. Bernstein is assuming that the only way to communicate an idea is literally to say it.* For most of us, though, having come to terms with the post-Gricean world, it just isn't too hard to see that Bush's casting a class of actors as "evil" might be taken by reasonable listeners as identifying those actors with the inhumanity of their actions. To wit, to characterize someone as "evil" arguably abstracts away their humanity--dehumanizes them.

*Bernstein applies a corollary hermeneutic to the interviewer's remarks: look only to the literal meaning of the speaker's words. Thus, Bernstein attributes only the most hyperliteral interpretation to the interviewer's remarks: that Bush literally thinks (or says) terrorists are not "human."

It's convenient for Bernstein's polemical point that the proposition attributed is utterly preposterous. But then we've seen this kind of thing before.

Why We Are Here

We are here to provide the world with more dramatic material.

Useful Customer Service Prompt?

The recently available hack sheet for getting around automated phone responders at various companies has received a lot of attention. I may have stumbled upon another, even more effective shortcut.

A credit card company had some time ago enticed me to sign up for payment protection. Today I called to discontinue the service.

After a brief number-punching-through-the-telephone-carousel, I was set in the queue to await the next available customer service representative. And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And then (to no one in particular) I posed the following rhetorical question: "Are you fucking kidding me?"

Within one second an operator was on the line with me, kindly asking me how I was doing today. (As it happened, I was doing "very well, thank you.")

So, next time you find yourself enduring too long a wait for your customer service facilitator, just ask--firmly and audibly--whether they are fucking kidding you. It might just work.

Department of Redundancy Department

This photo is captioned: "[I]n front of Schloss Sanssouci castle in Potsdam." (The German 'Schloss' means 'castle'. Just thought it was funny.)

Don't Call Me "Shirley"

Mark Kleiman on the conservatarian idea of judges as amanuenses of law:

[The constitutional issue regarding the Oregon assisted-suicide law] was whether the Justice Department could use the its power to hand out licenses to prescribe abusable drugs to regulate the practice of medicine, as opposed to using that power only to prevent "script-doctoring" and the diversion of drugs to the illicit market. The regulations provide that physicians may prescribe drugs only for a "legitimate medical purpose." Could that rule be used to overrule the decision of the voters of Oregon, voting in a referendum, to allow physicians in that state to help badly suffering terminally ill patients put an end to their misery?

To Scalia, the answer is clear. “If the term ‘legitimate medical purpose’ has any meaning, it surely excludes the prescription of drugs to produce death.”

Savor that "surely," if you will. Because Scalia finds assisted suicide morally offensive, it "surely" must be the case that relieving suffering by hastening death isn't a legitimate part of what a physician does....

All judges judge by their personal beliefs.  Whose beliefs would you expect them to judge by?

Language Mavenry is Bunk

I've always found it irritating when language mavens hasten to point out some formal linguistic or orthographical error that has no substantive or communicative significance. David Crystal's got my back.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco is Still Dead

Keith Burgess-Jackson has a whole blog dedicated to "exposing" Brian Leiter's verbal abuse.

Wow. Well, no doubt about it, Leiter's rants are frequently abusive. (So just what is the point of devoting an entire blog to "exposing" such rants? One might as well "expose" wet sand at a beach.)

But from the plainly unphilosophical character of some of Leiter's blog posts, Burgess-Jackson draws conclusions about Leiter's competence as a philosopher, simpliciter. E.g., "Certainly no philosopher would engage in such juvenile, pointless psychologizing."

I want to respond: Certainly no philosopher would commit such an obvious fallacy. But I'll suffer Burgess-Jackson's panphilosophic pretensions and offer a pair of counterarguments:

1. Argument from actuality: Leiter is a philosopher; Leiter engages in juvenile, pointless psychologizing; therefore, at least some philosopher would engage in juvenile, pointless psychologizing.*
2. Argument from analogy: Just as comedians aren't always funny, philosophers aren't always philosophical. (Cf. the writings of Leiter, Burgess-Jackson.)**

* Addressing Burgess-Jackson's own juvenilia (e.g., "Nietzsche was no more a philosopher than Hitler was a political scientist") is beyond the scope of this post.
** Note that this argument counters Burgess-Jackson's own even if his is construed as a statement of aspiration (I've suppressed the relevant normative premise for concision).

Re-CAP

Mark Kleiman draws an apt moral from the Alito-CAP connection:

[C]onservatism has never gone through the process of separating itself from the bigots, as liberalism separated itself from the communists during the Cold War period. Conservative politicians are delighted to receive the support of bigoted voters, the dollars of bigoted contributors, and the endorsements of bigoted TV preachers, and reluctant to do anything to alienate that large chunk of the "base."