February 2012
69 posts
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Posthumous Baptism and Liberal Pluralism
Since I’ve written a couple of posts on the Mormon practice of posthumous baptism recently, a number of people -– Jews and non-Jews alike -– have asked why I care about it or why it bothers me. Their feelings about the issue generally fall into one of these three categories:
I’m Jewish and it doesn’t bother me because the Mormons aren’t actually making these dead people into Mormons, even if they...
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The Multi-Touch Chinese Finger Trap
I wrote this piece on my MacBook Air and I proofread it on my iPad, devices which are dear to me and which power much of my work and recreation. Like many happy Apple customers, though, I’ve been forced to consider the very unhappy conditions under which these gadgets – and others like them – are produced. How should those of us who love and depend upon our electronics feel about the suffering of...
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“If the schools are just going to arrange their own schedule, why do we even set...”
– Pluralism, Texas-style.
The boy’s basketball team from Beren Academy, an Orthodox Jewish day school, made it to the state semi-final game … but that game apparently must be played on a Friday evening, after sunset, which means that the Beren Academy team can’t play.
The school...
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This week, The Hero Report steps into a phone booth and changes into … The Superhero Report!
Matt and I discuss classic comic book heroes and anti-heroes, ponder why there aren’t more female superheroes, and think through the question of why some big budget superhero movies succeed while others fall flat. Plus, I reveal a dark secret from my past …
Tell us what you think,...
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Another Death Row Debacle: The Case Against Thomas... →
Another month, another man on death row, another excruciating case that illustrates just some of the ways in which America’s death penalty regime is unconstitutionally broken. This time, the venue is Alabama. This time, the murder that generated the sentence took place 30 years ago. And this time, there is an execution date of March 29, 2012, for Thomas Arthur, a man who has always...
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Spanish Court Clears Ex-Judge in Civil War Probe →
The Spanish judge known for taking on high-profile human rights cases was acquitted Monday in a trial that had divided Spain. Judges ruled that Baltasar Garzon did not overstep his jurisdiction by launching an investigation into right-wing atrocities tied to the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War.
Garzon misinterpreted Spanish law but did not knowingly and arbitrarily violate the limits of his...
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Flashback: In 2006, Rick Santorum Wanted To Send... →
At an Americans For Prosperity-sponsored tea party rally [in Michigan] Saturday, Rick Santorum trumpeted his connections to the working class by attacking President Obama’s plan to make college more accessible to Americans.
“President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college,” Santorum said. “What a snob!”
But the last time Santorum ran for public office — his ill-fated 2006...
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“If you visit Detroit, you’re an explorer. Be prepared for a rich, very soulful...”
– National Geographic explores the strange and beautiful city of Detroit.
Getting beyond the facile descriptions of a city in utter ruin, the piece explores both the remnants of the grand old days as well as the signs of a real revitalization.
Read the whole piece here.
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Sacha Baron Cohen to attend Oscars, claims victory... →
This might be one of the best headlines I’ve ever read, especially since it’s from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The article itself is no slouch either:
British actor-comedian Sacha Baron Cohen announces he will attend the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday, after claiming that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has retracted its ban on the actors attendance and “sent...
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Plato's Gorgias: A Mini-Tutorial →
Robert Paul Wolff is preparing to launch a mini-tutorial on Plato’s Gorgias at his blog, The Philosopher’s Stone; yesterday, he provided some background and an introduction to the text. I believe the first post on the text itself will be available later today.
If you don’t know much about Gorgias, here are just two paragraphs from Wolff’s introduction:
The structure of...
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WatchIn response to the Mormon practice of baptising dead Jews — including those who died in the Holocaust — Stephen Colbert circumcised all the dead Mormons by proxy on his show last night.
“Mormon tov!”
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Ryan execution halted by Nebraska Supreme Court →
Dear taxpayers of Nebraska:
Enjoy the tainted fruit that your governor and attorney general picked especially for you, in their zeal to demonstrate their love of justice and the sanctity of life in time for the next election:
In a one-page order issued by Nebraska Supreme Court Chief Justice Mike Heavican, the court issued another stay of execution for accused murderer and cult leader Michael...
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What makes killing wrong? →
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Franklin G. Miller have a (perhaps controversial) new paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics [ungated] on morality, killing, and vital organ transplantation; here’s the abstract:
What makes an act of killing morally wrong is not that the act causes loss of life or consciousness but rather that the act causes loss of all remaining abilities. This account implies...
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Saving Zelda
At the heart of a tour de force about the manifold problems in Legend of Zelda video games since the 1987 original, and how to make new iterations stronger, Tevis Thompson has the following insight about the idea of heroism upon which all of the Zelda games are based:
The point of a hero’s adventure… is not to make you feel better about yourself. The point is to grow, to overcome, to in some way...
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“Really, who can resist a film about a pirate who prays, who keeps kosher and who...”
– Erol Araf, who is making just such a film:
There may not have been a Silverstein on the high seas in the 17th century, but there were swashbuckling buccaneers called Balthazar and Moses Cohen Henriques and - would you believe? - Rabbi Samuel Pallache. They pillaged and plundered Spanish navy...
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It’s the fifth episode of The Hero Report; this week, our guest is Drew Jacob. Inspired by the ancient epic poems, Jacob is planning his own heroic journey: He’ll be walking from the northern United States all the way to Brazil.
And, in this very special episode, my (almost) 2-year-old son makes an extended cameo, eventually explaining to all who will listen that he’d prefer...
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Serious Biblical Interpretation
One further word on the post I published this morning about whether or not the Bible necessarily regards conception as the beginning of human life, which has garnered a fair amount of attention. A number of people have pointed out that the English translation of the passage from Exodus, which the author I quoted doesn’t provide, says that there is no punishment to be meted out if the striken...
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Iranian warships dock at Syrian port after... →
The warships reached the Syrian city of Tartous, northwest of the capital Damascus, after crossing the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea.
The crossing was the second in a year by Iranian warships, Iran’s navy chief said.
Last February, the Iranian frigate Alvand and the supply ship Kharg entered the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal, for the first time since 1979.
Rear Admiral...
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The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy... →
In 1979, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal.
Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception.
Ask any American evangelical, today, what the Bible says about abortion and they will insist that this is what it says. (Many don’t actually believe this, but they know it is the only answer that won’t get them in trouble.) They’ll be a little fuzzy on...
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Victims of State Terrorism No Longer on Their Own →
Mental health professionals in Argentina have accumulated such a wealth of experience in treating victims of state terrorism that they are now sharing it with colleagues across the country’s borders.
Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, which like Argentina were under the yoke of military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, now have access to the experience of mental health professionals here by means...
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Inside #Politics
Back in May 2011, I wrote a post that complained about the sad state of the Tumblr Politics tag; I wrote another in July 2011 because I thought there ought to be somewhere to feature more global political content. There’s been a whole lot more written about the tag over the past few days, largely because of one editor’s behavior, but I’ve avoided wading back in because a)...
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Poverty and Terrorism →
A new article in The Journal of Politics (gated) — ”Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism” (draft 2009, ungated) by Benmelecha, Berrebia, and Klora — examines one of the connections between poverty and terrorism:
This article analyzes the link between economic conditions and the quality of suicide terrorism. While the existing empirical literature shows...
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Mormons apologize for posthumous baptisms of... →
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has apologized for “a serious breach of protocol” in which the parents of the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal were posthumously baptized as Mormons.
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The Wiesenthal baptisms violated a 1995 pact in which the church agreed to stop baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims.
I thought for the better part of an...
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“Tehran denies any involvement and accused Israel of attacking its own embassies...”
– In class yesterday, I came up with what I thought was the zaniest possible conspiracy theory about the recent bombings in India, Georgia, and elsewhere … only to have a student immediately point out that the Iranian government was way ahead of me.
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WatchIn this week’s episode of The Hero Report — which might be my favorite episode in this podcast’s young life — we debate the importance of success to heroism. Does a hero need to be successful and what do we mean when we talk about success?
We also spend a few minutes discussing Whitney Houston’s death, Chris Brown’s success at the Grammy Awards, and what heroic...
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“If you want to get to half a million pageviews, you’re always much more likely...”
– My friends at Short Form Blog explain the quote further:
Reuters’ Felix Salmon discusses the changing nature of Web journalism, where the SEO-friendly days of yore are starting to get a bit more social, which is good for high-quality but much-more-expensive reporting. Salmon’s point? The commodity...
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WatchThis report by Matthew Lee about Shavendra Silva, a Sri Lankan war criminal who has now become an advisor on peacekeeping to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is worth your six minutes this morning.
There has been very little press on Silva — or the massacres in Sri Lanka in 2009, really — but, as Lee argues, this move into the UN peacekeeping apparatus by a war criminal who is...
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WatchIn this short clip, Shadi Hamid and Gregory Gause agree that it’s not anyone’s place to tell Islamists to respect women’s rights. I suspect that this point about women’s rights will be regarded as off-putting by a whole bunch of people. It came across that way to me.
That said, this point is part of a larger discussion about the difference between democracy and liberalism,...
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Are Mansions Morally Wrong? →
Gates may have given away nearly $30 billion, but that still leaves him sitting at the top of the Forbes list of the richest Americans, with $53 billion. His 66,000-square-foot high-tech lakeside estate near Seattle is reportedly worth more than $100 million. Property taxes are about $1 million. Among his possessions is the Leicester Codex, the only handwritten book by Leonardo da Vinci still in...
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The Law Is The Law
In response to my post this morning about the Dutch reporters who stand accused of violating the privacy of a Nazi war criminal by secretly taping an interview with him, my friend the Political Prof argues:
Looks like an illegal taping case, and while it’s probably stupid for the prosecutors to care, the law, as they say, is the law. Even for war criminals.
I think I want to push all of my chips...
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Two Dutch reporters have been ordered to appear in a German court this week, following a complaint from a 90-year-old convicted Nazi war criminal who claims that the journalists violated his privacy by using a hidden camera to record an interview with him.
The reporters, Jelle Visser and Jan Ponsen, claim that they were serving the public interest by recording their conversation with the war...
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Hypocrisy or Heuristics?
What follows is a guest blog post, written by Carly M. Jacobs, a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research interests include group identity, political psychology, biology and politics, and political behavior.
Accusations of hypocrisy are standard ammunition for liberals and conservatives alike. After all, what could be more damning than pointing...
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How Repulsive Is Progressive Hypocrisy? →
In a piece on Wednesday, Glenn Greenwald made ample use of a new Washington Post/ABC News poll that highlights how progressives are willing to tolerate (or even support) Barack Obama’s policies that they vehemently protested when they were carried out George W. Bush:
[L]ong before Barack Obama achieved any significance on the political scene, I considered blind leader loyalty one of the...
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Spanish Judge Guilty of Misusing Authority →
The Spanish judge celebrated for pursuing international human rights cases was convicted of overstepping his jurisdiction in a domestic corruption probe Thursday and barred from the bench for 11 years, completing a spectacular fall from grace for one of Spain’s most prominent people.
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He is still awaiting a verdict in a separate trial on the same charge — knowingly...
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When Rights Conflict
In light of the discussion occasioned of yesteday’s post about why it seems Rick Santorum doesn’t understand rights, I thought I might say just a little bit more. In particular, it’s important to note that Santorum isn’t alone when it comes to misunderstanding what the language of rights actually means.
I’m reminded of the beginning of Mary Ann Glendon’s book...
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Federalist #78
After reading my most recent post — Rick Santorum Doesn’t Understand Rights — the Tumblr user corroborate sent the following note:
“Except we all know that the judiciary exists in order to check the excesses that might occur as a result of the democratic process.” I think that if I were you, I’d re-read the Federalist papers.
It might be helpful to provide a brief reply.
I...
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Rick Santorum Doesn't Understand Rights
7M Californians had their rights stripped away today by activist 9th Circuit judges. As president I will work to protect marriage.
— Rick Santorum (@RickSantorum) February 7, 2012
It’s not at all interesting or surprising that Rick Santorum opposes the 9th Circuit ruling.
What’s interesting, at least to me, is that he seems not to understand what rights are or what they do. Say...
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