Brandon Ruiz
Boiling Over
My jaw dropped a few minutes ago when I was browsing my daily news and read that former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. We have never discussed the situation in Pakistan here on Urbanagora, but I’ve thought about it quite a bit.
Pakistan could change the political landscape here in the U.S. more than just about anyone can realize. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed country that is in political turmoil. The top of this pressure cooker is being held down by strongman Pervez Musharraf who supports the very groups that are trying to take him down. He is part of the generation of Pakistani military officers that came up in the 70s and 80s when many military men were taking an interest in Islamism. He’s been supporting or at least not bothering the Taliban in the northwest while repressing his own people and continually denying even a mockery of a free and fair election. Pakistan has been heading toward some “interesting” shall we say, times for a while now and the death of the only serious contender for the Pakistani leadership will only increase tension.
The only other contender for the office was Nawaz Sharif. Last I heard Sharif was barred from seeking office and many of his party were similarly barred from running in regional elections. This essentially leaves Musharraf as the sole contender for Pakistan’s highest office frustrating democracy and increasing tensions. I imagine the next few months will be tumultuous and violent. These events will likely destabilize the region further and will doubtless impact politics here in the U.S. as contenders for office will have to come up with an appropriate response.
Throwdown in the Holy Land
I really have no justification for posting this other than the fact that it made me chuckle. Essentially a few Christian sects run a church in Bethlehem and occasionally bust out into minor scuffles. Fun stuff.
More on IQ and Genetics
Here’s a rather nice piece to serve as a counterpoint to the John Derbyshire piece that was posted by Tom a few weeks ago.
A brief excerpt:
“Nearly all the evidence suggesting a genetic basis for the I.Q. differential is indirect. There is, for example, the evidence that brain size is correlated with intelligence, and that blacks have smaller brains than whites. But the brain size difference between men and women is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men and women score the same, on average, on I.Q. tests. Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head sizes — and hence brain sizes. Yet their intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives.”
The Author, Richard E. Nisbett is no small potato, so take the article as something written by a well respected academic.
Abstinence Associated With Sexual Dysfunction
So I was perusing the news this morning as I am wont to do and stumbled upon this gem. That links prolonged sexual abstinence to sexual dysfunction. Now this is a study, so it only really tells us that there’s an association, but that can run either way. It could be that more people who are abstinent become dysfunctional by prolonged sexual repression, or it could be that people who are already dysfunctional are more likely to remain abstinent than their sexually healthy counterparts who break the pledge. Either way this was just interesting. Enjoy.
Get Paid to Blog for Hillary
One of the classiest parodies available online. I almost bought it for a while…
Property, But Whose Rights?
I was sitting in class today and we were discussing property rights. During the discussion a few thoughts and more questions came to mind that I thought I’d share.
Okay, so we have this thing called property. What does that mean? What does it really mean to “own” property. Oh I know the legal definition and the bundle of rights that are legally enforceable on a given piece of property, but I’m asking in the conceptual sense. Does owning property mean that I can do absolutely anything I want to on it? Could I, for instance have ten dogs on my half acre residential lot that bark all night? Does it matter what my neighbors think? Somehow I get the feeling that even some of the more ardent of libertarians would probably say no, there are reasonable limitations to how an individual can use their property. People can do what they want so long as it doesn’t harm another person or interfere with their rights to enjoy their property.
The old saying goes “your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins” and that’s generally a sound principle. It’s in balancing your right to swing against my right to not be hit that government generally comes in (and I swear Tom if you talk about God granting property rights or government being evil I’m bursting a vein, this isn’t about government) as an intermediary and we have that messy court stuff. At the founding of this country private property rights were generally understood in the negative; property was the ability to stop others from interfering in your enjoyment and use of it. Today that’s not quite so true. Granted a good number of us think this way, but that’s not the way things work. If that were true we wouldn’t have industrial pig farms because the stench is so overpowering that it makes the areas nearby virtually uninhabitable.
The problems of “do no harm” compound when we are talking about things that are not land or even the long term health of land. Land can be damaged pretty badly by poor management or short-term thinking. Iowa has a good 50 years or so of topsoil left – but then what? What about rivers, air, lakes, the ocean? We don’t really have property rights to air and water, but if we did what would that look like? How do you own water or air rights? How would we remedy harms to those rights? I could just imagine a polluter having to buy the right to pollute from millions of property owners from Illinois down to Indiana to have a source of pollution in Wisconsin. This sounds a bit extreme, but we currently (and into the future will) reside somewhere between absolute unregulation and this extreme uberprivatization. What’s the right line? What about multi-source pollution? If there are millions of cars in LA that produce smog and my kid gets asthma complications that can be fairly traced to the smog to whom do I turn for redress?
I’m perfectly serious here, we have a certain conception of property rights and that influences all of the questions I’ve posed. A lot of these questions are directed towards the more libertarian-oriented here, but they’re generally open. I’m not really trying to push a value judgment, but rather asking where the balance should fall. Basically what is property and how does it apply to some of the hypothetical scenarios I’ve tossed up?
Bentham in the Law School Classroom
As I reread Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” I am struck by the pervasiveness of the disciplinary mechanism which order our lives. Of particular interest to me was Bentham’s Panopticon and how very like the famed Panopticon the Law School classroom is. Students are prescreened, regimented, and disciplined before they even arrive. Upon arrival, they are given an examination number which is anonymous but at the same time individualizing because it is unique. Exams are double-blind in that the professors have no idea whose paper they are grading, yet scrutinizing each individually for whether or not they have included certain key lessons and adopted the correct modes of thought.
Students are forced to compete against one another in a perverse scheme which imposes a hierarchy upon them and which grades them according to their relative proficiency in the prescribed disciplinary methods and modes of thought. Each student, upon receiving his or her grade for a course, knows exactly where they stand in relation to their peers. In many schools this is a precise numerical quantification, in others merely a relative measure of being “in the top x%”. It is almost like the school Foucault discusses where students wear different color cloaks and clothing to designate whether they are elite, good, mediocre, or outcasts. Those who are among the elite are granted privileges such as access to the most prestigious and high paying employers, summer clerkships for after their first year, and teaching assistantships.
Beyond the classification and quantification of each student vis-a-vis their peers, law professors act like the all-seeing eye of discipline as they stand in front of their classrooms. Granted, they are perfectly visible manifestations of power, yet they exercise panoptic power nonetheless. Their panoptic power stems from the Socratic method. Under the Socratic method, a student is chosen (sometimes at random, sometimes according to a formula) and assaulted with a barrage of questions designed to either demonstrate mastery of a concept or simply to confound the poor wretch. This is particularly cruel because classroom participation has absolutely nothing to do with grades or performance. It is the stick to the grading scheme’s carrot. If a student stumbles in a Socratic session they face varying degrees of humiliation and censure from their peers thereby reinforcing the work ethic and disciplined thought process of the law classroom.
The end result of three years of this process is to produce docile minds. This is not docile in the sense of dull, slow or stupid. Quite to the contrary, the minds produced are sharp, quick, and highly efficient. This is docile in Foucault’s “docile bodies” sense in which a whole body (or in this case mind) is regimented into discrete parcels and put through rigorous training to produce correct reactions to given situations. Students are run through intellectual gauntlets and crucibles to extinguish deviant thought modes and approaches to a given situation and produce a relatively uniform type. It is kindly called “thinking like a lawyer.” Little of substance is learned in a legal education, indeed, nothing need be learned. The end goal is simply to produce docile minds. Minds which approach problems in a mechanistic, methodical manner to come to the most correct conclusion given one’s goals. Minds which rarely question the power structure in which they are embedded. And therein lies the danger…
Libertarians and Government Services
Here’s a stub of a very classy news story that’s a few years old that a professor sent out to my environmental policy class:
Libertarian Reluctantly Calls Fire Department
April 21, 2004 | Issue 40•16
CHEYENNE, WY—After attempting to contain a living-room
blaze started by a cigarette, card-carrying
Libertarian Trent Jacobs reluctantly called the
Cheyenne Fire Department Monday. “Although the
community would do better to rely on an efficient,
free-market fire-fighting service, the fact is that
expensive, unnecessary public fire departments do
exist,” Jacobs said. “Also, my house was burning
down.” Jacobs did not offer to pay firefighters for
their service.
The Midnight Ride of Ron Paul?
“Republican” presidential candidate Ron Paul reported a surprising 5 million dollar haul in the third quarter of fundraising. This relatively large take for a relatively minor candidate seems to have surprised the punditry and probably the frontrunners too. Paul snuck in under the radar and has been a highly critical and outspoken participant in the Republican presidential debates and has earned himself a reputation for being a no-nonsense, small government conservative.
Before Tom celebrates the rising juggernaut of the Paul presidency, it’s important to note that this cash has largely come from online contributions – the Republican equivalent of the MoveOns or DailyKos folks. Definitely a vocal segment of the party, but by no means influential or numerous. It shows the sad state the Republican party is in when a guy who has a snowball’s chance is taking in probably about half as much as the more well-known and conventionally popular candidates. As a Democrat and a pretty hacky one at that, I wish I could say I were happy by this fracturing, but I’m a little sad. What’s the fun in a scrap if your opponent is the weak little guy no one likes?
My Alma Mater: The Greatest University in America
Now I won’t disagree that my alma mater has a leftward tilt, but to call it the worst college in America is really something. I don’t hear these guys complaining about economics departments that are slavishly chanting the free markets dogma. So why do they complain about Santa Cruz? Oh yeah, because it’s not hard right. I mean I’ve got no problem with people complaining about a bias (which showing was conspicuously absent in this spot), but don’t act like it’s all one-sided.