Escape from the APA
Whew. Had to go straight from the Ranch of the Damned to the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, where I did nothing all day long every day but interview job candidates. It continues to amaze me--and everybody else--how many excellent job candidates there are for so relatively few jobs. Depressing.
We had a little excitement on our last night, when the hotel was evacuated b/c of a fire on the 7th floor (we were on the 9th). A good bit of smoke and water flying around, the whole shebang. We were outside for about 45 minutes, then they let us back into the ballrooms, and we got back to our rooms around 7am.
Crashed with Statisticasaurus Rex last night, and now for a day with Johnny Quest's folks before FINALLY getting a few days of down time in Chapel Hill before the Spring semester starts and I do it all over again.
Anyway, not that anybody cares about all this, but, hell, I've been cut off from/ignoring current events, so I don't really have anything to say.
Whew. Had to go straight from the Ranch of the Damned to the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, where I did nothing all day long every day but interview job candidates. It continues to amaze me--and everybody else--how many excellent job candidates there are for so relatively few jobs. Depressing.
We had a little excitement on our last night, when the hotel was evacuated b/c of a fire on the 7th floor (we were on the 9th). A good bit of smoke and water flying around, the whole shebang. We were outside for about 45 minutes, then they let us back into the ballrooms, and we got back to our rooms around 7am.
Crashed with Statisticasaurus Rex last night, and now for a day with Johnny Quest's folks before FINALLY getting a few days of down time in Chapel Hill before the Spring semester starts and I do it all over again.
Anyway, not that anybody cares about all this, but, hell, I've been cut off from/ignoring current events, so I don't really have anything to say.
posted by Winston Smith at
6:51 AM
21 Comments:
best site
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Hehe/ Good one, Myca.
Welcome back to the jungle, WS.
I think I'm going to leave again.
Run.
It's all coming home to roost, and the chickenshit's flyin' everywhere. Oh, the humanity.
See, this sh!t would be alarming if it weren't so much better than the sh!t we've endure for the last 6 years. But against the backdrop of that sh!t, this sh!t seems downrigt tolerable.
Remember: at best we've crawled out of the fire and back into the frying pan.
You were hoping for, what? A flawless transition to total sanity?
Sheesh, man, you must have a higher opinion of the Dems & co. than I do...
On the bright side, they haven't gone out of their way to lie us into a morally and strategically disastrous war...
...uhhhh...not in the last thirty years, anyway...
Just cleaning up some old business, WS. So far, the Dems in congress are picking up where the GOP left off. (Which was admittedly bad.)
As for the constitutional right to act like a yahoo, well, Mother Sheehan is all yours now.
Iraq indeed may be a strategic blunder, but immoral, no.
Immoral yes, actually.
Or at least maybe. It's a very tough case.
At any rate, your gesture at an argument here fails immediately. Note that the following inference is patently invalid:
Saddam was evil
therefore
Action A taken to remove Saddam is good.
Anyway, you're being silly, but so are lots of Republicans right now. It's tough to transition gracefully from power, I guess.
I'm always silly, by any definition hereabouts. But I won't concede that toppling Saddam was immoral. I cannot believe you actually watched the videos of Saddam's torture that I linked to and then actually wrote that, WS. Just can't believe it. I think too highly of you.
Those wringing their hands right now that somebody ought to do something about Darfur and might find the grapes to actually back a military intervention could find a mess equal to Iraq created with the best of intentions.
Fortunately, the moral course remains to continue to do nothing. Let us pat ourselves on the back for our realism.
And for the record, I don't know a single Republican who didn't think the GOP didn't deserve to lose control of congress. That the Democrats deserved to win it is another matter, altho I found the GOP's tyranny over congressional procedure a sound argument, as previously noted.\
And Cindy Sheehan remains yours. Io Saturnalia.
Keep being silly, Tom, and people will continue to point it out.
We've been over this again and again: I don't know of anyone who posts here who thinks that Saddam was a good guy. I'm glad he's dead and gone.
But the fact that x is bad and that y fights x doesn't entail that y is good, nor that y acts rightly. Otherwise both Hitler and Stalin would have been good guys.
One can conduct and immoral war against an immoral person. Go back and read your Aquinas if you like. The weight of just war theory seems to be against you on this one.
We fougt a war for bad reasons, made life even worse for the Iraqis than it was under Saddam, and, in fact, made the whole world a better place.
Yet Bush's cult of personality continues to try to claim that this sow's ear is a silk purse.
The miracle is that Bush can be so dishonest, mean-spirited and incompetent as to ultimately bring it about that Saddam looks somewhat less monstrous than he really was.
Hell, Saddam was a Frankenstein made by Republican administrations, anyway...in response to a radical, theocratic Iraqi regime that was ultimately created by Republican actions.
Nice going. Make a monster, help him committ mass murder, then conduct his removal in an immoral manner.
Your boys are amazing.
and, in fact, made the whole world a better place.
Context says 'worse' would fit better than 'better'.
If one wishes to argue from cliches, he is free to do so, but such banalities are no argument at all.
If one wishes to discuss Aquinas, he must discuss Aquinas. To do otherwise is silly.
Yep, 'worse'. Sorry about that.
I agree. So read Aquinas. Unless I'm getting him confused with Grotius, he requires "right intention" for a war to be just.
Actually Grotius and Aquinas may not be disagreeing. One may be talking about the justice of the war while the other is talking about the justice of the leader.
But EVERYONE I know of accepts the "last resort" condition, which clearly wasn't met in the case at hand.
Blah, blah, blah. We've gone over this a million times.
How about a rewritten cliche?
The last refuge of a sophist is a methodological quibble.
TVD, once you've lost, you always claim that your interlocutor didn't meet your idiosyncratic apprehension of the Form of argument. I think you're just looking for a way to stop defending another indefensible position without admitting error.
But, of course, that's just a meta-argument, not an argument, with a few gibes thrown in for good measure to give you something besides the just war question to dispute (or to call banal), since it seems you don't want to go there.
Not good ol' Grotius, but the New Anger, right on schedule. The thymotic should and will not read this.
Bush may have miscalculated, but this type of calculation is what's immoral, killing innocents, with not a single person freed or given hope for freedom:
In 1996, Madeleine Albright was asked the following question on CBS’ “60 Minutes” by Lesley Stahl: “We have heard that half a million children have died (in Iraq). I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And you know, is the price worth it?"
Albright infamously replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”
Yes, we've been through this, WS, but how soon we forget that there are things worse than war, or miscalculation.
Oh, and LL, in response to your point, Thymos in America is part of old business too.
But don't read that---it'll only make you angrier. And Cindy Sheehan is still yours.
And altho I objected to the incoherent form of the argument, which chose "immoral" from Column A and "strategically disastrous" from Column B, as partisan cliche (which it is), I chose only "immoral" to rebut substantively. The charge of the absence of "right intention" is scurrilous, and Saddam's crimes are quite germane to the rebuttal.
I consider "strategically disastrous" a valid line of inquiry, and on that should have been more emphatic. Thymotic, even...
TVD, you thought that was anger from me? Hmm, no. Sorry you interpreted it that way, though it is convenient for your style of disputation.
Only a brief glance at "Thymos in America" - I still have work to do even at this hour, but one thing: Any conversation that starts with de Tocqueville's observations about the withering away of caste is, to put it mildly, too late, as caste is making a pretty good comeback these days.
Also, is thymos joining de Tocqueville as right-wing fetish? Here's your thymotician:
The opposite force is winning ? which is bad, not because it is in error, but simply because it is the opposite of what we the left happen to believe.
Can we retarget this to the right, especially the Christianists? Good fit!
Last, I am frequently angerned by American politics, and I am on the left, but do you really think anger is a particular or even significant problem of the left? Probably - just more evidence of your departure from common intersubjective reality.
Here's the thing: The Bushists act as if they believe that reality is up for a vote, as our host is wont to point out. Liberals don't; instead, we think you believers are ignoring reality. And that does frustrate us, at times to anger.
You baffle me, Tom. We note that Bush's decision to go into Iraq didn't meet the conditions for a just war, and you bring up some dig at Madeline Albright...
Thing is, inretrospect, it isn't clear that she was wrong...
The conditions that would have made this a just war were not met. Bush deceived us about his reasons. This may be the biggest strategic error in American history, and one of the biggest humanitarian errors. It's bad pretty much all around and pretty much however you look at it.
I'm really not sure why we're still talking about this.
That damn Madeleine Albright utterly failed to satisfy the requirements for a just peace, therefore we had to choose war!
Satisfy? A bit of an understatement. Your gift for overheated rhetoric is sorely needed in this matter.
Ultimately it's the Clenis's fault, of course...
Nah, just comparing the two administrations' approach to the same Saddam problem.
I think Bill Clinton, being Bill Clinton, did the best he was able.
Dubya, as Dubya too. You (I suppose) prefer Clinton's peace to Bush's war. I don't see a ton of difference in essence, altho I certainly admit a preference for Bush's choice.
But we (should) agree, both very much suck. Sometimes, if not often, all alternatives suck.
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