Link Banana

I found Theodore Dalrymple’s argument against modern apologies for past wrongs — Kevin Rudd apologizing to Aborigines, Tony Blair’s apology to the Irish — to be fascinating and challenging. The most interesting paragraph:

In some case, it is a substitute for importance, or for a loss of importance. Europe (or at least its intellectual class) now feels more than ever responsible for Africa, precisely because its power over it has waned. If Europe cannot feel itself responsible any longer for all that is good and progressive in Africa, such as modern medicine, roads, railways, telephone, etc., it can at least feel responsible for all that is bad in it, such as starvation, civil wars, and so forth. For it is far better, from the point of view of self-esteem, to be responsible for great evil than to be completely or even relatively unimportant. If in the process of false apologizing the participants render Africans themselves inert and inanimate, responsible themselves for nothing, or nothing very much, that is a small price to pay.

(via Ideas)

Many people have linked to this article on Flickr’s Director of Community and I didn’t get why. Then I read it. It’s pretty interesting.

The consistently interesting William Saletan points to — and considers — an innovative argument about sexual propriety:

The defendant is accused of purveying obscene material from a Florida Web site. To be judged obscene, the material has to be found patently offensive or prurient by “contemporary community standards.” According to Matt Richtel of the New York Times, the defense attorney in the case, Lawrence Walters, will use Google Trends to argue that the community’s standards are lower than advertised. Walters “plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like ‘orgy’ than for ‘apple pie’ or ‘watermelon,’” Richtel reports. (Evidence here.) The point is “to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics—and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.”

…[Th]is case is more than a titillating gimmick. It’s an early attempt to think through human duality in the age of the Internet. In the old days, there was a private you that lived in your head, a semi-private you that lived in your house, and a public you that lived in your community. You could commit adultery in your fantasies, try bondage with your spouse in the bedroom, and sing about purity in church. The Internet has confused these distinctions. Now the private you can sneak around the semi-private you and become semi-public. (I doubt those folks in Pensacola have talked to their spouses about orgies.) Your fantasies are no longer confined to your head. They’re visible, in the aggregate, on Google Trends.

…And don’t judge a porn site operator by the open-air standards of his geographic community. That’s not where he peddles his smut. He peddles it online, where the standards, as we now know from Google, are different.

From the large stack of old reading I’ve been meaning to do, I found this:

Offices in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to their critics burdensome remnants of an older age, symbolic shackles of bureaucracy—a system as inhuman as it was ineffective. Cubicles, by contrast, seemed to lack the fixity, and the constraints of bureaucracy of the old office. Moreover, cubicles eliminated the hierarchical distinctions between managers and workers; every cubicle had an open door, everyone was equally a worker. Empowering and humane, cubicles seemed to create a workplace with a soul.

(via Coudal)

It’s Science Saturday on Bloggingheads and today’s discussion is especially interesting. Yale psychologist Paul Bloom and UNC (experimental) philosopher Joshua Knobe discuss how morality comes about and persists. Fascinating stuff.

Slate’s Explainer tackles a question a lot of people may be asking in the wake of NY Governor Spitzer’s run-in with the law. The answer?

The case for making it against the law to buy sex begins with the premise that it’s base and exploitative and demeaning to sex workers. Legalizing prostitution expands it, the argument goes, and also helps pimps, fails to protect women, and leads to more back-alley violence, not less. This fight over legalization has been waged in the last few years over international human-trafficking laws and proposals to make prostitution legal in countries like Bulgaria, a movement that the U.S. government helped defeat.

Thankfully, Ms. Bazelton also tackles the sensible arguments for legalization.

The venerable Steven Pinker had a fascinating piece in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about morality. It’s a very good and wide-ranging piece, but I found this particularly striking:

The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.