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Feb 7, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 13:14:51
Animal charity sues SeaWorld on behalf of five 'slave' whales (UK Telegraph 2-7-12)
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller called the hearing in San Diego after SeaWorld asked the court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) that names five orcas as plaintiffs in the case.
PETA claims the captured killer whales are treated like slaves for being forced to live in tanks and perform daily at its parks in San Diego and Orlando, Florida.
“This case is on the next frontier of civil rights,” said PETA's attorney Jeffrey Kerr, representing the five orcas.
By David Brown | Posted at 12:18:32
Top five regrets of the dying (UK Guardian 2-1-12)
There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps. A palliative nurse who has counselled the dying in their last days has revealed the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'.
Feb 6, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 13:58:52
Colbert v. the Court (Slate 2-2-12)
The Supreme Court has always had its critics. Chief Justice John Marshall had to contend with the temper of President Andrew Jackson (“John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!”). And Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes went toe-to-toe with FDR, who wouldn't let up with the court-packing. But in the history of the Supreme Court, nothing has ever prepared the justices for the public opinion wrecking ball that is Stephen Colbert. The comedian/presidential candidate/super PAC founder has probably done more to undermine public confidence in the court's 2010 Citizens United opinion than anyone, including the dissenters. In this contest, the high court is supremely outmatched.
Citizens United, with an assist from a 1976 decision Buckley v. Valeo, has led to the farce of unlimited corporate election spending, “uncoordinated” super PACs that coordinate with candidates, and a noxious round of attack ads, all of which is protected in the name of free speech. Colbert has been educating Americans about the resulting insanity for months now. His broadside against the court raises important questions about satire and the court, about protecting the dignity of the institution, and the role of modern media in public discourse. Also: The fight between Colbert and the court is so full of ironies, it can make your molars hurt.
By David Brown | Posted at 9:21:20
An education in occupation—what happened to Iraqi universities (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2-2-12)
Until the 1990s, Iraq had perhaps the best university system in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's regime used oil revenues to underwrite free tuition for Iraqi university students — churning out doctors, scientists, and engineers who joined the country's burgeoning middle class and anchored development. Although political dissent was strictly off-limits, Iraqi universities were professional, secular institutions that were open to the West, and spaces where male and female, Sunni and Shia mingled. Also the schools pushed hard to educate women PDF, who constituted 30 percent of Iraqi university faculties by 1991. (This is, incidentally, better than Princeton was doing as late as 2009.) With a reputation for excellence, Iraqi universities attracted many students from surrounding countries — the same countries that are now sheltering the thousands of Iraqi professors who have fled US-occupied Iraq.
Jan 30, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 16:32:1
The Same-Sex 'Marriage' Proposal is Unjust Discrimination by Patrick Lee (Public Discourse 1-30-12)
The “marriage equality movement”: that's the name chosen for themselves by same-sex “marriage” supporters. The implicit argument is that the state's granting marriage licenses only to opposite-sex couples is undue discrimination. The claim has an initial plausibility” the state grants a marriage license to John and Mary but not to Jim and Steve. Isn't that unequal treatment? But this charge, I will show, rests on a profound confusion about both marriage and equality. A state's recognition that marriage is only between a man and a woman is not unjust. What's more, a state's endorsement of same-sex “marriage” does create an arbitrary and invidious discrimination.
By David Brown | Posted at 16:24:27
The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake - review by Mary Midgley (UK Guardian 1-27-12)
We need a new mind-body paradigm, a map that acknowledges the many kinds of things there are in the world and the continuity of evolution. We must somehow find different, more realistic ways of understanding human beings—and indeed other animals—as the active wholes that they are, rather than pretending to see them as meaningless consignments of chemicals.
Rupert Sheldrake, who has long called for this development, spells out this need forcibly in his new book. He shows how materialism has gradually hardened into a kind of anti-Christian faith, an ideology rather than a scientific principle, claiming authority to dictate theories and to veto inquiries on topics that don't suit it, such as unorthodox medicine, let alone religion. He shows how completely alien this static materialism is to modern physics, where matter is dynamic. And, to mark the strange dilemmas that this perverse fashion poses for us, he ends each chapter with some very intriguing “Questions for Materialists”, questions such as “Have you been programmed to believe in materialism?”, “If there are no purposes in nature, how can you have purposes yourself?”, “How do you explain the placebo response?” and so on.
By David Brown | Posted at 16:12:46
Religion, grrrr-Rachel Aviv reviews The Church of Scientology by Hugh Urban (London Review of Books 1-26-12)
In The Church of Scientology, one of only a handful of academic treatments of the subject, Hugh Urban is less interested in the experiences of Scientologists than in the legal processes and semantic twists through which a set of beliefs becomes a religion. A professor of religious studies at Ohio State, Urban is interested in secrecy in religion, and in this book he chronicles the way Hubbard reacted to legal and political challenges to his authority by attempting (largely successfully) to conceal his theories from the public. Had he stuck with his original conception of Dianetics, his practices could have been investigated and judged according to scientific standards. A religion, on the other hand, can turn self-help platitudes into a scarce and privileged resource; criticism can be dismissed as intolerance, or persecution.
By David Brown | Posted at 16:6:19
Citizen Philosophers-Teaching Justice in Brazil (Jan-Feb 2012)
Getting out of the cave and seeing things as they really are: that's what philosophy is about, according to Almira Ribeiro. Ribeiro teaches the subject in a high school in Itapua, a beautiful, poor, violent neighborhood on the periphery of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia in Brazil's northeast. She is the most philosophically passionate person I've ever met.
Jan 26, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 16:5:55
What Really Happened at the Beginning of Time? by David Berlinski (Ricochet 1-25-12)
In a very bravura passage, David Hume writes that “if we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics let us ask this question, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can be nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
What of Hume's own remarks? Not so good. Hume was an early victim of the Vise, the circumstance that attends a philosopher who finds himself squeezed between the premises and conclusion of an argument by which he attempted to squeeze others.
By David Brown | Posted at 15:56:36
Religion for Atheists: An Interview With Alain de Botton (Talking Philosophy 1-24-12)
In my book, I argue that believing in God is, for me as for many others, simply not possible. At the same time, I want to suggest that if you remove this belief, there are particular dangers that open up—we don't need to fall into these dangers, but they are there and we should be aware of them. For a start, there is the danger of individualism: of placing the human being at the center stage of everything. Secondly, there is the danger of technological perfectionism; of believing that science and technology can overcome all human problems, that it is just a matter of time before scientists have cured us of the human condition. Thirdly, without God, it is easier to loose perspective: to see our own times as everything, to forget the brevity of the present moment and to cease to appreciate (in a good way) the miniscule nature of our own achievements. And lastly, without God, there can be a danger (note the tentative can) that the need for empathy and ethical behaviour is more easily overlooked—in other words, that evil becomes less incongruous.
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