Scottish Nous

More Rylean Acerbity

FROM THE EDITOR OF MIND

     MAGDALEN COLLEGE

      OXFORD OX1 4AU

     August 24th, 1970.

Dear Mr. Feldman,

I am sorry but for many years MIND had to keep the door shut against contributions which are entirely or primarily expository.  Your paper seems to be expository both of Leibniz and of Russell's interpretation of Leibniz and I am afraid I can do nothing with it.  This is not a polite way of saying that the thing is no good since, to be frank, I haven't even read it.

Yours sincerely,

G. Ryle

Typewritten Notice From Fritz Warfield's Door

FROM THE EDITOR OF MIND

     MAGDALEN COLLEGE

                OXFORD

    December 29, 1967.

Dear Mr. Feldman,

I am returning your paper.  There may be a little in it, but it doesn't seem to cut enough ice.

Yours sincerely,

G. Ryle

Yeah, Well, It's Your Set of Laws Buddy

Former House member Randy Cunningham is whimpering in prison due to federal laws he can only hold himself and his ilk responsible for:

I am human not an animal to keep whiping [sic]... I hurt more than anyone could imagine.

Should have thought about spending more time reforming a perverse justice system which every day inflicts immeasurable harm on citizens and non-citizens alike.  Instead, you spent your time figuring out more ways in which to swindle tax payers out of their money.  How do you like it now?  Can you say the words "zero sympathy"?

Pure Ugliness

Read excerpts from e-mails sent by (probably Christian) anti-abortionists who need to be Hellenized or sterilized.  [via Majikthise]  Perhaps some of these neo-Nazi skinheads can be identified via their e-mail headers?  It'd be great fun outing them to their fellow non-denominationalists who could then give a special altar call for their murderously raging comrades in arms, lay hands upon them, and exorcise their demons.  That solution would, of course, be just as good as the worthless solutions this sort of person proposes to decrease the number of obtained abortions: from the mild "abstinence only education" to the extreme "bomb a clinic" variety. 

Empirical research proves that the best known way to minimize the number of obtained abortions is to provide comprehensive sex-ed programs and unfettered access to contraceptives and the morning after pill.  There is also no reasonable objection to contraception, because empirical research also shows that up to 50% of conceptions result in natural abortions, and philosophical argument suggests (what will likely be scientifically demonstrated in the near future) that the rhythm method results in vastly more embryonic death than the pill.  (I am obviously assuming that it is unreasonable to insist that it is morally permissible for couples to have sex only for the purpose of procreation at the times that conception is most likely or while pregnant or otherwise infertile.  And note that, if you're going to bite this bullet, you'll have to stop having sex as soon as in vitro fertilization becomes more reliable than sex the natural way.)

Another Blogroll Update!

Visit the new blogs: Janus Blog (Virtue Theory), Ideally Speaking (SUNY g.s. Adam Taylor), De Crapulas Edormiendo (Michigan g.s. Nate Charlow), The Web of Belief (Tufts Group), The Fighting Mongoose (Western Michigan Group), Making the Cooler Argument the Stronger (ND g.s. Eric Hagedorn), Transcendental Idealism (St. Andrews g.s. Ralf Bader), Lemmings (Missouri's Berit Broogard), American Philosophy (RIT's John Capps), In Search of Enlightement (Waterloo's Colin Farrelly), Blogitations (Biola g.s. James Gibson), Seeing Things (Princeton's Sean Kelly), Footnotes on Epicycles (SUNY's P. D. Magnus), Dulcius Ex Aspersis (Notre Dame g.s. Alex Arnold), Brain Hammer (WPU's Pete Mandik), Brains (also Mandik), Per Caritatem (Dallas' g.s. Cynthia Nielsen),  Knowability (St. Louis' Joe Salerno), The Splintered Mind (UC Riverside's Eric Schwitzgebel), Philosophy Hurts Your Head (Univ. of Newcastle g.s. Sam Douglas), hpb etc. (Cincinnati's Robert Skipper), Ratiocination (ND g.s. Andrew Bailey),  Logic Matters (Cambridge's Peter Smith), dim lit philosophy (Ultrecht's Rob van Gerwen), This is the Name of This Blog (Rochester g.s. Trent Dougherty), Virtual Philosopher (Open University's Nigel Warburton), Mnemosynosis (Rutgers g.s. S. Kate Devitt), Theories 'n Things (Leeds' Robert G. Williams), The Glfer (g.s. Greg),  Philosophy Blog (St. Louis' g.s. Aaron Cobb), Aspiring Lemming (Arizona g.s. Adam Arico), Scribo (Calgary's Nicole Wyatt), Staff of Ra (ND g.s. Dan Hicks, et. al.), Philosophical Remainders (g.s. Jeff Dauer), and Stop That Crow! (g.s. Jeffrey Giliam).

Richard Heck: Logician and Computer Programmer

He's written a Greasemonkey script for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  Get it! (You need to be using Firefox, of course.  If you aren't using it, then you must just like coping with needlessly unsolved problems.)

Nostradamus Me

Lindsay asks a rhetorical question regarding the devil's servants in Republican guise:

How inept are these people? They can't even protect teenagers in the halls of congress. How are they supposed to protect the rest of us?

She has in mind, of course, sexual predator and elected congressman Mark Foley.  While Foley's disgusting e-mails do provide us with a nice, concrete case of some of the wickedness infesting the halls of congress, Foley by no means exhausts the depths of congressional moral depravity, which, of course, is hardly confined to the Republican camp.* 

We live in a country in which a whole plethora of rich, white, male, self-interested moral perverts with god-complexes are actually voted into office by poorer, harder-working unthinking citizens who pay them hard cash to be dominated and abused.  Bizarrely, some people actually seem to believe that this is democracy rather than tyranny.  Granted, your average American hopes to be dominated and abused less then they are protected, and so appears to at least tacitly endorse utilitarianism w.r.t politics.  Yet intellectually lazy Americans will get what they're satisifed with, and so long as they're satisfied with electing tyrants, they shouldn't be surprised that their tyrants are morally depraved.  This is because the sort of psychological freak of nature who desires to wield widespread and near-unilaterial powers over others is more likely than not to be both rationally and morally incompetent.

Perhaps it comes as a bit of a surprise that Foley, in particular, turned out to be just another common moral pervert.  But it is no surprise that yet another moral pervert has been found out in the halls of congress.  I hereby safely prophesy that moral pervert after moral pervert after moral pervert will be uncovered in the foolishly revered halls of congress.

* The moral terminology employed here (wickedness, depravity) presupposes only moral realism, and not any particular member of the class of moral realisms.  So in particular, I am not presupposing any religious set of beliefs by using the English word "wickedness".  I make solely metaphorical use  of "devil's servants" for "civil servants".

Lingua Pranca

The linguist's version of Special Creationism: Wrathful Dispersion Theory.  Far more amusing than the FSM ever was:

Wrathful Dispersion is couched in more cautiously neutral language; rather than tying linguistic diversity to a specific biblical event, it merely argues that the differences among modern languages are too perverse to have arisen spontaneously, and must therefore be the work of some wrathful (and powerful) disperser who deliberately set out to accomplish a confusion of tongues. When asked in court to speculate about the possible identity of the disperser, Michael Moringa, a prominent proponent of WD, demurred, saying that the theory makes no claims about the answer to that question, and that it certainly does not insist that the Disperser is the God of Genesis.

From the comment thread at Pharyngula:

The fact remains that Grimmism's "language evolution" has never been demonstrated under scientific conditions. You can put a Chinese speaker, an English speaker, and a speaker of any Altaic* language you like together in the same room, but will they end up speaking Japanese? Hardly!

I'm a bit behind on this.  Oh well.  Also see: Language Log and Spec Gram.

Notre Dame Flunks Sex Ed Test

Notre Dame is keeping bad company.  It ranks second to last - right down there next to Brigham Young - when it comes to promoting sexual health, according to a survey by Trojan.  In fact, ND and BYU were the only two universities to receive an "F" in all seven categories.  It looks like some administrators here might need to take a class or two in the philosophy department: sexual ethics.  Ah well.  I'm in a great philosophy department, and you can't have everything, now can you?  I give you the actual policy on sexual misconduct from the Student Handbook:

Because a genuine and complete expression of love through sex requires a commitment to a total living and sharing together of two persons in marriage, the University believes that sexual union should occur only in marriage.  Students found in violation of this policy shall be subject to disciplinary suspension or permanent dismissal. -Du Lac, p. 95

Seriously...  This is not intended as a joke.  Maybe ND doesn't want to educate women who will have sex on how to have safe sex so they can "find them out" and "dismiss" or "discipline" them?  Call this the "we like to screw you over again" policy.  Note further that it disadvantages women far more than it disadvantages men, for how will the Grand Enforcers of THE Policy determine that a man has had sex?  It's about now that the boring platitude common in religious circles, "of  him to whom much is given, much is required" is invoked in a lame justificatory attempt, with "her" replacing "him" and "a womb" replacing "much".  So what do we think about the "lets make your college degree conditional on your sex life" policy?  Comments? [Via The Headpiece for the Staff of Ra]

Suppose You Were An Idiot

Racists, sexual perverts, and abusive thugs?  You decide.  Not commenting further may save me from having to vomit.