The Surge

I keep hearing that the surge is working. It’s hard, but I have a trillion dollar argument against this. The battle is also economic, blasted to start against the Twin Towers.

Everything is linked.

Tough Times

I’m with this:

But we’ll be here, and we’ll be paying attention, and we’re sure going to be reading a lot of Web pages and using a lot of new software. That’s the audience you want, and it’s all the audience you need.

Government Expansion

Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy raises a perfectly legitimate point:

Nonetheless, I fear that the conjunction of an Obama victory, a strongly Democratic Congress, and a major economic crisis will produce a massive and difficult to reverse expansion of government

This is one of the great chopping points that divides sides on political theory and federalism. But it’s also fraught with ambiguity, which is perhaps a good thing. It could be argued, for example, that laws against pot smoking are a legitimate government intrusion on people’s lives, whereas the regulation of alcohol can be viewed as non-intrusive.

These are arguments that need to exist. Legitimacy is an important issue. Where people should disagree is on the definitions and the details. What constitutes big or good government? What trade offs should be agreed to? It’s difficult to say now, given recent events. At the moment, people may be skeptical of but also thankful for a rather large hand, even with temporary nationalization.

We need to keep cool heads.

On that note, I say Go Obama!

Equity

It was close, but I’m proud of this ruling for CT.

With the ruling, Connecticut joins Massachusetts and California as the only states that allow same-sex couples to marry. Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and New Jersey have civil unions, while Maine, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii have domestic partnership laws that allow same-sex couples to receive some of the same benefits granted to those in civil unions.

Understanding

Dan Green engages a post by Obooki (?)

Since I, too, cannot think of any particular novel that “has changed my thinking about life,” and since I also don’t read novels “for philosophy, for meaning” and am antipathetic to “philosophizing” in novels (as well to the underlying notion that fiction is a medium for “saying something” in the first place), I want to agree with the further claim that no novelist has ever “contributed anything important to human understanding,” but finally I really can’t.

In the narrow sense of the term “understanding” that Obooki seems to be invoking here–“understanding” as philosophically established knowledge–it is certainly true that fiction has contributed almost nothing to the store of human knowledge.

The engagement has generated interesting comments. But I’m wondering at the suggested framework: it’s one thing to claim that fiction may produce human understanding, another thing to say that fiction may generate knowledge (something unknown or unconsidered as related, for example). The distinction matters. Formative knowledge, such as an historical fact, can be conveyed through a fiction, and some fictions may discover a new aesthetic.

But the question of knowledge may lead to an expectation of it. We could ask a different question: a reader may discover an interesting relationship in a fiction or poem. A fiction may uncover something hidden. “Life-changing” is a pretty high and complicated standard. Isn’t the judge in McCarthy’s novel somewhat of a contribution? I admit that the kind of contribution can be an interesting question to pursue.

Landscapes

A clever post from Geoff Manaugh at Worldchanging:

In a related vein, it’s often said in the U.S. that certain politicians simply “don’t understand the West”: they’re so caught up in their big city, coastal ways that they just don’t get – they can’t even comprehend – how a rancher might react to something like increased federal control over water rights or how a small-town mayor might object to interfering rulings by the Supreme Court. Politicians who don’t understand the west – who don’t understand the rugged individuality of ranch life or the no-excuses self-responsibility of American small towns – are thus unfit to lead this society.

But surely the more accurate lesson to be drawn from such a statement is exactly the opposite?

One could even speculate here that politicians from small towns, and from the big rural states of the west, have no idea how cities – which now house the overwhelming majority of the American population – actually operate, on infrastructural, economic, socio-political, and even public health levels, and so they would be alarmingly out of place in the national government of an urbanized country like the United States.

Economists on McCain and Obama

Interesting, but predictable results from an Economist poll of economists on the candidates. Here’s a bite:

A candidate’s economic expertise may matter rather less if he surrounds himself with clever advisers. Unfortunately for Mr McCain, 81% of all respondents reckon Mr Obama is more likely to do that; among unaffiliated respondents, 71% say so. That is despite praise across party lines for the excellent Doug Holtz-Eakin, Mr McCain’s most prominent economic adviser and a former head of the Congressional Budget Office. “Although I have tended to vote Republican,” one reply says, “the Democrats have a deep pool of talented, moderate economists.”

There is an apparent contradiction between most economists’ support for free trade, low taxes and less intervention in the market and the low marks many give to Mr McCain, who is generally more supportive of those things than Mr Obama. It probably reflects a perception that the Republican Party under George Bush has subverted many of those ideals for ideology and political gain. Indeed, the majority of respondents rate Mr Bush’s economic record as very bad, and Republican respondents are only slightly less critical.

Thanks to Matthew Nisbet for the link.

Not Knowing

Susan Gibb raises pertinent questions in this post in her pursuit of Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She writes

So Tomas has branded them [the Communists] as guilty; ignorance no excuse for action. Yes, I suppose I can justify the outrage, the blame-laying, and yet, there are degrees of guilt that should lessen the pain from the known and committed; the venial versus the mortal sin of the Catholic mind.

There’s another point to add to this. Tomas builds his thinking on Oedipus and concluded based on the king’s “not knowing.” But this is a special “not knowing”; it’s not meant, I don’t think, as a “should have known better” because, for Oedipus, the evidence pointed in every direction but to him. The special condition comes before with unconditional proof in the absence of proof, a stance of certainty, being so sure that paradise is just around the corner.

The special realm of poetry and fiction is not “to know” as a condition of being, but to consider and probe what is and or what presents itself. There are modern equivalents to the paradox of confidence or the paradox of faith and certainty.

We are drowning in them now.

Seeing

I don’t know why, but I’ve found Importance of Achromatic Contrast in Short-Range Fruit Foraging of Primates strangely fascinating. Here’s a snip:

Despite these findings, behavioral observation of wild primate populations has given a limited support for trichromat advantage. In a study of wild mixed-species troops of saddleback (Saguinus fuscicollis) and mustached (S. mystax) tamarins, trichromats are further from their neighbors than their dichromatic conspecifics are during vigilance, which is explained through the potentially better perception of predation risk in trichromats [33]. Results of many other field observations are equivocal or opposite to the pattern expected of the trichromat advantage hypothesis.

One reason is the simplicity (but amazing complexity and importance) of the question: so what’s the advantage then of trichromacy?

By simplicity I mean: the basic questions matter still and still need pursuing. It’s a fascinating piece.

Thanks to Bora Zivkovic for the original link.