Muss es sein?

Several months ago, Simon Rich wrote a humor piece for The New Yorker in which he imagined that boyfriends are traded like ball players .  The male protagonist of the story is feeling pretty bummed about being traded to a new owner by his ex-grirlfriend when he arrives at his new owner's/girlfriend's apartment.  But when his new owner tells him that she engineered the deal because she thought he'd be a "good deal," his spirits lift.  Rich ends the piece thusly: "He wrapped his arms around her, laughing with relief.  There was nothing like joining a new team; there was nothing like Opening Day."  Which prompted me to write in the margin: "the excitement of the new, of possibility; of being desired."  And every time I think about our need or desire for another person's desire, I think of Kojeve.  And that invariably leads me to revisiting old haunts and setting out on new vistas. Begin with our desire to be desired. ...

Yeah, so I've been a little lax in my blogging.  Anyway, in the past Supreme Court term, the Court decided that the nationwide class of female employees who filed an anti-discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart did not constitute a certifiable class.  Dahlia Lithwick at Slate  had the most entertaining line about it : " Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, seems to have figured out that the key to low-cost discrimination lies in discriminating on a massive scale."  I express no opinion on the merits of the lawsuit, except to note that, while one may be sympathetic to Lithwick's outrage, the fact of the matter is that employers are generally given the benefit of the doubt in employer discrimination cases.  Viewed in the context of employment law as a whole, the ruling is not as outrageous as it might first appear.  Again, this is not to say it was correctly (or incorrectly) decided.

Craziness .

David Frum made some sensible comments about war and oil on NPR, saying, "Countries do not fight wars for oil. That never makes economic sense. You can buy a lot of oil for the cost of even a small war. But countries do care intensely about security of supply."  This reminds me of a professor I had who once told us, "I don't ever want to see any of you out there waving one of those idiotic signs saying, 'No war for oil!'"  Frum's point is that although countries may not fight wars for oil, they may fight wars over oil.  There's a crucial distinction there.

Nabil Fahmy, dean of the school of public affairs at American University in Cairo, said of students' demands to ouster Mubarak-affiliated school officials, that they were " legitimate, but ... not reasonable ."  One might think that legitimate demands are demands that ought to be satisfied.  One might also think that only demands that pass the bar of reason ought to be satisfied.  Curious.  So what do we do?  How do we weigh these "competing values?" Perhaps legitimate demands ought to be satisfied, but people have a duty to be reasonable?  I leave the status of the "ought" purposely ambiguous--i.e., whether moral, prudential, or other.  Think of those everyday situations when people make understandable but not entirely reasonable demands.  Isn't (for example) monogamous marriage itself an understandable if not entirely reasonable demand?  Less polemically, don't we often, in states of intense emotion, make understandable but not entirely r...

Hubert Dreyfus co-authored a column in the New York Times in which he says (and I agree), "The greatest danger of Watson’s victory is not that it proves machines could be better versions of us, but that it tempts us to misunderstand ourselves as poorer versions of them."  However, he also quotes John Haugeland as saying, "The problem with computers is that they just don’t give a damn."  The implication is that human caring is what distinguishes us from computers.  I think that is not quite right. Now, in the source material, i.e., Heidegger, Da-sein cares because Da-sein is being-towards-death.  Da-sein cares because Da-sein dies.  However, what Kubrick and others present is the possibility of an artificial intelligence that cares but does not die (A.I. is like animals in this sense; animals also do not die, in the Heideggerian sense).  This is possible without self-consciousness.  It is conceivable to me (and perhaps this is because I know nothin...

Ah, my first blog post! I recently finished Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet .  She writes about Lysias' speech of the non-lover in Plato's Phaedrus , and how that speech derives its power by looking at the love affair not from the moment of inception, but from the moment of or after its dissolution.  As she says, "Lysias looks at a love affair from the point of view of the end," but "[n]o one in love really believes love will end." Today, I was reading the comic strip Luann , which had Luann telling an Australian foreign exchange student she likes, "There's no point in starting something if you're just going to go back to Australia."  Ah, the sober prudence of the American teenage girl, who will not sacrifice her precious adolescent years in pursuit of something that can only be fleeting and temporary, however otherwise pleasant and enjoyable it may otherwise be, when there is not even the possibility of a happily ever after to t...