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PIRÆUS PICTURE Co. is a fresh video enterprise with the heart of cinema. Piraeus’ first political ad ousted 4 term incumbent, Jim Camblos as the Virginia Commonwealth's Albemarle's Attorney. The ad was commissioned by a local PAC, Crime Victims United of VA. Camblos blamed the ads in his concession speech. ...read more
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"Politics is the art of the possible" - Otto von Bismarck
Glenn Greenwald: An Interview with The Art of the Possible
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Popular (perhaps even ‘Pop’?) psychologist Jonathan Haidt and pals have constructed a cool website wherein you can gauge your various moral senses as they relate to relationships, politics and more: (more…)
So, Batman: The Dark Knight is good, if not great. But by golly, we need to reduce it to its political subtext, darnit, or we haven’t done our jobs as pundits. I would say, it’s surprisingly friendly to anarchism. The Joker engages in massive destructions of government-supplied order, and we get to see how people react in its absence. In many cases, they react very well. (I won’t say more.) Don’t get me wrong: while there are crooked cops and corrupt officials and mobsters in bed with the law, this isn’t an “anti-government” movie per se. But there’s a gratifying absence of the old adventure-story cliche where people begin Hobbesian omni-wars the instant the police are out of action. It’s worth noting that in the previous Christopher Nolan Batman movie, there was a vox pop riot, but that was because people had been dosed with psychoactive gases.
Last week, Noah Millman wrote a long meditation on the issues raised by the SCOTUS decision banning the death penalty in child-rape cases. Leaving aside how persuasive it was (hint: it does more to bolster confidence in the future of the conservative movement than Matthew Continetti’s assay of the same controversy), I was struck by something in Millman’s closing:
I’m comprehensively skeptical, as I’ve noted before, of our rights-based discourse. I don’t think we have inalienable rights; I think we have inescapable duties.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read Millman’s previous critique of the “rights-based discourse,” but I think there is enough evidence in the death penalty post to make an educated guess about what he’s getting at. Here is how Millman cashes out what it means for something to be inalienable: “If our humanity is inalienable, that really does mean that nothing we do can take it away from us.” In traditional metaphysics, the way to put this thought is that humanity is an essential property of anything that possesses it. (more…)
At Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux muses.
Jim did a very fine job dispatching the Douthat-Carter contribution to number theory and set theory: “[J]ust as ‘a lot of people would say’ there is ‘similarity between having sex with a prostitute while you’re married and paying to watch a prostitute perform sexual acts for your voyeuristic gratification,’ there is also similarity between ‘having sex with a prostitute’ and having sex with your spouse. Hey, it’s sex, right?” Right. The point generalizes. In a classic paper called “New Work For a Theory of Universals,” David Lewis (sort of my intellectual hero, so be prepared to hear more about him) wrote: (more…)