What’s wrong with brains?

Saw this comment (click and scroll) and it says what everyone should be saying:

He is a man who has spent his adult life thinking serious thoughts about serious issues and having serious conversations about them with other serious, well-informed people; while Palin quite as clearly has done none of those things. He was the president of the Harvard Law Review; she was the point guard on her high school basketball team.

Why is it is fucking crime that he is smart?  That he has worked hard?

Caro on Johnson

This editorial by Robert Caro is very very important.  We must remember our history!

Kucinich, Go man, go

What a barn burner. I love it!

History

What is with America’s antipathy for history? It really is a problem.

LHC

I don’t know how old this is, but it is well worth a gander.

Wow

You must read this book review. I have rarely seen someone in power taken so much to task. It is sad how rare it is to see someone who knows what they are talking about (the author of the review) shred the know nothing talking heads of the “think tanks”. One of the main reasons that we are in the trouble that we are in is because the decision makers listen to the gasbags at the “think tanks” who merely blather “conventional wisdom” and recycle old prejudices. Why is actually knowing what you are talking about so scorned in America today?

Karma

Here’s an example for part of what I was talking about yesterday. Take karma. Many seem to take it as some sort of magical force. It “flows” out from you and magically good stuff comes back.

Really, it is much simpler, obvious, and hard to maintain than that. Karma really says that if you are pissed off and nasty you will piss off and anger people and will get treated worse. If everyone is nasty, everyone gets treated worse. It means that if you are nice, the person that you are nice to might not necessarily be nice, but someone else might react to it. The more that we are nice, the more people are being nice so the odds are better that we’ll run into someone nice.

Simple and obvious and I hope that the imaginary reader just said, duh!!!!! Karma is really that simple, the more you smile the more smiles there are. The more smiles there are the more likely that you will run into one. To say nothing of the biological fact that someone’s smile generates good feeling in the person who receives this.

OK, how does this simple logic/biology interaction get perverted by people into magic? Can people really not see anything without ascribing magic to it?

Can I get this down?

OK, this is the first of an undetermined number of posts as I try to wrap my head around my latest conversation with Deutsch. It will be jumbled now, but I hope that I get some clarity from this.

The law part might flow something like this. What is law and how do we consider it. Underneath it all, law is nothing. Money take away Cardozo creates precedent while no one gets it and everyone disagrees with it. Law then is to create a vague enough sense that people think that there is something but really it is anything that you want it to be.

Think about how we have considered law. By enforcer (torts/criminal), by existence or idea (real property v everything else), what kind of relationship (tort, contract), by who is involved (corporate, human rights, family), by how we should sort it out (law and economics/jurisprudence). The weird thing is that we’ve never moved on from any view, we’ve just added new ones.

The most popular today is law and economics. I think that in most ways it is the thinest and most bankrupt. It seems that there was a crisis when thinkers accepted the mechanism of evolution, it eliminated the need for a god when asking how did we get here (it obviously didn’t eliminate the emotional need). When “legal thinkers” threw god out as a rationale for law (very quietly), they also threw out the justice, morality, fairness rationales as the bathwater. They made a mistake in thinking that justice, morality, and fairness require a god. After they dumped the big three, they had to find something to base the mirage on. Legal realists gave the cynics answer, and while there is a lot of truth to what they hold and legal realism does describe the working of the world well enough, it is not enough. It is not enough for at least two classes of reasons. First, it is too cynical, society needs to dress it up in prettier clothes. Second, it isn’t aspirational enough. The same animal that seeks and creates Mozart and Van Gogh can’t be happy with something as simple and “paint by numbers-like” as realism.

So, where is the academy? They decided to worship at the alter of science. However, scientists know that they know very little and that they are seeking. Law gives the answer. So, they took some simple science-looking trappings and use that as a means of resolving problems. They took statistics, they took the work of the actuary.

Look, there is a place for an actuary. It just isn’t dispensing justice. Justice isn’t what is “most economically rational”. Justice is a much more complex idea.

The idea of justice is a human art. Art every bit as beautiful and important as Bartok. We need to recognize that all we see all we sense all we do is done from a ridiculously small perspective. Also we spend almost no time in the world. Almost all of our time is in the past, the future, the imaginary. We are not in touch with reality to any great extent.

Where do we go from here? Seek Buddahood? Seek an understanding of justice? Truth? What is equally disheartening is that people insist on understanding similes as real. Anything that will describe something as indescribable as justice will use examples and similes and the end result is that we will follow the examples and similes as reality and not understand where they were going.

I’m cited

in a Freakonomics blog post. Thank you, Ian!

Back

I’m back. So, what did I miss? I’ve been having a great vacation, but was cut off from the blogsphere. The Olympics are on and China is oppressing its people. Russia is at war with its neighbors. Pakistan in unstable. The convention season is upon us. I guess that it is time to start really working this election thing. Traditionally, of course, Labor Day marks the time that “real Americans” begin paying attention to the election. I expect the polls to be more interesting in about a month. By the way, I saw a post on the estimated under-counting of the young because the pollsters use land lines and a lot of people have abandoned them. But, I don’t remember the numbers.

I expect to not watch the conventions — I can’t imagine anything more boring. I guess I’ll get news of them from Comedy Central and the blogs. By the way, in reading Nixonland, one of the interesting things that I noticed is how bizarrely wrong the pundit class has always been. They don’t seem to be right on catching the “first draft of history”, they have become okay at expressing the talking points fed to them, but the politicians are also so far off from history that these pronouncements are irrelevant. I don’t think that I understand their place. Once in a while they will spin a lie and make it “conventional wisdom” out side of their hot house, but not too often. Usually, they only talk to each other. It is the viral marketing of the spin and lies that is successful.

By the way, how big a moron is Fox? When they had an Ossetian-American on, they were surprised and upset that she was pro-invasion! Don’t these people have any frigging idea about geopolitics? It really ain’t that hard!