Meta and Meta

But There's Still Time

I can't quite grasp how it is Ford's pardoning Nixon before Nixon's crimes were at least initially vetted by investigators is supposed to have "healed" the nation or "restored confidence in the office" of the presidency. But hey, I guess that's because I'm not a political scientist.

Funny, though, how few of those conservatives who sponsor this line of argument never thought to ask President Bush to pardon Bill Clinton. That would've "brought the country together" too, right?

UPDATE: In addition, what Hitch said.

 

Keen Prediction

The spectral deconvolution software that iTunes uses to recommend new music to listeners usually seems to do a pretty lousy job of predicting songs I actually enjoy.

Still, even with that in mind, I'd say this is an unusually...exotic inference.

And They Was Right

We're in the studio recording what is surely destined to be our first megasmash country hit. I know this because I haven't slept in three days. I also know this because I've thought the same thing on previous occasions, and it turns out that on each occasion I couldn't have been more wrong. Which, I figure, pretty much makes it certain I've got to be right this time.

Anyway, when you're in the studio after serial sleepless days as we have been, the hijinx begins. In the instant case, the hijinx involved the other vocalist and I multitracking a scat-sung double of a descending guitar line. The result ("doo-bee-ooh-doo-bee-doo-bee-doo-bee-Doooooo") is sublimely ridiculous, right out of the Golden Throats' songbook of musically unnatural acts. Thus, as George W. Bush might have said, Mission Accomplished.

A few hours later our manager came by to listen in. We played him the track, doing our best to keep a straight face. (Regular Meta readers will have seen something like this picture before.) Then we turned to him for comment.

He said, "Whoever thought up that idea should be hung."

I stopped the track, then replied: "And we are."

Thoughts:
1. Must...get...sleep.
2. God bless the gambler's fallacy--for what else stands guard at the threshold of a musician's hope?
3. Sometimes the soul of wit is just plain lying.

The Relative Benignity of Moral Relativity

Ilya Somin addresses a common fallacy about atheism (as illustrated in this article by Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby), viz., that atheism is somehow "antithetical to morality."

In Ilya's post and the ensuing comments there is considerable discussion about the relationship (such as it is) between atheism, free will and moral relativism. Just about everyone there abjures moral relativism, and it's been rendered such a bogeyman in contemporary culture I feel the need to speak up on its behalf. Moral relativism is not the claim that morally "anything goes." Rather, it is the claim that moral and ethical propositions are (or should be) determined (in part) by some set of local social, environmental, cultural, psychological, etc. factors. (Some relativists might deny that anything "determines" moral content, and would argue that we more or less just make it up as we go, but that kind of moral positivism doesn't necessarily follow from relativism.) With regard to some given class of persons in some place and time, then, relativism does not preclude there being a moral "fact of the matter" in specific cases. So if that's what you've got a yen for, maybe relativism's for you.

Anyway, I've never really understood what's so unsettling about the notion that there are no (or that we lack epistemic access to) universal determinants of moral content. Universality isn't necessarily any great shakes--as Ilya points out, even the most heinous of moralities can (and have been) universalized.

UPDATE: This is a reworking of a post originally entitled "Free Wheelin' on Free Willin'." (I cut all the material related to free will, hence the change in title.)

Getting Over It

I am still not the Overman, and I'm really starting to resent it.

This Sentence is Probably Ambiguous

From Cognitive Daily: "[I]n an analysis of a set of 891 sentences ranging in length from 1 to 25 words, a team led by Kathryn Baker found an average of 27 possible ways to parse each sentence."

I would've said how interesting that was, but for the fact that I now realize it's possible I'm totally misreading it.