Holiday Remarks

• Italian food: just as Chester French's frontman once described the band's work as "music for people who don't listen to music," this is food for people who don't eat food. And, much like Chester French, it's extremely good anyway.
• Presents received:
  1. Digital camera (MySpace-style shots of my reflection in a mirror TK)
  2. Beef jerky
  3. one (1) box of Constant Comment teabags
• Why do legal documents do that "one (1)" "two (2)" thing anyway? Is it just a failsafe system, i.e. there's a chance that someone (probably that cotton-candy–brained secretary of yours!) will "goof" and mistype a figure once, but there's a much lower chance that that person will make the same mistake twice in the same place, and any inconsistency will immediately throw up a red flag for editing? Or is there something more/less to it?

• I kind of get a kick out of Richard Posner's monomaniacal efforts to examine every single social issue through the lens of simple algebra and simpler economics, but there's something a little troubling about the distribution of his opinions. Last week on the blog he shares with the economist Gary Becker, he wrote in favor of the New York trans-fat ban — basically because consumers are too stupid to internalize the now widely publicized findings about the negative health effects of trans fat, thus justifying a smidgen of paternalism. But this week he's literally arguing, albeit with a few caveats that come in toward the end, that the number of drunk-driving deaths that occur annually in the U.S. is optimal. Valuing a human life at $7 million, and assuming a 0.001 chance that drunk driving will result in a fatality, the expected cost of drunk driving is $7,000. But drunk drivers probably enjoy drunk driving about as much as they enjoy getting $7,000. So cutting down on drunk driving will make us worse off on average. I don't think I'm being particularly uncharitable in my reading of the argument. I would link directly to it, but I'm typing this offline; it should be easy enough to locate via the Google if you're actually interested.

  At some point Posner (or was it Becker?) also argued that pre-emptive war on Iraq (or whoever) could be justified even if the likelihood that Iraq was ever going to do anything to harm the U.S. was very low. It's not hard to figure out how this works: you just have to multiply the low probability of a major attack by the extremely high cost that the U.S. would incur if such an attack happened. If you have the right estimates, then you can make the expected (/probability-weighted) cost look pretty scary indeed. Some blogger took this logic and ran with it, arguing that we should pre-emptively invade the moon, since, while the probability that moon-men a) exist, b) are hostile, and c) possess weapons of mass destruction is very, very low — say, 1 in 10¹² — the cost that they would inflict on the population of the earth, including loss of all life, destruction of all property, and deletion of all blogs, would be extremely high — say, $10²¹, so the expected cost of lunar terrorism would be around a billion dollars, so the world should be willing to spend that much trying to blow up the moon now before it's too late. Solving the collective-action problems that immediately arise is left as an exercise for the reader.

• Unger, and plenty of other people, argue that the form of consciousness characteristic of the liberal state is basically a secularized version of transcendence — we consider ourselves to stand in relation to nature and to society as God stands in relation to the world. However, Tony Yayo says, "When I die, I hope heaven looks like the ghetto." Pure immanence. (He also says, "I'm cheap like the Chinese man with duck sauce.")

• There are those who would deplore things they find insufficiently interesting as "obvious." I've never been a huge fan of the "obvious" critique, although I've certainly deployed it more than a few times in my day. The problem is that it's just too easy to make — too obvious, lol. Any well-articulated observation or theory will, after the fact, seem obvious; that's basically what defines a good explanation or an incisive comment. But that doesn't mean that the auditor would ever have spontaneously hit upon the observation or theory himself without the help of the observer/theorist; the auditor could easily have spent the rest of his life in ignorance. It's a piece of cake turned upside-down to claim independent discovery and roll your eyes when the other dude publishes first, more difficult by half to explain why you didn't beat him to the punch.

  But even with the best of wills, you can end up heckling the "obvious" as "obvious" without really appreciating all the details. This is a large part of why I have a much better grasp of Marx than I do of Mill or Montesquieu, even if said grasp is loose and tremulous in all three cases. Classical liberal thought sounds so familiar, so American, so high-school, that you have to really concentrate to pick up the important nuances. Or at least I do. And I haven't. Which is why I don't know anything, still, after all these years.

• An obvious point, but one I haven't seen anyone making recently: rapping is hard! Not "rapping" in the sense of content (interesting narratives, clever rhymes), which is also hard, but which people generally acknowledge as being hard, but rather "rapping" in the sense of form — saying things quickly and rhythmically but without slurring your speech or stumbling over your words. Nellie McKay and MC Paul Barman both try their hand at rapping, and both are kind of endearing, but neither can deliver the right syllables reliably; they just make a mess of things. (This is not, or at least not entirely, a racial thing: Eminem, for instance, has no trouble saying what he wants to say.) Anyone who has ever tried to rap along with their favorites — :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[ — understands this viscerally. But music critics who dismiss this or that catdog as a "bad rapper" rarely distinguish between the form and content sense in which someone can fail in this endeavor, even though this is a crucial distinction when, e.g, planning a party (not that I have ever done this).
• It is somewhat well-known that, in the wake of the Matrix movies, lots of people named their daughters Trinity, after the Carrie-Ann (sp?) Moss character. But remember that Trinity was (one must assume) the hacker name she adopted after being rescued from the Matrix the first time around, much as Neo was the hacker name that Mr. (Thomas? I'm forgetting) Anderson took on. There's something a little perverse about a large number of people foisting upon their children a name that, in its original context, symbolized personal freedom and humanity's infinite power to redefine itself. Let the kids name themselves, that's what I say.
• There's never a dull moment with Unger: "The closer the assignment of jobs comes to the ideal of merit, the more decisive the influence of natural talents in determining social place. The hierarchy of talents, distributed by nature without regard to men's moral purposes, succeeds the accident of inherited wealth and opportunity. The lucky ones can then cash in on the favors of nature like prostitutes whose price depends on whether they are fat or slim." Curveball!
• It should be clear by now that I'm basically live-blogging my brain.
• [At this point I fell asleep. My laptop also slept, humming and blinking, right by my side.]