"Muslim Americans are our friends and family members, our doctors and nurses, our police officers and firefighters. They own businesses and teach in classrooms. Thousands of them have fought for the American flag. Many have died defending it. And yet, too often—especially in the last year, following a number of tragic terrorist incidents, and amidst an increase in divisive and fearful rhetoric—we have seen Muslim Americans targeted and demonized simply because of their faith. And to impose a blanket stereotype on all members of any faith because of the actions of those who pervert that faith is to go backwards in our thinking and our discourse, and to repudiate the founding ideals of this country."
Read more at Slate.
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
Abortion: An Allegory
Angelina Rosario went into Our Lady of Mercy Hospital in Santa Cristina, California, last week for a minor procedure to help with her dysmennorhea and walked out pregnant. The hospital is still trying to figure out exactly what happened. There was also another woman, Rosaria Angelino, there that day. Ms Angelino had been undergoing fertility treatment and was scheduled to have several embryos implanted in her uterus. Somehow, their charts got mixed up as they were taken into adjoining operating rooms. (There was a small earthquake about that time, and there is some evidence that the charts were knocked off the women’s gurneys.) The error was not discovered until the two women woke up in recovery. Ms Angelino was surprised to find that she had gotten an ablasion, but not nearly as shocked as Ms Rosario was to discover that she was pregnant.
Ms Rosario immediately demanded that the hospital undo its mistake. The doctors, however, refused to do so. The only way to undo what they had done would be to perform an abortion, and Our Lady of Mercy does not perform abortions, on ethical and religious grounds. Ms Angelino and her husband, though they had some sympathy for Ms Rosario’s plight, pleaded with her not to abort the pregnancy. They had been through a very long process, they explained, and the embryos that were to have been implanted in Ms Angelino were the only viable ones that had resulted. It must, they understood, be difficult for Ms Rosario unwittingly to have become a surrogate mother, and Ms Rosario ought no doubt to be compensated by the hospital. But none of that, they said, changes the fact that Ms Rosario was now carrying their unborn children, who have as much of a right to life as any other human being.
It is clear that Ms Rosario has a legal right to abortion if she should choose one. But her personal, moral situation is quite complicated. Ms Rosario has always believed herself that life begins at conception and so agrees with the Angelinos that she is now carrying ‘unborn children’ who have a right to life. But, in statement released by her attorney today, Ms Rosario insisted that this does not settle the question what she should do.
“It is true”, she wrote, “that the embryos I am now carrying have a right to life. But I have rights, too, and their right to life does not give them the right to use my body to sustain themselves. It does not give them the right to put my life and health at risk so that they might grow and develop. It does not give them the right to make me give birth to them so that they might live independent lives. It is tragic that, through no fault of their own, these unborn children have come to be in my uterus. But they have no right to be there, and it is not my fault that they are.”
She concluded, “I do not want these embryos to die. If they could be removed from my body and put in someone else’s, that would be fine with me. But that is not possible. I do not want the Angelinos, who seem like nice people, to lose the children for which they have struggled so long, either. I wish I could help them. Maybe that would be the most honorable thing for me to do: to carry their children for them. But I cannot do it. I have my own life to live.”
I made that story up. None of it is true. But it might have been true, and maybe one day something like it will be true. But the lesson of the story is the same, whether it is true or not. Far too often, it is assumed in our public discussions that, if only we could decide whether “the fetus is a person”, we would know what to think about abortion, so we fight and fight over that unanswerable question. But, as my philosopher friends will already know, Judith Jarvis Thomson (one of my teachers at MIT) pointed out forty-five years ago in her now classic paper, “A Defense of Abortion”, that is wrong. And not just wrong but sexist, because it completely ignores the fact that, where there is a fetus, there is also a pregnant person, usually a woman, with rights of her own.
Events relevantly like the ones in my story happen with terrifying frequency, even if people like Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin would have you believe otherwise. When a pregnancy results from rape, an embryo has, in the same way, though no fault of its own, come to be where it is not wanted and not welcome. It is, no doubt, a tragedy compounded. But such embryos, whatever right they may have to life, have no right to the use of their hosts’ bodies.
Thursday, December 1, 2016
"Why Are There Lesbians?" Asks Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner
Absolutely fantastic, and really quite funny, article over at Outward about arguments yesterday at the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals concerning what may turn out to be a landmark LGBTQ discrimination case.
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Working Class Voters and the 2016 Election
The day after....
Today in my introductory logic class, we were supposed to start talking about formal deduction: one of the most important, and confusing, topics in the course. When 10am rolled around, there were a lot of missing people. And those who were there mostly looked half-asleep, and many of them looked as if they were about to cry, or scream, or something else. I canceled the class, and several students thanked me.
What happened yesterday? There will no doubt be a lot of punditry, but in reading the exit polls last night (I kept the TV off), it seemed to me pretty obvious what had happened. Here's my theory. (And it's apparently not just mine.)
The story of this election is really told in four states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That is where Clinton's famed "firewall" gave way. And why does she lose those four states? Because of Trump's absolutely huge advantage with, as the pollsters tend to put it, "whites without a college education", i.e., working class whites. Republicans have done well with that group for some time now, but exit poll data from the New York Times reveals the depth of the problem Clinton had. Obama lost this group by just 18 points in 2008 and 25 points in 2012; Clinton lost by a staggering 40 points. Along similar lines: Among people with household incomes under $30,000, Obama by 32 and 28 points in 2008 and 2012, but Clinton won by only about 12 points. (Obviously, there is some overlap between those groups.)
Might the fact that Clinton did less well with African-American and Latinx voters than Obama did in 2012 be partly for this same sort of reason?
Who are these relatively poor and less educated people who voted for Obama but have now voted from Trump? I'll hazard a guess that they are the same people who formed a group of which many of us had heard, but of which few of us could believe might exist: the people who wanted to vote for Bernie Sanders, but would vote for Trump over Clinton. Which is to say: Yes, obviously, there are plenty of racists and misogynists and xenophobes among Trump's supporters. But I doubt that they are who won him the election.
The truth is that, long before working-class voters turned out in historic numbers, seemingly fleeing from the Democratic candidate, the Democratic party had abandoned them. The recovery from the 2008 crash has been painfully slow, even non-existent from the point of view of that demographic. What exactly has the Obama administration done to help them? Or, allowing for Republican obstructionism, even tried to do?
But if you really want a poster child for the way the Democrats have taken working-class people for granted, you could do no better than to choose that other Clinton, Bill. It was Bill, together with the so-called "Democratic Leadership Council", who pushed the party in a 'pro-business' direction. That was a needed corrective, after the disasters of 1984 and 1988. But it did not have to go as far as embracing and even championing the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Bill did largely over the objections of labor, who predicted, rightly as it turned out, that it would lead to a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States. And many of those lost jobs were in the very states in which Clinton stunningly lost last night.
The good news, for Democrats, is that these voters may well not be lost to the party. As I said, I suspect that many of them would have been happy to vote for Sanders, who tirelessly called attention to their plight during the primary. Indeed, in so far as Clinton paid any attention to this group, it was because of pressure from Sanders. I'm not saying that Sanders would have won. Maybe, maybe not. But a Democratic party that took a turn back towards its roots and became once again a champion of labor, would, I think, stand a very good chance of luring at least many of those voters back into the fold.
The reason is that Donald Trump, although he has to be given credit for recognizing the depth of frustration among these voters, has absolutely no concrete plans to help them. Building his ridiculous wall (which Mexico still isn't going to pay for), or anything else that restricts immigration, has nothing to do with it. Probably the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead, but that, at most, will serve to prevent further erosion, not to restore the coastline.
Probably some other moves towards protectionism are likely, too. For example, Trump has talked about re-negotiating NAFTA and other trade deals. But it's far from clear that we can turn the clock back now, or that doing so would lead to a restoration of US manufacturing. What seems far more likely is that it would lead to a trade war that would cost the US economy dearly, since Mexico and Canada are two of our biggest export markets. Besides which, it's far from clear how many Republicans in Congress, who tend be a pretty pro-trade bunch, would be willing to go along with protectionist legislation.
And, speaking of the Republicans in Congress, what we're likely to get from them is a series of policies that will benefit the traditional Republican constituencies, which, to put it mildly, do not include the working class: Massive tax cuts for the wealthy, just to start; a partial repeal of Obamacare, which will deprive many working class people of health insurance; a privatization of Medicare, which will affect millions of older Americans, especially those less well-off.
Maybe, just maybe, there will be enough support for the sorts of investments in infrastructure that seemed, at one time, to be attracting bipartisan support. But that was really a core proposal of Clinton's. And it costs money, which means you need either revenue or debt. For which of those do the Republicans in Congress have an appetite?
Nothing else has even been mentioned at this point, certainly not by Trump.
So here's a prediction: Two years from now (at the mid-terms), and four years from now (at the next presidential election), the plight of working class people will not be any better than it is now and may well be even worse. And the `cross-over' voters who swept Trump into power are not going to be happy about it. They voted for Trump because they wanted concrete change, not just symbolic change, and they certainly did not want the usual offerings from the Republican establishment. But they are not going to get concrete change.
That gives the Democrats an opportunity. But only if they're willing to have their own reckoning and stop just pretending to care about the working class.
Today in my introductory logic class, we were supposed to start talking about formal deduction: one of the most important, and confusing, topics in the course. When 10am rolled around, there were a lot of missing people. And those who were there mostly looked half-asleep, and many of them looked as if they were about to cry, or scream, or something else. I canceled the class, and several students thanked me.
What happened yesterday? There will no doubt be a lot of punditry, but in reading the exit polls last night (I kept the TV off), it seemed to me pretty obvious what had happened. Here's my theory. (And it's apparently not just mine.)
The story of this election is really told in four states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That is where Clinton's famed "firewall" gave way. And why does she lose those four states? Because of Trump's absolutely huge advantage with, as the pollsters tend to put it, "whites without a college education", i.e., working class whites. Republicans have done well with that group for some time now, but exit poll data from the New York Times reveals the depth of the problem Clinton had. Obama lost this group by just 18 points in 2008 and 25 points in 2012; Clinton lost by a staggering 40 points. Along similar lines: Among people with household incomes under $30,000, Obama by 32 and 28 points in 2008 and 2012, but Clinton won by only about 12 points. (Obviously, there is some overlap between those groups.)
Might the fact that Clinton did less well with African-American and Latinx voters than Obama did in 2012 be partly for this same sort of reason?
Who are these relatively poor and less educated people who voted for Obama but have now voted from Trump? I'll hazard a guess that they are the same people who formed a group of which many of us had heard, but of which few of us could believe might exist: the people who wanted to vote for Bernie Sanders, but would vote for Trump over Clinton. Which is to say: Yes, obviously, there are plenty of racists and misogynists and xenophobes among Trump's supporters. But I doubt that they are who won him the election.
The truth is that, long before working-class voters turned out in historic numbers, seemingly fleeing from the Democratic candidate, the Democratic party had abandoned them. The recovery from the 2008 crash has been painfully slow, even non-existent from the point of view of that demographic. What exactly has the Obama administration done to help them? Or, allowing for Republican obstructionism, even tried to do?
But if you really want a poster child for the way the Democrats have taken working-class people for granted, you could do no better than to choose that other Clinton, Bill. It was Bill, together with the so-called "Democratic Leadership Council", who pushed the party in a 'pro-business' direction. That was a needed corrective, after the disasters of 1984 and 1988. But it did not have to go as far as embracing and even championing the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Bill did largely over the objections of labor, who predicted, rightly as it turned out, that it would lead to a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States. And many of those lost jobs were in the very states in which Clinton stunningly lost last night.
The good news, for Democrats, is that these voters may well not be lost to the party. As I said, I suspect that many of them would have been happy to vote for Sanders, who tirelessly called attention to their plight during the primary. Indeed, in so far as Clinton paid any attention to this group, it was because of pressure from Sanders. I'm not saying that Sanders would have won. Maybe, maybe not. But a Democratic party that took a turn back towards its roots and became once again a champion of labor, would, I think, stand a very good chance of luring at least many of those voters back into the fold.
The reason is that Donald Trump, although he has to be given credit for recognizing the depth of frustration among these voters, has absolutely no concrete plans to help them. Building his ridiculous wall (which Mexico still isn't going to pay for), or anything else that restricts immigration, has nothing to do with it. Probably the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead, but that, at most, will serve to prevent further erosion, not to restore the coastline.
Probably some other moves towards protectionism are likely, too. For example, Trump has talked about re-negotiating NAFTA and other trade deals. But it's far from clear that we can turn the clock back now, or that doing so would lead to a restoration of US manufacturing. What seems far more likely is that it would lead to a trade war that would cost the US economy dearly, since Mexico and Canada are two of our biggest export markets. Besides which, it's far from clear how many Republicans in Congress, who tend be a pretty pro-trade bunch, would be willing to go along with protectionist legislation.
And, speaking of the Republicans in Congress, what we're likely to get from them is a series of policies that will benefit the traditional Republican constituencies, which, to put it mildly, do not include the working class: Massive tax cuts for the wealthy, just to start; a partial repeal of Obamacare, which will deprive many working class people of health insurance; a privatization of Medicare, which will affect millions of older Americans, especially those less well-off.
Maybe, just maybe, there will be enough support for the sorts of investments in infrastructure that seemed, at one time, to be attracting bipartisan support. But that was really a core proposal of Clinton's. And it costs money, which means you need either revenue or debt. For which of those do the Republicans in Congress have an appetite?
Nothing else has even been mentioned at this point, certainly not by Trump.
So here's a prediction: Two years from now (at the mid-terms), and four years from now (at the next presidential election), the plight of working class people will not be any better than it is now and may well be even worse. And the `cross-over' voters who swept Trump into power are not going to be happy about it. They voted for Trump because they wanted concrete change, not just symbolic change, and they certainly did not want the usual offerings from the Republican establishment. But they are not going to get concrete change.
That gives the Democrats an opportunity. But only if they're willing to have their own reckoning and stop just pretending to care about the working class.
Thursday, October 20, 2016
How To Be a Man in the Age of Trump
A man behaving as Trump does would be a pariah in any culture that did not actively and persistently enable men like him.It sounds like an interesting article, but it turns out to be much more interesting than you might expect. It's written by a transman, who has a special perspective on what it is to be a man.
Sunday, September 11, 2016
New Paper: Comments on Imogen Dickie's "Fixing Reference"
The main focus of my comments is the role played in Dickie's view by the idea that "the mind has a need to represent things outside itself". But there are also some remarks about her (very interesting) suggestion that descriptive names can sometimes fail to refer to the object that satisfies the associated description.
You can find the paper here.
You can find the paper here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)