Mr. Misanthropic

Least Sympathetic Cause Ever

2005-09-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

Or maybe that's overstating it a bit, since organizations such as NAMBLA also have a cause. But graduate student unions are a close second. This article in the NY Times describes a rally in which 76 individuals were arrested for staging a protest over NYU's administration's decision not to recognize a graduate student employee union. The supposed reason NYU no longer recognizes the union is the union's failure to uphold an agreement not to interfere with academic decision making.

I would hope NYU wouldn't need so substantive a reason to cease acknowledging a GSU. If union's have a valid purpose, it is to obtain a living wage for those who have no bargaining power, either because of a lack of education, inelastic job market, or some other market-related perturbation which gives employers the ability to pay less than competitive wages.

No one has to attend graduate school. Graduate school is a privilege, not a right. As it stands, most graduate students receive a tremendous amount of money from universities such as NYU, and I'm not talking about their sizable teaching stipends or health insurance benefits. Rather I'm talking about the massive tuition break they receive. I'm 95% certain this amounts to more than 50,000 a year at NYU, given professors' salaries and the amount of attention graduate students receive.

I cannot stress enough how unsympathetic a group graduate students are. Schools pay graduate students to learn subjects they presumably love, yet all these GSUs seem capable of, it seems, is bitching and moaning. If you cannot afford graduate school, get another job. If you cannot juggle another job and graduate school, look for scholarships. If you cannot get a scholarship, get a private loan. If you cannot get a private loan, drop out.

Why graduate students deserve more money from graduate institutions is anyone's guess. Should they receive more money at the expense of undergraduates? Should junior faculty be paid less? Certainly the evil "corporate criminals" running NYU should be paid less? After all, they've done nothing but raise billions of dollars to satisfy the needs of faculty and students. How dastardly! How despicable!

Perhaps the GSU's point is a symbolic one. (Given the AFL-CIO's presence, the point of this rally is perhaps merely to extend the influence of unions into higher academics.) They are simply trying to promote the cause of unions, to shift the balance of power from capitalist pigs toward hardscrabble laborers - if graduate students can even be characterized as laborers and college administrations as capitalists.
To this, one can only reply, "To what end?" Who cares where power lies? Are unions good in themselves? Of course not. They are good or bad depending on their consequences, so let's hear some arguments along those lines: What will happen if NYU no longer recognizes the union? If NYU recogizes the GSU and the GSU uses its increased leverage to obtain more benefits for graduate students, who will receive less as a result?

I don't hear any arguments. I just hear talk of "corporate criminals" and "corporatization" as though a business structure characterized by centralized management and limited liability were but an avatar of Lucifer. Enough already.

Finished

2005-08-20T11:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I finally finished my long overdue substantial. I'm relatively happy with the end product: It seems to say alot, all the while accomplishing very little.

Correction

2005-08-10T08:34:00.000-07:00

At dinner last night, Joseph pointed out that "intensive purposes" is incorrect. I have thus eliminated that expression and replaced it with "intents and purposes." I googled the two expressions and found that the latter expression is used about ten times more often than the former one is. I stand corrected.

A Farewell

2005-08-08T20:28:00.000-07:00

Sadly, I learned my grandfather passed away sometime early this morning.

I will always remember the last time I saw him. Alhough suffering from a moderate case of cerebral hypoxia, clearly at death's door, unable to speak, and breathing only with the help of a BiPAP machine, he became noticeably angry at my grandmother, who was unintentionally making a nuisance of herself.

Well done my good man.

The Work Life Balance

2005-08-05T11:33:00.000-07:00

Talk of the so-called "work-life" balance is everywhere: in law school and at law firms; among associates, law students, and partners; on chat boards and in lawyerly magazines - fucking everywhere. Hearing mothers and fathers and choir singers and violinists talk about balancing work with taking care of their children, having babies, writing, singing, or whatever they take to be "life" leads me to conclude that these people have vastly overestimated the utility of their non-work lives.

After some thought on the issue, I've decided one might pictorially represent the ideal balance between work and life thus: WORK life.
The virtues of WORK are numerous, the vices of life many.
WORKing long, grueling hours develops character, helps one become disciplined, and keeps you from becoming highly unhealthy. Living a life leads to alcoholism, drug addiction, slothfulness, and - more likely than not - VD.
WORKing obscene amounts improves earning potential and helps you save lots of money. If you're WORKing 100 hours a week, you don't have time to waste money at a bar, on your kids, at a restaurant, or on some woman. Soul crushing hours don't allow you to worry about how unattractive you are, how out of date your clothes may be, or the countless other ways in which you are irredeemably inadequate. WORKis thus an excellent anti-depressant.
life is little but a source of misery more often than not: friends dying, relatives dying, hangovers, bitter breakups, casual breakups, self-questioning, pointlessness, boredom, and so forth.

I'm not arguing we should be masochists. Rather I'm arguing a very Epicurean position. That is, what we should strive at isn't maximizing pleasure but rather avoiding pain. Ataraxia is what we want. I maintain - for the best of reasons - that we'll find more of this at WORK than in life, and it's about time people started realizing this and stopped complaining about the number of hours they must bill.

Selfish Penguins

2005-08-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

[Sorry for the delay between posts. After a less than uplifting weekend I suspect this blog will take a decidedly darker turn the next few posts.]

Given the previous post dealt tangentially with memes, I thought I'd dedicate this post to another brain-child of Richard Dawkins: the selfish gene theory of evolution ("SGT").

The SGT looks at evolution from the perspective of genes and supposes that our genes are running the show. It says we should view sundry forms of life as entities designed to pass on as many copies of their genes as possible. I, and you for that matter, are but protective shells for our genes, machines programmed to pass on half of our genetic material to our offspring. Although inadvertently painting a somewhat chilly picture of life, one which seems to bother so the less misanthropic and more religious members of our species, the SGT was able to explain evolutionary puzzles that had stymied other theories of evolution, such as the group and species centered evolutionary theories.*

The recent, excellent documentary, March of the Penguins, corroborates SGT quite nicely. Emperor Penguins, for instance, make no effort, as far as I can tell from the documentary, to shelter the young of penguins which died from the blistering cold of the Antarctic winter or starvation on the eternal march for a bite to eat in the ocean. One would expect just the opposite behavior if operating from a species centered theory of evolution, since the goal one imposes there is that of maximizing the number of Emperor Penguins. It's a poor strategy indeed to allow potentially viable young penguins to die if one's goal is to maximize the number of Emperor Penguins. So how does SGT explain this phenomenon? Well, with a plausible, sensible "just so" story of course. The amount of genes a random female and baby emperor penguin share is likely small relative to the portion of genes she shares with her offspring (1/2). The risk she bears in taking a newbie under her wing is starving to death. If she starves to death she can't have another go at mating. Her genes have thus hard wired her to "flip the bird" at the helpless little penguins who lost their mommy or daddy and preserve herself.** (I will note that Emperor Penguins, unlike many humans, do not believe most children are worth a damn.)

In the spirit of academic honesty, I will note that the SGT doesn't explain why some female penguins, on the death of their young, attempt to appropriate the offspring of other penguins. Doing so is surely a foolish strategy from the perspective of SGT for reasons noted above. This might be a very rare phenomenon and perhaps results from some mental disorder - penguin postpartem depression?? If it is a very rare phenomenon, then it can be explained away as an anomaly. If it's pervasive, this is a problem for SGT. Given Freeman's narration, if I remember it correctly, it's the former.

I'll note in closing that SGT doesn't explain my behavior well. I have a habit of alienating even those women I find tolerable. My genes, I fear, are destined to die with me, never having found another vessel to house themselves. Fortunately for them, my sister shares 1/4 of my gene pool, so there's some hope for them yet. I feel I've let them down. I'm simply not that good of a protective shell / reproductive vehicle for my genes. And that makes me not that good of a person.

*A species centered theory holds that species X is evolutionarily driven by the desire to maximize the number of members of its species. A group centered evolutionary theory holds that some group, say, a pack of dogs, is attempting to maximize the number of its members.
**SGT explains other quirks in the Emperor Penguins' behavior, but I'll save those stories for another day.

Violence toward Children

2005-07-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

In contrast to hand-wringing, pantywaist American directors, Brazillians - if the film City of God is any indication - do not seem overly worried about unsentimentally showing children murdered. Many features of American culture deeply annoy me, but none does so more than the "special child syndrome" meme or perhaps, instead of meme, I should refer to it as a virus of the mind. (As an aside, I find it unfortunate that using the word "meme" now might seem clichéd as a result of the scholarship of a bunch of muddle-headed halfwits who will remain nameless and who appear to have absolutely massacred Dawkins's idea.)

Unfortunately for the misanthropic, cynical members of society, this meme has infected several prominent filmmakers. One, as you surely guessed, is Steven Spielberg, who cannot resist cloyingly aggrandizing children and maternal and paternal bonds. The most conspicuous example of such nonsense was AI, a film the last 20 minutes of which drove me to ponder various possible self-inflicted deaths. AI starred the villainous child actor Haley Joel Osment, who's squinty-eyed, nauseous countenance seems perfectly designed for propagating the virus. Mr. Osment also starred in the Sixth Sense, the director of which is similarly fatally infected with the virus. I think it was N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott who saw Sixth Sense for what it truly was: gaggingly mawkish supernatural kitsch.

These movies glorify children and vastly overestimate their worth to society. Protagonists in movies bend over backwards for machine versions of kids, or mentally retarded kids, or normal kids with paranoid delusions. No matter the cost to society, the life of some useless, worthless brat must be preserved, and we're supposed to cheer the lead on as he unreasonably beats back the baddies who are trying to harm the child. See, e.g., Mercury Rising starring Bruce Willis (an actor who's apparently infected with the virus). George Carlan once (roughly) remarked that the children whose wondrous gifts we celebrate today will grow up to be the same ugly, stupid people we currently loathe. I couldn't have said it better myself or agree more strongly.

If you wanted to see children treated like adults, you'd really have to search. One movie that treats children equally is Citizen Toxie, which was produced by Troma, I believe - so consider yourself warned.

What was I talking about? . . . City of God has to be one of the most unsentimental, unpreachy film dealing with gang violence, murder, robbery and poverty ever. Even without the child-slayings, City of God is a fine film. It even managed to have non-cheesy narration. Not many films do that well and when done poorly it can really hurt a film - see, Y tu Mama Tambien. Without question the best voice over narration had to be American Psycho - ("I'm on the verge of tears by the time we arrive at Espace since I'm positive we won't have a decent table, but we do, and relief washes over me in an awesome wave.").

Anyway, this was an outstanding film. Check it out if you have a chance.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

2005-07-20T07:07:00.000-07:00

Sadly, I wasn't even able to sit all the way through this. The unrelenting onslaught of feeble, feeble puns and poorly thought out slapstick were two, but not the only, reasons I left. Another crucial one was a lack of air conditioning. There has to be a way to keep a theater air conditioned without drowning out the actors and actresses. Movie theaters have mastered this mysterious art, and Broadway shows seem louder than most movies. Perhaps the Loews and Regals of the world will one day deign to reveal the secret of how to keep cool large rooms filled with assloads of people. Until then, Broadway audiences must pay far more than moviegoers for the pleasure of sweltering in uncomfortable seats.

I was surprised by how easily the crowd was amused. I can't remember one line from the show; they were all forgettably bad and lazily written. There were no memorable songs and Lithgow - although a great comedic actor - simply cannot carry a tune.

The crowd also was a disappointment. Who'd have thought all of these sloppily dressed tourists could afford $90 - 100 tickets?

This may have been my first and last Broadway musical.

Review:The Beat that My Heart Skipped

2005-07-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

Mr. Audiard's latest movie - a remake of "Fingers" which starred Harvey Keitel - is an amusing, sometimes brutal, but generally pleasing farce of a drama. The last scene has Thomas's apparent lover and former piano tutor playing Brahms's Rhapsodie No. 2 in G Minor at a recital, while Thomas, drenched and soaked with blood, plaintively observes from his seat. Audiard couldn't have picked a more apt piece to end on. The Rhapsodie, like this movie, is an odd, brooding work defying easy description. It isn't bad, but it's not that good either. The melody is forgettable but agreeable.

As with the Rhapsodie, no memorable theme to the movie emerges, and even at its most frenzied moment, not much is really going on or being said. Still, I don't need a theme spelled out in bold letters to enjoy a movie, and Thomas's character is complex and likeable. If he's not charming some woman, he's terrorizing a squatter or trying his best to play nice with his father, for whom he works as a thug. Perhaps dreaming of a better, different life, after a fortuitous encounter with his former piano instructor, Thomas takes up the piano again to prepare for an audition. These contrapuntal notes - Thomas's thug life and his musical ambitions, of course, make the movie a bit of a stretch but at least it's an interesting stretch. Quite aptly, Thomas decides to play Bach, whose polyphonic music well captures Thomas's Baroque character: he's a bit of this, a bit of that, and all over the place. Just like the movie.

A Reply to "How Originalist Is Originalism?"

2005-07-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

This is a response to questions the Fox asks on his blog. His questions might succinctly be stated thus: Is originalism permitted, forbidden, or mandated by the Constitution? If so, what is the content of originalism? Has anyone asked such questions?

In answer to the last question: I doubt that anyone has asked such questions about originalism. At least one person has, however, asked whether certain constitutional methods of interpretation are mandated, permitted, or forbidden by the Constitution: me. I don't know of anyone else who has addressed such questions sytematically. I aim to do so in my, as yet unwritten, substantial.

Since my project overlaps somewhat with the questions you asked, I will do my best to give you a non-useless description of what I'm doing and helpful advice on what sort of problems you might encounter if you do indeed decide to write your SAW on such questions.

So what question or questions does my substantial address? Here's a simplified version of the primary question: Does the Constitution forbid Justices to interpret the Constitution via Ackerman's Judicial Synthesis or Amar's Intratextualism? Let's suppose the Constitution mandates that it be interpreted via an originalist methodology. This would seem to spell the end of Judicial Synthesis and Intratextualism as interpretive methodologies. In what way is this "the end?" Well, normatively, these theories fail because Justices must abide by the Constitution and they could not do so if they used an unconstitutional method of interpretation to decide cases. These theories would also fail descriptively, under certain conditions, since they would be describing the Court as behaving illegally on a regular basis. Now, some theories are not trying to make sense out of the Court's decisions. Ackerman is. I don't believe Amar has tried to develop a descriptive account of the Court's doctrine. If he had, however, he definitely wouldn't be charitable to the Court and wouldn't care whether he described it as basically an illegal, incoherent entity. Most importantly, if you are advocating an unconstitutional method of interpretation your theory would seem to be, to put it politely, suspect.

Some history: The first person to ask such a question about interpretive methodology and address it in any rigorous way was - as far as I know - Nicholas Rosencranz, a former Yalie, but he only asked that question of statutory methods of interpretation. The article appeared in the HLR a couple years ago and its name escapes me.

General remarks: This question of constitutionality, although never directly addressed, has been tacitly addressed by, I venture, every theory of constitutional interpretation, from the prudentialism of Bickel to the paradigm case methodology of Rubenfeld. Each and every one of these theories assumes that its method of interpretation is at least permitted by the Constitution. To say otherwise just doesn't make sense. Now, whether these theories are constitutional is anyone's guess.

Criticizing these theories is tricky: It would seem that to prove some constitutional theory of interpretation, X, is unconstitutional you must commit yourself to some sort of interpretive methodology that will allow you to deduce that the Constitution forbids X, but doing so begs the question. There are ways around this seeming quasi-paradox - you might try a proof by contradiction - but still there looms a yet even larger question: If you read an interpretive methodology into the Constitution - if after all of your research you determine the Constitution says that it must be interpreted via an originalist methodology, for instance, how do you interpret the constitutional mandate that it be interpreted via an originalist methodology? "Originalistically" - but that begs the question. If you see what I'm getting at, you're probably inclined to believe that interpretive methodology is something extra-constitutional, perhaps even necessarily so. But the limit of self-referentiality is something that, to my knowledge, has not been systematically studied. Hofstadter talks about it at length in GEB and is worth reading on the subject. But I don't think there's anything comprehensive out there. Wittgenstein might have said something (useless) about it, but I don't remember.

If you understood my "originalistically" point, a moment's reflection will lead you to realize that textual attempts at justifying judicial review must fail, unless legal bootstrapping doesn't bother you.

Some final thoughts: Your post seems somewhat myopically "Framer focused." Remember that the Constitution was significantly amended during the Reconstruction - as you well know, and there's no reason to suppose that if interpretive methodology is indeed tacitly specified in the Constitution that the Reconstruction amendments did not amend the Constitution's interpretive methodology.
You must precisely formulate just what the Constitution says about Originalism. Does it permit itself to be interpreted originalistically or does it require it?
I would guess that no clear answer will emerge, but that current Due Process doctrine forces us to say that only one interpretive methodology works for reasons that I won't go into now.
Finally, I would consider the implications of the null hypothesis being true: The Constitution does not say specify an interpretive methodology.

In sum, Fox, I think you should write a paper on this.

Random thoughts from the past week

2005-07-12T12:03:00.000-07:00

Since it's been a while between posts, I thought I'd give you, in no particular order, a hodgepodge of observations on various happenings.

1. Kelo was rightly decided under Supreme Court law, and (former) Justice O'Connor's jurisprudence is risible. Not only does she adopt silly, unprincipled balancing tests to decide most difficult issues but, when she does develop a relatively clear standard for something - see, e.g., Midkiff for O'Connor's "rationally related" standard for the "public use" portion of the takings clause, she doesn't follow it to its logical conclusion. Her legacy should be one of legal and logical ambivalence. Always ready to reach a reasonable, prudentialist type result, O'Connor never developed a coherent judicial philosophy, unless one takes all this balancing nonsense seriously and not for what it truly is: ad hoc legal decision making. Ad hoc decision making does not constitute a jurisprudence worthy of adulation. Rather it represents an absence of a judicial philosophy. This is the position you reach once you have given up trying to formulate a coherent approach to legal issues.

You might think it odd that I, an avowed consequentialist, should have such a strong reaction to cost-benefit / balancing legal analysis. But I do. Here's why: No one has any reason to believe that CBA reasoning is required, let alone permitted, by the Constitution. The nature of the rights specified seem decidedly unconsequentialist in nature. Our Constitution takes, to use Phillip Petit's terminology, a "principle honoring" view of rights. This is to say that the very few rights it bestows negatively on the population by limiting government are not such that the government can disregard them when some relevant value is better promoted by disregarding them. Anyway, I'll one day write more on this. And of course, I'll more thoroughly explain myself if a reader requests that I do so.

2. A debate on my school's webmail system over the role of race and gender in judicial appointments has led me to make the following tangentially relevant remarks: If all else being equal you would promote to the Court a woman over a man or a minority- however defined-over a non-minority because that woman or minority is a woman or a minority, you are a racist or sexist. Now those are loaded words and usually they convey some sort of animus on the part of the racist or sexist. But I think I'm not too far off, if I've missed the mark at all. What I'm saying isn't that radical, although it is strongly worded.

Here's an attempt to clarify and defend the above definition. Consider the following individuals:
1. An individual who wants a woman promoted over a man even if given some definition of qualified the man is more qualified or equally as qualified, he would not be a sexist under the definition I gave if his desire is fueled by a belief that promoting a woman is a means to the end of, say, motivating more women to enroll in law school.
2. Imagine a sociopath burns a cross on a black couple's lawn with full understanding of what this will mean to the couple and community at large. This person, it would seem, is no less a racist than the KKK member who does so, even though animus does not accompany his action. This, I believe, helps to show that my definition does not stray too far from normal usage of "racist." I could give similar examples of "sexist" acts but I don't feel like thinking anymore right now. I'll leave it to your imagination.

A more general restatement of my definition: One is a racist or sexist if solely for the sake of having more women or more minorities or non-minorities on the Court one wishes to see some individual promoted. I tend to think that many liberal thinkers who want to see minorities and women promoted do not see gender and racial diversity as ends in themselves but rather as means to desirable social or legal consequences. But, then, I'm not aware of very much serious empirical research demonstrating that having more minorities or women on the Court or anywhere else for that matter will further or has furthered desirable goals, whatever those may be, or indeed has any effect at all. (I will note an exception to what I just said: A classmate of mine has performed some admirable research on females in the judiciary and shown it does have a statistically significant effect on case outcomes.) An apparent lack of empirical evidence to back up firmly rooted beliefs that promoting diversity by promoting minorities and women to positions of power furthers goals other than making groups more diverse according to some objective metric - e.g., the number of latino judges in the ninth circuit, leads me to believe that people who ardently push for such measures do so simply for the purpose of promoting more minorities or women or midget children of divorce, which makes them racist or sexist or midgetist, respectively. The good news is that I'm an ontological relativist and coherentist, which makes me perhaps surprisingly empathetic, so it's unlikely I'll sever relations with such people.

Review: Crash

2005-07-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

Heavy-handed writing and a paradoxically simplistic rendering of apparently complicated characters don't sink this movie. Good acting, humor and generally decent directing rescue it from cliche.

Following along the lines of a Magnolia or Boogie Nights this movie gives viewers a large cast of characters whose lives become connected with one another in various ways. For the most part, each character is racially intolerant and willing to let others know this; their interactions are implausible, but not artificial. Many people, I'm wiling to bet, think just what Mr. Haggis's characters say.

The same stereotypes that each character so unrealisticaly vocalizes serve as fodder for some of the best racial humor since Def Comedy Jam. At certain points I wondered whether some of the lines were meant to be funny, since I seemed to be the only one laughing. Perhaps this indicates just how racially insensitive I am. Or maybe it just indicates how trivial I think race issues ought to be.

This movie's most valuable insight is that, ultimately, for all of their prejudices, when it matters most, people generally act without regard to race.

Happy thoughts

2005-07-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

Just yesterday, I received a cold, uncalled for slap in the face. While rooting through my backpack in search of gym shoes, I came across red-wrapped vestiges of a former sexually active life. I considered tossing them but ultimately decided to let them be, for what reason, though, not even I know. My chances of meeting someone are somewhat diminished given an inability to make sustained eye contact with members of the opposite sex. (Guess the movie I more or less lifted that descriptively true line from and I will dedicate a post to your genius.) My aloofness and misogyny know no bounds. They conspired for nearly eight years to condemn me to a life of involuntary celibacy, a fate unbefitting of even the most despicable of our species. After slumbering briefly, they have reemerged, bent on subjecting me to depression and misery. I am truly blessed.

Logical problem

2005-07-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

The problem:

There is an arbitrary number of gnomes.
Each gnome wears a green, orange or red hat, and the distribution of colors is random.
The gnomes will eventually line up.
Before they line up they can discuss strategy, e.g., "Odd number gnomes will say the color of the hat of the gnome in front of him."
While in line, each gnome can only see in front of him and cannot see the color of his own hat.
Each gnome can only say "green," "orange" or "red" and the gnomes cannot convey any additional information by the way they say the color, e.g., by saying it loudly or by inflecting differently depending on the color of the hats they see.
Once in line, the first gnome - who can see all other gnomes - says the color of his hat. The second gnome then does the same. And so forth.
If a gnome says a color different from the color of his hat he dies. Otherwise, he lives.

HINTS

This is a a problem of how best to convey information. Come up with a way for a group of gnomes or a gnome to convey information about the hats it sees to the other gnomes.
The percentage of gnomes' lives that the optimal solution guarantees approaches 100% as the number of gnomes approaches infinity. There is more than one way to do this.

In a week or a few days, I'll post the solution and, for your viewing pleasure, my less elegant and optimal but similarly effective solution.

Review: War of the Worlds

2005-07-02T10:31:00.000-07:00

This mawkishly contrived melodrama chokes to death on its own sentimentality. Presaging its ultimate fate was the scene in which Cruise tearfully and reluctantly allows his son to rush off to his seemingly certain death. Of course he doesn't die; of course they are reunited and appear to reconcile in a thoroughly improbable ending. One of my classmates noted that, in a movie about a war with aliens, the ending was the least plausible part of the movie. Well said.

I must say that I love this city. Nowhere else would movie goers have such a hostile reaction to an otherwise decent suspense filled movie with plenty of explosions and special effects to keep the great unwashed masses distracted. But, last night, the cynical New Yorkers who watched alongside yours truly refused to be distracted. Well done.

In sum, avoid this movie if possible, and if you must go, leave five minutes before the movie ends.

Review

2005-06-28T06:27:00.000-07:00

Somewhat surprisingly, I saw Batman Begins for a second time. I usually have no problem seeing movies more than once if they were good. However, I'm not sure whether it deserved a second viewing. It was good, but was it that good?
A few things stand out about the movie:

1. The villain kind of sucked and his plan was ill-conceived and unlikely to succeed - it was a pill a bit too thick to swallow. Never did I believe that Gotham was at the precipice of disaster. This led to a lack of suspense. Further some sort of Eastern Philosophy clearly influenced the villain, and this caused him to blather senselessly about restoring the balance of justice, equalizing the yin and the yang, or some such nonsense. At least he - appears to have - died at the end, which is a lesson to all readers: Eastern philosophy will rot your mind and make you hatch inane plans that will ultimately get you killed.

2. Bale is one of the best actors alive. Bale has given us a Batman we don't want to ridicule. Given the previous two installments, this is no small feat.

3. Katie Holmes is annoying and I sincerely hope that the Scientologists take all of her money.

4. Certain scenes are quite memorable: Batman's escape from Arkham and his gliding above the terrified populace in the Narrows are two that come immediately to mind.

5. Batman is unwilling to kill purposely but seemingly willing to kill knowingly and definitely willing to recklessly risk the lives of others.

Happily, gone from this episode are the camp and homoerotic undertones that plagued the last two installments. When the inevitable sequal is made, I hope only that they make Batman a bit more evil, a little more willing to kill purposely.

Good movie

2005-06-26T12:37:00.000-07:00

I would like to start by thanking "From on High" for mentioning this blog. It was appreciated.

After dinner last night, I saw Land of the Dead, Romero's latest zombie movie. I was pleasantly surprised. The movie was not only very funny, but also suspenseful and thoroughly dystopian - dystopia is something which warms Mr. M's small, dark heart. I don't remember being on edge through much of Dawn or Day of the Dead, although both were similarly dystopian. I never saw Night of the Living Dead, a movie they (Zombie movie fans) say was the best of the previous three, but Land of the Dead may now be the best, although that call is not for me to make seeing as how I haven't seen it.

In any case, Dennis Hopper was brilliant. Hopper plays menacingly sleazy characters with an enviable ease. Whether he's slapping around Isabella Rossellini as a nitrous huffing homicidal "hero" named Frank Booth ("Heineken! Fuck that Shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!" and "Call me daddy shithead!" are two of his many classic lines) or plotting his escape with full knowledge that this will screw over helpless townsfolk, he never disappoints.

Unfortunately, the movie has an anti-corporation undercurrent. Mr. M has no patience with feeble minded hippie types who dislike corporations but I will give Romero the benefit of the doubt. Hopper's character - the supposed villain - is the head of a corporation, which of course has a board of similarly evil directors. This is absurd and I'll leave it at that.

Back to due diligence.

Awkward Social Events

2005-06-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

After a semi-awkward dinner at the Danube, I have some banal, worthless thoughts as to why this happened.

First, any time you throw seven people together and more than two people know fewer than five people in the group, you will have awkwardness. The more newcomers there are the more the non-newcomers feel compelled to talk about things of general interest to everyone, which generally are of interest to no one. Perhaps counter intuitively, I would guess that the most awkward dinners are those where each person knows one other person. The urge to speak just with that person is strong, which makes it less likely one will attempt to converse with the unfamiliar members of the group. This balkanizes dinner conversation and makes group centered discussion less likely and more likely - if it does occur - to be fraught with embarassing lulls and unfortunate attempts at humor.

Second, a lack of air conditioning on a hot summer night doesn't help. One's concentration tends to wane as his body temperature eclipses 100 degrees.

Third, you can't have too many characters at such a dinner. Those who slay their friends are likely to confuse and offend others.

Fourth, in general, the larger the group the more likely you will get conversation free riders who wait for others to offer up the next topic for discussion. It's a lot easier just to sit there and let others do the talking. This can lead to a tragedy of the social commons: the marginal benefits of just sitting in silence and enjoying one's food are greater than those one will on average receive by socializing. Each person performs this calculation and what happens is that group discussion dies. Or maybe I'm just talking out of my ass.

On the whole, the evening was not a total loss, but it wasn't a runaway success. In such situations, I never know whether to try to dominate the conversation or play a supporting role. I end up just sitting there and feeling ill at ease.

In any case, I'll note that the food was good but not excellent. The decor was interesting and distracting in a good way. The service was adequate.

Blogging is fun

2005-06-25T14:39:00.000-07:00

Today, I boldly decided to enter the blogosphere. My decision was driven in part by a desire to be heard, in part by the crushing boredom associated with performing due diligence. I will kick things off with a scintillating post that will be of interest to potentially one person: Just how do I reconcile being a non-cognitivist and a consequentialist? I can just imagine you, the reader, bristling after reading the "about me" portion of this blog. I will leave you in suspense no longer. More importantly, how I managed the seemingly logically impossible task of being both a non-cognitivist and a consequentialist will be unknown to the world no longer:

I accept the non-cognitivist thesis at least to the extent it holds that moral statements are not truth functional in an absolute sense. Contra strict non-cognitivism, I hold that moral statements are truth functional, however, relative to the rules of an ethical system. The ethical system I happened to have adopted is consequentialism. I agree that non-relative moral facts do not exist. Pace Hume, however, I believe that moral facts do exist once one adopts an ethical system.

So now you know. As with magic tricks, the fun is in not knowing how the trick was pulled off. Once you know, you can't help but think, "That's it?!" Unfortunately, loyal readers, that's it.
Having been infinitely enlightened and epistemically sated, you will surely now lead a fuller, richer life that might even be worth living.

- Mr. M