Sheridan: Con-Law

FEYNMAN: IF IT DISAGREES WITH NATURE, EXPERIMENT, IT'S WRONG

Richard Feynman quote of the day (from 1964):

In general, we look for a new law by the following process:

First we guess it;

then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right;

then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works.

If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.

In that simple statement is the key to science.

It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is — if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.

From the blog "Brainpickings", as noted by NPR's Robert Krulwich, here.

Note that Feynman is discussing laws of Nature, i.e. the subject and study of Science, not the sort of laws made by people who don't much care about other people, like Stalin, Hitler, and, I hate to lump us in the same category, but we do have to face up to the constitutional laws protecting slavery and Jim Crow, otherwise we've learned nothing about human nature, a subject that does not exist outside nature, so, yes, us.  

Here, the operative rule seems to be that if a proposed law gets enough votes, it can be adopted for as long as it takes to get rid of it.  

Conlaw is supposed to help us get rid of bad law, when it doesn't help perpetuate it, or worse, create it, but why go looking for trouble, right?  Wrong.  Conlaw  IS looking for trouble, everywhere and all the time, and thank goodness.  It helps us keep our nose clean.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

From an NPR report, today, this quote from the article reproduced below for reference purposes:

 

Cognitive dissonance:   The psychological experience of having to hold inconsistent ideas in one's head.

Causes pain, apparently because one view conflicts with our preconceived super-story; of which, see previous article.

The mark of a good lawyer, one might say...

Okay, the deal is that when the price of gasoline goes up during the GWB administration and the Dems pounce on it as evidence of the man's incompetence, the Repubs become angry at the unfair attack; but when gas prices rise under Obama, our first black Muslim socialist president who deserves no credit for anything happening on his watch, although he's fully to blame for every calamity that does, according to the far right, he's to blame and better fix it soonest, as though he could, or any president could.  But no matter, politics is politics and mud thrown is ground gained.

Here's the full article:

When pollsters ask Republicans and Democrats whether the president can do anything about high gas prices, the answers reflect the usual partisan divisions in the country. About two-thirds of Republicans say the president can do something about high gas prices, and about two-thirds of Democrats say he can't.

But six years ago, with a Republican president in the White House, the numbers were reversed: Three-fourths of Democrats said President Bush could do something about high gas prices, while the majority of Republicans said gas prices were clearly outside the president's control.

The flipped perceptions on gas prices isn't an aberration, said Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan. On a range of issues, partisans seem partial to their political loyalties over the facts. When those loyalties demand changing their views of the facts, he said, partisans seem willing to throw even consistency overboard.

Last time it was Republicans who were against a flip-flopping, out-of-touch elitist from Massachusetts, and now it's Democrats.

- Brendan Nyhan, political scientist, Dartmouth College

Nyhan cited the work of political commentator Jonathan Chait, who has drawn a contrast between the upcoming 2012 election between President Obama and the likely Republican nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and the 2004 election between President Bush and John Kerry, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts.

"Last time it was Republicans who were against a flip-flopping, out-of-touch elitist from Massachusetts, and now it's Democrats," Nyhan said.

Nyhan also contrasted the outrage in 2004 among Democrats who felt that Bush was politicizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks for political gain, and the outrage today among Republicans who feel the Obama re-election campaign is exploiting the killing of Osama bin Laden.

"The whole political landscape has flipped," Nyhan said.

Along with Jason Reifler at Georgia State University, Nyhan said, he's exploring the possibility that partisans reject facts because they produce cognitive dissonance — the psychological experience of having to hold inconsistent ideas in one's head. When Democrats hear the argument that the president can do something about high gas prices, that produces dissonance because it clashes with the loyalties these voters feel toward Obama. The same thing happens when Republicans hear that Obama cannot be held responsible for high gas prices — the information challenges their dislike of the president.

Nyhan and Reifler hypothesized that partisans reject such information not because they're against the facts, but because it's painful. That notion suggested a possible solution: If partisans were made to feel better about themselves — if they received a little image and ego boost — could this help them more easily absorb the "blow" of information that threatens their pre-existing views?

Nyhan said that ongoing — and as yet, unpublished — research was showing the technique could be effective. The researchers had voters think of times in their lives when they had done something very positive and found that, fortified by this positive memory, voters were more willing to take in information that challenged their pre-existing views.

"One person talked about taking care of his elderly grandmother — something you wouldn't expect to have any influence on people's factual beliefs about politics," Nyhan said. "But that brings to mind these positive feelings about themselves, which we think will protect them or inoculate them from the threat that unwelcome ideas or unwelcome information might pose to their self-concept."

Shankar Vedantam is a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk.

 

SUPER-STORIES; LENSES THRU WHICH WE FOOL OURSELVES

You can file this under "How we continue to fool ourselves..."

See also next post.

Fact of the matter is that avoiding fooling oneself has been an interest of mine for a very long time.  See Richard Feynman's:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, but remember, you are the easiest to fool.

It's from Cargo Cult Science, the last chapter of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.  The Wikipedia text states that the book title comes from an incident in which as a Princeton grad student after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Feynman was offered tea at a gathering by the university president's wife who asked if he'd like lemon or cream.  He wasn't absent-minded, as the Wiki item claims, but simply unsophisticated, when he said "Both," leading to the nervous laugh and the "Surely..." reply, letting him know that one chose one or the other, not both.  Being unsophisticated myself, I imagine that the lemon would curdle the cream, but I'm no more of a tea drinker than he was, apparently.  And so it goes.  And no, this post wasn't written all in one sitting, but over a period of at least two days as I left and returned with afterthoughts.

From a review of JR Moehringer's "The Tender Bar."  The bar was Dickens in Manhasset, Long Island, N.Y., a seventeen mile drive or train ride from Manhattan.  Manhasset Bay separates King's Point, home of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy on the west from the landed gentry on the right.  Scott Fitzgerald used Manhasset and environs as the setting for his great American novel, The Great Gatsby.  John Cheever, who writes about the upper crust and their travails, sets his short story, Goodbye, My Brother, in Manhasset.  To say that Moehringer admires Cheever's ability to craft a sentence is an understatement.

Following is a quote from a NYT book review of The Tender Bar, the place where JR grew up, assuming he ever did, which appears to be the case.

He won a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard in 2000, and studied with John Stauffer, a professor of English and American literature and language. As the New England winter deepened, he said, "we would talk about the American memoir, the pitfalls and the rewards."

"The American memoir is always about escape," Mr. Moehringer said. "Thoreau is escaping civilization. Henry Adams is escaping from history."

He realized too, he said, that "there's always something that holds the memoir together."

"It was ennobling to discover that my sense of the bar as a focal point in my life had precedent," he said. "In 'Walden,' Thoreau had the pond and felt as if the pond had chosen him as much as he had chosen it. For better or worse, the bar was my pond. And often for much worse."

Let's take a look at the claim that:   "The American memoir is always about escape.  Thoreau is escaping civilization. Henry Adams is escaping from history."

What are 'civilization' and 'history?'

History and civilization are the 'super-stories' (a coinage of NYT writer Tom Friedman) by which we orient ourselves in the otherwise chaos of our universe.

Friedman's definition of super-story:  

"...super-story, the notion that we all carry around with us a big lens, a big framework, through which we look at the world, order events, and decide what is important and what is not."

I.e. a preconceived notion assembled by a biased selection of fact used to create an illusory world.  Where did this illusion come from?  Who told it to you?  Or did you just pick up odds-and-ends and assemble your own illusory world all by your lonesome?  Or did you have help from parents, siblings, cousins, friends, teachers, preachers, presidents, and the like?  Did you ever have anyone, like my mother, now Great Grandma Molly, who used to tell me, "We don't believe that any more; people used to believe that, but not any more."  So much for witches and other supernatural beings created by someone's overworked imagination.  Saved a lot of trouble.  My superstory.  Contains a pinch of salt...

Do ants have superstories?  Or bees?  Or chimps?  Or whales?  Somehow they keep themselves together, but I doubt through the mechanisme of the superstory, as we do.  Our superstories about God and the devil, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are invented by adults to fool kids, to keep them quiet for a moment, at least by orienting them in a desired direction.  In this manner we lie to kids.  The ants and bees, meanwhile, seem to have developed a prearranged social order that keeps them reproducing as a group via their queen; they look out for each other, seemingly by genetic predisposition and an efficient system of communication using pheromones and other biochemical laying down of track, dancing, etc. See E.O. Wilson whose presentation at the San Francisco Exploratorium I recently attended.  I've read his autobiography Naturalist and novelized treatment of what ants, his specialty, are all about in Anthills. 

Marie, my wife, used to tell the kids about the Tooth Fairy.  One day little Teddy, 7, came downstairs to breakfast with the proud announcement that he'd disproved the existence of the Tooth Fairy, a sacrilege of heretical proportions in Marie's household.  "How's that?" we asked.  "Well, last night in bed, I felt a tooth coming loose and so I began moving it with my tongue.  It fell out.  I didn't tell Mom.  I wanted to see whether there really was a tooth fairy, so I put the tooth under my pillow.  When I woke up in the morning, guess what, the tooth was still there," he said, displaying the tooth in his hand.

Well!  Marie was having none of that.  "Teddy, give me that tooth and we'll go upstairs and check under that pillow again; I'm sure there must be a dollar bill under it somewhere," she said, reaching for her wallet.  "Now, now, Marie, let's not have any of that; what Teddy did was wonderful.  He'd conducted an experiment to discover whether you'd been telling him the truth.  He deserves the Nobel Prize for Experiments," I urged.  To this day, decades later,Ted is our own Nobel Laureate.  He'd disproved a super-story, which isn't always easy or met with universal approval.

Once composed and passed down the generations by whatever means in talk, story, legend, epic poem, play, dance, or song, in church or temple or out, the super-story becomes not only our benchmark but a way of life.  Imagine living out your life believing in a lie!

A wise man said:  "An illusory world is composed of a biased selection of [alleged] facts according to preconceived notion."  He is Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution at Stanford in Palo Alto, California.  This is one of the most heavily laden sentences that I know.

Wisdom, as I have been known to say, is learning what not to believe.  Learning what not to believe is not always easy when parents, teachers, ministers, and political leaders all tell you differently.  Before the U.S. Civil War, they usually taught that slavery was good since the Bible referenced it and Jesus didn't rail against it specifically.  I guess that there were things too big even for Jesus to take on.  He did preach, however, "Do unto others as you would have them do to you," which certainly covers the base, but not quite explicitly, does it.  Sometimes even God makes mistakes and can't see evil, as witness the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, which Abraham starts to do, or when God threatens to wipe out the entire town of Sodom for the evil deeds of some.  Abraham challenges God, asking whether He really means to destroy the good in order to eliminate the bad.  God scratches his head and relents. Score one for Justice and Abraham.  Waytago, Abe.

You see, this is why God, or someone, or something, provided us with brains, to allow us to ponder the super-stories we've been handed by people allegedly in the know.  They aren't; they may think they're doing good, but they may simply be perpetuating questionable super-stories.  And they get mad when you challenge them.

Brains are for inventing our own super-stories, challenging past super-stories, and learning to think around, over, past, and through them.  Brains are what Teddy exhibited in destroying the Tooth Fairy super-story his mother had foisted off on him.

Growing up is learning to acquire wisdom, learning that when your heart is broken that there are more fish in the sea, or as one philosopher put it:  "Women are like buses; if you miss one, there'll be another along in fifteen minutes."  

That, my friend, is wisdom.

One of the things our Supreme Court often does is to confront 'tradition.'  If the Court really honored 'tradition,' we'd still have slavery, Jim Crow, and anti-Gay bias reflected in law and government practice. When the Court claims to be upholding 'tradition,' what it really means is that it is selecting from the grab-bag of tradition and choosing the more beneficial ones while rejecting the old, bad, ones, such as the forms of inequality we used to know and love, until we learned better.

Tragedy, as the philosopher said, is not found in the contest between right and wrong, but in the contest between right and right.  Yesterday slavery was seen as entirely right, the way of the world, noticed without criticism in the Good Book itself.  It took a bloody Civil War, over 600,000 killed, both sides, soldier and civilian, for the light to find its way through the dust of tradition, right yesterday, evil today.  The new right versus the old right produced the country we are today and are still becoming.

It has been observed that once established, rights recognized by the Supreme Court are never abrogated or repealed.  I don't know whether this is entirely true because some folks have their own definition of what's right.  North Carolina yesterday enacted a law purporting to define marriage as a relationship that can only occur between a man and a woman, flying the face of the gay-rights movement which holds that any two adults may marry and enjoy the legal and legitimate benefits of marriage even between adults of the same gender.  The governor of North Carolina, a woman, has stated in this connection that heterosexual couples have rights, too, and that among these is the right to have the marital relationship defined as lawful and legitimate only between opposite-gender people.

I'm not sure how it hurts my marriage if two boys or two girls fall in love with one another outside my own particular preference, but some folks seem unable to tolerate this incursion into rearranging their mental furniture in the name of equal rights.  Some seem to have a remarkable inability to conceive of themselves as being in a least-favored position vis-a-vis their neighbors.

My own view is that we need to try harder to mind our own  business.  The French, it is said, are famous for their long, figurative, noses, looking down them at their neighbors whose business is noticed overmuch.  We do not appreciate our neighbors sticking their nose into our business or our bedrooms; yet we do, by asking government to do our dirty work for us:  Make this illegal, or that!   I'd prefer not sounding too much like a Libertarian candidate on the pro-Marijuana circuit, but I see the point, the need to be let alone, as Justice Brandeis put it in a famous dissent, to Olmstead on wiretapping, later made into law.  He called the right to be let alone by government the most valuable right of all.  

He was ahead of his time.

Here is the full text of Tom Friedman's 2002 article defining and applying 'super-story' to the idea of globalization:

The Super-Story

I am a big believer in the idea of the super-story, the notion that we all carry around with us a big lens, a big framework, through which we look at the world, order events, and decide what is important and what is not. The events of 9/11 did not happen in a vacuum. They happened in the context of a new international system – a system that cannot explain everything but can explain and connect more things in more places on more days than anything else. That new international system is called globalization. It came together in the late 1980s and replaced the previous international system, the cold war system, which had reigned since the end of World War II. This new system is the lens, the super-story, through which I viewed the events of 9/11.

I define globalization as the inexorable integration of markets, transportation systems, and communication systems to a degree never witnessed before – in a way that is enabling corporations, countries, and individuals to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and in a way that is enabling the world to reach into corporations, countries, and individuals farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before.

Several important features of this globalization system differ from those of the cold war system in ways that are quite relevant for understanding the events of 9/11. I examined them in detail in my previous book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and want to simply high-light them here.

The cold war system was characterized by one overarching feature – and that was division. That world was a divided-up, chopped-up place, and whether you were a country or a company, your threats and opportunities in the cold war system tended to grow out of who you were divided from. Appropriately, this cold war system was symbolized by a single word – wall, the Berlin Wall.

The globalization system is different. It also has one overarching feature – and that is integration. The world has become an increasingly interwoven place, and today, whether you are a company or a country, your threats and opportunities increasingly derive from who you are connected to. This globalization system is also characterized by a single word – web, the World Wide Web. So in the broadest sense we have gone from an international system built around division and walls to a system increasingly built around integration and webs. In the cold war we reached for the hotline, which was a symbol that we were all divided but at least two people were in charge – the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union. In the globalization system we reach for the Internet, which is a symbol that we are all connected and nobody is quite in charge.

Everyone in the world is directly or indirectly affected by this new system, but not everyone benefits from it, not by a long shot, which is why the more it becomes diffused, the more it also produces a backlash by people who feel overwhelmed by it, homogenized by it, or unable to keep pace with its demands.

The other key difference between the cold way system and the globalization system is how power is structured within them. The cold war system was built primarily around nation-states. You acted on the world in that system through your state. The cold way was a drama of states confronting states, balancing states, and aligning with states. And, as a system, the cold war was balanced at the center by two superstates, two superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union.

The globalization system, by contrast, is built around three balances, which overlap and affect one another. The first is the traditional balance of power between nation-states. In the globalization system, the United States is now the sole and dominant superpower and all other nations are subordinate to it to one degree or another. The shifting balance of power between the United States and other states, or simply between other states, still very much matters for the stability of this system. And it can still explain a lot of the news you read on the front page of the paper, whether it is the news of China balancing Russia, Iran balancing Iraq, or India confronting Pakistan.

The second important power balance in the globalization system is between nation-states and global markets. These global markets are made up of millions of investors moving money around the world with the click of a mouse. I call them the Electronic Herd, and this herd gathers in key global financial centers – such as Wall Street, Hong Kong, London, and Frankfurt – which I call the Supermarkets. The attitudes and actions of the Electronic Herd and the Supermarkets can have a huge impact on nation-states today, even to the point of triggering the downfall of governments. Who ousted Suharto in Indonesia in 1998? It wasn't another state, it was the Supermarkets, by withdrawing their support for, and confidence in, the Indonesian economy. You also will not understand the front page of the newspaper today unless you bring the Supermarkets into your analysis. Because the United States can destroy you by dropping bombs, but the Supermarkets can destroy you by downgrading your bonds. In other words, the United States is the dominant player in maintaining the globalization game board, but it is hardly alone in influencing the moves on that game board.

The third balance that you have to pay attention to – the one that is really the newest of all and the most relevant to the events of 9/11 – is the balance between individuals and nation-states. Because globalization has brought down many of the walls that limited the movement and reach of people, and because it has simultaneously wired the world into networks, it gives more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states than at any other time in history. Whether by enabling people to use the Internet to communicate instantly at almost no cost over vast distances, or by enabling them to use the Web to transfer money or obtain weapons designs that normally would have been controlled by states, or by enabling them to go into a hardware store now and buy a five-hundred-dollar global positioning device, connected to a satellite, that can direct a hijacked airplane – globalization can be an incredible force-multiplier for individuals. Individuals can increasingly act on the world stage directly, unmediated by a state.

So you have today not only a superpower, not only Supermarkets, but also what I call "super-empowered individuals." Some of these super-empowered individuals are quite angry, some of them quite wonderful – but all of them are now able to act much more directly and much more powerfully on the world stage.

Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States in the late 1990s. After he organized the bombing of two American embassies in Africa, the U.S. Air Force retaliated with a cruise missile attack on his bases in Afghanistan as though he were another nation-state. Think about that: on one day in 1998, the United States fired 75 cruise missiles at bin Laden. The United States fired 75 cruise missiles, at $1 million apiece, at a person! That was the first battle in history between a superpower and a super-empowered angry man. September 11 was just the second such battle.

Jody Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for helping to build an international coalition to bring about a treaty outlawing land mines. Although nearly 120 governments endorsed the treaty, it was opposed by Russia, China, and the United States. When Jody Williams was asked, "How did you do that? How did you organize one thousand different citizens' groups and non governmental organizations on five continents to forge a treaty that was opposed by the major powers?" she had a very brief answer: "E-mail." Jody Williams used e-mail and then networked world to super-empower herself.

Nation-states, and the American superpower in particular, are still hugely important today, but so too now are Supermarkets and super-empowered individuals. You will never understand the globalization system, or the front page of the morning paper – or 9/11 – unless you see each one as a complex interaction between all three of these actors: states bumping up against states, states bumping up against Supermarkets, and Supermarkets and states bumping up against super-empowered individuals – many of whom, unfortunately, are super-empowered angry men.

Copyright © 2002 Thomas Friedman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOT SO SECRET SERVICE

I'm having trouble getting worked up over the current scandal in which Secret service agents, male, on overseas assignment, are getting sacked for entertaining women in their rooms overnight.  I've posted the following to the local rag in response to one of their articles:

***

"Would JFK have been upset? 

These men were, to all intents and purposes, off-duty when they went out for drinks. Brought back girls to their rooms, some of them? Any college boy at a social convention dreams of this. Congressmen have been known or suspected of entertaining women. They too are responsible, in a manner of speaking, for the welfare of the nation. 

Soldiers are known to have used their opportunities away from home during war to enter liaisons with local or other women: Lt. Pinkerton of 'Madame Butterfly' and Lt. Caleb (?) of 'South Pacific,' have achieved fame for it, not to mention the randy Gen. George Patton. 

Secrets were compromised? 

I doubt it. 

Prove it. 

The reaction against picking up ladies, for pay or not, is a bit too Puritanical to sit well. The men had a right to their pickings, for play, or pay, or both. A misunderstanding over the gratuity? A hundred dollar misunderstanding? Or two? Or eight? That's between the contracting parties, not the public's business. Or don't we draw the line at the bedroom? Do you have a right to stick your nose in your neighbor's private business? Since when?

I think we need to grow up a bit, don't you? 

As in learn to mind our own business a bit more, as in 'a lot more.'

What happens next week? A man sits in a bar and has a drink? A woman sits next to him? They become friends? This is a problem for you? For us? 

How, pray tell?"

***

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/04/21/national/w081408D10.DTL#ixzz1stbCpkrD

POLITICAL PATHOLOGY: FROM RIGHT TO WRONG TO INSANE, THE PROGRESSION

Ever notice how some ideas and practices go from being considered proper and correct but later are understood to be wrong?  And then crazy for someone to believe the tradition should be revived?

Slavery and Jim Crow are two examples.  At one time presidents and founders of the nation owned slaves and protected the institution of race-based slavery and the business of importing and selling slaves for money and profit, not to mention sexual orientation beyond labor exploration.  During a visit to the South recently, a friend in the group from Back East, where I grew up, that I was reuniting with, wanted, as a Civil War buff, to see Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis, the president of the confederacy that seceded from the Union and initiated civil war against the United States.  Beauvoir is within a bow-shot of the water of the Gulf of Mexico on the Mississippi coast a few miles west of Biloxi, the resort town, as in gambling casinos, also on the water.

Beauvoir is a privately operated memorial to Jefferson and the confederacy.  A large confederate flag flies from a tall pole next to the highway.  Statues of Jefferson stand on the spacious lawn surrounding the old mansion.  A new visitor center is under construction.  An armed security rides a vehicle around the property.  The tour guide has a spiel heavy on the "Here's the bedroom where so-and-so slept."  Nothing of substance.  "When Pres. Davis was renovating the mansion, he didn't have to pay any taxes" for something, the guide explained.  "Did he have to pay wages?" I asked.  There were a few suppressed laughs in the mixed group of northerners and southerners.  The first thing uttered by the guide after welcoming us was the question as to where we were from.  It must have seemed important to have found out.  Later, apart from anyone else, I asked about this monument to someone who made war on the United States.  We wouldn't have admired a monument to Osama Bin Laden erected next door, I suggested.  "Pres. Davis didn't make war on the U.S., but the other way around," observed the guide, conveniently forgetting the attack by the South on Fort Sumter, the federal installation in Charleston harbor, South Carolina.  It seemed a bit insane to have changed the facts to fit the theory.

In Norway, the central question in the trial of Anders Breivik, today, is whether he was insane when he murdered in cold blood, by hunting out and shooting 77 teenagers attending a summer camp run by the Labor Party on an island.  His stated purpose was to bring attention to the fact that the ruling Labor Party supported the idea that we should all get along together, meaning native Norwegian and immigrant alike of whatever race or nationality.  Brievik, a form of Nazi, opposes 'multiculturalism.'  In Germany, Hitler was admired devotedly by people who saw him as the savior of the nation after defeat in WWI and the ruinous inflation that followed.  He, too, opposed 'multiculturalism' a term that was probably invented during the postwar period long after his demise.  Multiculturalism includes the effort to try to get along w/o killing one another over race, creed, or color, not to mention a few other attributes we seem to be born with.  Hitler has gone from being considered right in his place and time, although not among his neighbors or us, to wrong, to insane.  Anyone following Hitler's ethnic and extermination policies can rightly be considered certifiable, i.e. insane.  The problem is that Breivik, while clearly politically insane, doesn't seem insane in any medical manner of speaking; he seems to be oriented in time, space, and context; it's only that his political views seem to make no sense and are impervious to reason, sort of like Ted Kazinski, the Unabomber.

At any rate, we see this progression from where certain ideas at first seem to be right (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the Supreme Court justice, thought eugenics just fine) and then are realized to be quite wrong, to finally being deemed literally insane, at least in a political sense, that is, rejected by the great body of opinion that might have once seemed wierd, like the Abolitionists were long before the Civil War.

Tragedy, as the German philosopher Georg Hegel observed, is not represented by the conflict between right and wrong, but between right and right.  The old is supplanted by what seems the new.  Yesterday's right is now supplanted by today's opposite which makes the old wrong and today's right.

It can take a long time for this to happen.

I suppose we can call this a form of political pathology; Hitler either didn't know or didn't care; we do.  We have our own Holocaust to consider, slavery on this continent since 1619 and Jim Crow since the end of the Civil War in 1865 for the next century and counting as its effects are, we hope, reduced if not entirely eliminated.  We all have our Breiviks, don't we.

 

 

AGAINST STUPIDITY THE GODS THEMSELVES CONTEND IN VAIN

Or, as an investigator friend, in regards to certain clients, puts it:

 "There's no defense against stupidity."

The translated line of the caption, above, "Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens" (III, 6; Talbot) is the origin of the English expression "Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain."

Per Wikipedia, "This was the most performed (at least in Germany) of all Schiller's plays down to the Great War. In modern post-war Germany, its militarism is an embarrassment, but the dramatic power of the last two acts keeps the play on the stage."

This was quoted to me in reply when I posted to Conlawprofs the item following:

--- On Tue, 4/17/12, Robert Sheridan <rs@robertsheridan.com> wrote:   From: Robert Sheridan <rs@robertsheridan.com> Subject: Insanity, political section To: "Con Law Prof list"  Date: Tuesday, April 17, 2012, 9:45 PM   In the USSR, 'dissidents,' which I once heard described in this context as "people who think differently," were subjected, in lieu of years in the Gulag, to confinement in mental institutions, with forced drugging that drove prisoners to the brink of real insanity.  We thought this barbaric, naturally.   The theory was, apparently, that anyone having the temerity in the USSR to oppose the ruling ideology, Marxism-Leninism, must be insane as opposed to being a 'real' criminal who cut throats to steal purses.  Perhaps you've read Solzhenitsen's "One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich," in which he describes the Gulag Archipelago, the spread of prison camps throughout Siberia.  Ian Frazier writes of them briefly in the current "Travels in Siberia http://tinyurl.com/6pzd4uq."   Today's news reports on the mass killer, Anders Brievik, who killed 77 teenagers attending a summer camp sponsored by the ruling Norwegian Labor Party.  At issue is whether he is truly insane, as though we could tell the difference.  Breivik's political views harken back to the original Nazi view that in our country there is room only for people like us; the rest are subject to extermination.  Breivik professes, in a statement to the court, that he's happy with what he did, murder in cold blood times 77, because he's opposed to 'multiculturalism,' the idea that there are more than one kind of people in the world and that at any rate, they shouldn't be here, meaning Norway, where he lives.   What do we call a person who has a fixed idea that is impervious to reason, one that he will kill for?  Is this insane and subject to more-or-less humane treatment for people unable to help themselves conform their conduct to society's mores?  Or is this evidence simply of an unreconstructed state of mind when compared to a society that has move on from such monocultural ideas in favor of a more inclusive notion of humanity?  It seems to me that in the U.S. we've moved on to include as full humans entitled to every bit as much dignity as the former ruling WASP class all sorts of folks we used to disdain; a partial list might include:  non-Wasps such as Catholics, Jews, and it goes w/o saying, Muslims.  Also Italians, Irish, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and needless to say, Indians, oops, I mean Native Americans...   Suppose someone today, say a presidential candidate, campaigned on a platform favoring a return to slavery, or Jim Crow?  Would we call him insane?  An incipient Breiviks?  How about the abrogation of the rights of women?  Gays? Laborers?  You get my drift.  At some point, a return to the bad old days seems quite insane.   In my readings in literary criticism, which I would commend to this list for critical thinking at its best, I've come across a few terms that we see w/ more-or-less frequency, depending, I suppose, on where we delve, such as:  utopia (we all know that never-never land, usually meaning a delightful place), dystopia (the opposite, a favorite of sci-fi writers); but how about "heterocosm" meaning an alternative universe?  Some of the political ideas I see being bandied about seem either insane (political category) or to involve an alternative universe.   I think it's the job of the Court to keep us on this side of the sanity cliff...   ...and lots of luck.   rs    The kind responder wrote: "problem is, we have MILLIONS of dangerous cuckoo heads.  and by pushing/isolating them, they become heroes to millions more. [Schiller]: Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens."   _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Conlawprof@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/conlawprof   Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private.  Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.