by Thomas R. Wells

There are people living among us who have done terrible things to other human beings – murder and rape, for example – yet who nonetheless deserve society’s forgiveness. They have been convicted for their crimes and punished by the laws we collectively agreed such moral transgressions deserve. Now they deserve something other than punishment. They deserve to be treated with respect rather than resentment, contempt, and suspicion. They deserve a real chance to overcome their history and make something of their life.

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When someone commits a morally terrible act against another that is a concern for the whole society rather than only the victim. Hence the institutions of police, courts and prisons administered by the state on behalf of the people. These systems are designed to discover the moral facts of each case: how bad the crime was, how responsible the perpetrator, and how much they deserve to be punished. This is important to make sure that we punish the people who do terrible things (and only those people), and also that we punish them to the degree that they deserve it and no more.

The last point is essential. We have a duty to punish the people who do bad things, but we have no right to punish them more than they deserve. For the same reason that it is wrongful to punish the wrong person for a crime, it is wrongful to punish the right person in the wrong way. This is why it is important for us to leave the judging to specialist institutions with the resources and authority to do it properly. When we try to do it ourselves we get mob justice – i.e. punishment only stops when those with the most extreme feelings about the case are satisfied.

In most developed countries the criminal justice system is trusted well enough to decide who is guilty and deserves punishment, i.e. who is a criminal. However, it seems that some people hold a lingering belief in their personal right to decide how much punishment criminals deserve to receive, and to inflict that privately if they have the chance. Thus, people with convictions for murder are routinely harassed and denied employment or access to opportunities like university education. Read more »

by Abigail Akavia

As was to be expected, artists are now calling to relocate the next Eurovision Song Contest, which is to be held in Israel in May. No less predictably, supporters are saying, more or less, “let’s leave politics out of it”. As if the Eurovision is nothing but a celebration of music, a friendly competition where sportsmanship is what counts above else. As if, indeed, athletic competitions have nothing to do with politics. The Eurovision has been described as the “Gay Olympics” or the “Gay World Cup.” The analogy brings to mind the controversies surrounding Russia’s hosting of the 2018 world cup games, despite the country’s well-documented violations of human rights. The example of Russia is telling, since there was quite a lot of criticism aimed at FIFA this summer, not for allowing Russia to host per se, but for failing to secure the games as a racism-free zone. In the 2014 Eurovision held in Copenhagen, the Russian representatives were loudly booed in response to Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea and its stance on gay rights. Like it or not, Eurovision participants are held as representatives of their nation, and are judged as such. Thus, even though Eurovision fans display a “playful nationalism” in their celebratory participation in the events, and often support not only their nation’s song but also the one they deem most worthy, the Eurovision remains an overt political arena where two issues are at stake: nationalism and queerness.

A local controversy surrounding one of the runner-ups to become Israel’s contestant to the Eurovision illuminates these two contexts and how they intersect. The next performer to represent Israel on the Eurovision Song Contest will be chosen in a pre-competition reality show called “The Next Star.” Since the competition began two and half months ago, one of the contestants has gained particular attention. Rotem Shefi, a Jewish Israeli singer, performs under the stage-persona of Shefita, an Arab diva, whose props include tacky gowns, heavy jewelry, a glittery walking-cane (yup), and, the most important in her toolbox, a thick Arabic accent. Shefi’s songs in the competition have so far been almost exclusively covers, remakes of rock and pop hits rendered in a non-specific Middle Eastern, pseudo-Arabic sound, performed in English. Despite some signs of unease, especially among one of the show’s judges, Shefita is consistently voted up, and is still presented as a likely contender to win and become Israel’s representative to the Eurovision. Read more »

by Samia Altaf

“Let’s go look at the flowers outside,” I say, as I sense Dad sinking into the recesses of his fading memory. I wheel him out. Look at the petunias. What a riot—purple, pink, white, that ordinary pedestrian flower in such abundant glory. I hold a bunch to his nose and he takes a deep breath. “Wow,” he says, and opens his eyes. The misty and faraway look hits me hard. It is like looking inside a bombed-out building that has few windows left intact and very little light. But he tries, never having been one to give up; he blinks shortsightedly at the greenery, the flowers, and the blue sky, and shakes his head at the wonder of it all—and of him being there in the middle of it. He struggles to say something but gives up halfway—words too have faded. “Wow,” he says again.

Dad has steadily and imperceptibly lost all memory to Alzheimer’s. Memories of his children, friends, family, his wife now gone. Only shards of crystallized knowledge—encoded so deeply—remain beyond the cognitive deterioration, He recognizes the simple beauty of flowers, they are still real. We look at the yellow rose bush, the petunias and the marigolds, this lovely spring evening. His face lights up. “Wow,” he says, over and over. And then: “I have these in my house” and “when will I go there?” He asks, a complete sentence, and looks anxiously at me, his brow scrunched with a look fit to break your heart. That he remembers—his house and the feeling of wanting to go there. One he had to leave when he and mom got to be too sick to live on their own. Do memories plague his ears, like flies?

“Do memories plague their ears like flies?

They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.

Summer by summer all stole away,

The starting gates, the crowds and cries.”

(Philip Larkin)

Read more »

“Luddite” is a word that is thrown around a lot these days. It signifies someone who is opposed to technological progress, or who is at least not climbing on board the technological bandwagon. 21st century luddites tend to eschew social media, prefer presentations without PowerPoint, still write cheques, and may even, in extreme cases, get by without a cell phone. When used in the first person, “luddite” is often a badge of honour. “I’m a bit of a luddite,” usually means “I see through and am unimpressed by the false promise of constant technological novelty.” Used in the third person, though, it typically suggests criticism. “So-and-so’s a bit of a luddite,” is likely to imply that So-and-so finds the latest technology confusing and has failed to keep up with it, probably due to intellectual limitations.

The original Luddites were English textile workers in the Midlands and the North who organized themselves in secret and destroyed machines in the newly established factories and mills. They were called “Luddites” after their fictitious leader, “General Ludd.” Peak Luddism occurred around 1812-1813, although there were incidents of machine breaking before and after then. The most notable of these were the Swing riots that swept across parts of Southern England in 1830 when impoverished agricultural labourers, sometimes carrying out threats issued by the fictitious Captain Swing, smashed threshing machines, burned barns, and demanded higher wages.

A common view today of these machine-breakers in the early stages of the industrial revolution is that they represent a clearly futile attempt to block technological innovation. One can sympathize with their plight, of course. Weavers who were proud of skills they had spent years mastering could now be replaced by relatively unskilled workers operating the new machines. Agricultural labourers who counted on threshing with hand flails for several months of employment following the harvest now faced winters without work or wages. But the times they were a-changing. Quite simply, the new methods of production could produce much more in less time and at lower cost. Trying to halt progress of this sort is as pointless as ordering back the tide. Resistance is futile.

But this view of the people who smashed stocking looms and threshing machines is oversimplified and somewhat unjust. It also carries some questionable ideological freight. Let me explain. Read more »

by Liam Heneghan

The traffic had been slow all day but by four pm, it was reduced to a trickle. Those cars that passed him on the street did so in two and threes as if they were sticking together for safety like lumbering animals caught out in a storm. It was, in fact, a very harsh winter day. The afternoon temperatures dipped well below zero: one of the coldest days ever recorded in Chicago. The only sounds now were from an occasional plane passing overhead, and from distant cackling from those venturesome neighbors who had left snug homes to experience the cold. He could hear the sound of his feet crunching through the snow.

The husband and wife had left the house to drop off a bag of groceries to a nearby homeless shelter. Peanut butter, cans of peaches, mandarin oranges in a light syrup, crackers, nuts, and so on: things that people accumulate in abundance for emergencies that rarely materialize. He stepped out of the car to drop off the goods, and walked down the short flight of stairs into a reception area in the basement of the church. The volunteer welcomed him with gusto; she had said “Welcome”, rather grandly, and looked at him expectantly. She seemed confused when he extended his shopping bag. “Donations,” he said. “Ah…!” she replied as she realized that he would not be staying. Another volunteer elaborately produced a receipt and he was required to jot down the list of items he was leaving behind. He found that he could not remember all the items, and made a few of them up.

As he left the shelter, he suppressed a smile and once back in the car he and his wife laughed at the confusion as she drove them away. It seemed like the sort of thing that always happened to him. The sort of thing that would also happen to his father, he reflected. After a few minutes, they fell silent, both ruminating, no doubt, on those now suffering without shelter. The husband abruptly declared he wanted to walk home and got out of the car. “I am looking more and more like my father,” thought the husband. The wife drove on. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

One of the biggest early 20th century philosophical challenges to the belief in God stemmed from the doctrine of verificationism.

Roughly, according to verificationism, a claim has meaning just in case it is possible to verify the claim — either through empirical evidence or logical proof.

Now here’s the problem for a claim that expresses belief in God. There is no empirical evidence that can prove the existence of God, nor is it possible, purely through logic alone, to prove God’s existence. So, according to verificationism, a claim like “God exists” is quite literally meaningless. It’s just nonsense. Though grammatical, it’s no more meaningful than “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”.

What made me think of verificationism and theism recently is the fact that, in the last couple of weeks  (and, indeed, years), a number of religious people have claimed that God had a particular interest in the outcome of the 2016 United States Presidential election.

Now it seems to me that we can show that such claims are pretty obviously nonsensical. And it seems to me that we can do this without accepting anything as strong as the verificationist thesis. In fact, we can do this even according to the standards of a committed religious believer. Read more »

by Dave Maier

A contemporary truism, ironically enough, is that we now live in a “post-truth” era, as attested by a number of recent books with that or similar titles, related by their authors with varying degrees of chagrin. We all know the ultimate, or at least proximate, source of this concern: that fount of untruth which is Donald Trump’s Twitter feed (with a side of Brexitmania for those across the pond). Even among his supporters – and this is indeed, I think, the most charitable interpretation of the phenomenon in question – Mr. Trump is, as his aide Ms. Conway has put it, best taken “seriously but not literally.” That is, he is not particularly concerned with whether what he says is true, but instead with its effect on his readers and listeners, friendly or hostile.

I’m not going to defend this attitude toward truth-telling, which has become known, thanks to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, as “bullshitting,” and in fact dates back to the ancients, when Plato’s Socrates criticized what were called “sophists” for similar attitudes. However, it does seem that some of today’s self-appointed defenders of truth can paint their targets with an excessively broad brush. Naturally there is a lot of complaining about “postmodernist skepticism about truth,” but since most of our writers are not philosophers, their somewhat vague griping is hard to evaluate. (Michiko Kakutani, for example, clearly doesn’t like Derrida; but that’s just about all I got out of what she said.) But I’m not here to defend postmodernism any more than I am to defend “alternative facts.”  Read more »

by Michael Liss

“He knew the American people better than they knew themselves, and his truth was based upon this knowledge.” —Frederick Douglass, Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, April 14, 1876

In October of 1859, Abraham Lincoln received an invitation to come to New York to deliver a lecture at the Abolitionist minster Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn.  

Although Lincoln was, at this time, largely a regional figure among Republicans, and held no public office, the invitation was not accidental. The party was still a bit like a Rube Goldberg contraption, made up of pieces (former Whigs, Know-Nothings, disaffected Northern Democrats) that didn’t all quite fit together. People of influence, notably the newspaper publishers William Cullen Bryant and Horace Greeley, knew the new movement needed a coherent, inclusive platform, and an articulate, attractive man to lead it.

They weren’t, by any means, anointing Lincoln—in fact, they had no idea what he could do. He had acquitted himself well in his 1858 Senate race against Stephen Douglas, the presumed 1860 Democratic Presidential nominee, but he had also lost. There were other questions as well: Would a person some described as a “backwoodsman” play in front of a New York audience?

What was obvious was that the most likely Republican candidates for the nomination were either flawed or disliked, or flawed and disliked. The presumed frontrunner, William Seward of New York, was unquestionably competent, but had made some radical-sounding speeches and was seen by many as a captive of Thurlow Weed’s political machine. Seward’s support was also thin in lower North states like Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois—all of which Republicans had lost in 1856 and were essential to victory this time. Other potential candidates had different weaknesses: Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase was an able Governor, but lacked what we would now call retail political skills. Pennsylvania’s favorite, Simon Cameron, was undeniably corrupt. The fourth “first tier” candidate, Edward Bates of Missouri, was 66, barely a Republican, and almost certainly the most conservative. It was hard to see how he could have ignited a movement. Read more »

by Bill Murray

47-year old Teburoro Tito stood at the head of his delegation on an island way out in the Pacific Ocean. At the stroke of midnight on January 1^st, 2000 the President of Kiribati handed a torch to a young man, ceremonially passing the future to a new generation.

Nobody lived there. Nobody ever went out there. When the designers of the International Date Line put marker to map, they drew right through the 33 islands that wouldn’t become Kiribati for 95 more years. They were just trifling bits of land, of no concern to cartographers 9050 miles away in London.

But there the little group stood because in 1994 the I-Kiribati president “applied to have a slight loop inserted into the date line that included all its islands in one time zone…. The Greenwich Observatory sanctioned his proposal and thus it was that his little nation profited greatly from the millennial hoopla.”

Dancers in grass skirts played to the cameras and the Kiribati archipelago made its claim to be the first to welcome the new millennium. The US Navy submarine Topeka made its own claim, positioning itself 400 meters underwater straddling both the date line and the equator.

New Zealand claimed the new millennium’s first sunrise. Their Chatham Islands, 500 miles east of the rest of New Zealand, got about a forty-minute jump on the rest of the country.

The real first dawn over land was near remote Dibble Glacier in Antarctica, but it was midsummer there, and you couldn’t really call it dawn, because the sun had never even set. If anybody was there, they never mentioned it. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

Amidst all of the disheartening immigration news, it was refreshing to see the recent D.C. district court decision in Grace v. Whitaker. The A.C.L.U. and the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies brought the case on behalf of twelve adults and children who fled domestic violence in their home countries and were denied entry by United States border officials. Judge Emmet Sullivan reviewed former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ extraordinary decision in Matter of A-B- last summer, which imposed heightened requirements for asylum-seekers entering the U.S. and moreover stated that domestic violence and gang violence were “generally” not grounds for asylum. Judge Sullivan found that Sessions’ decision and the subsequent Policy Memorandum that the Department of Homeland Security issued were unlawful.

Asylum law in the U.S.

Asylum law in the U.S. recognizes refugees belonging to a few specific categories: political opinion, race (encompassing ethnicity), nationality, religion, and “membership in a particular social group.” People fleeing abusive domestic situations and gang violence have been able to gain asylum in the U.S. through the last category, social group. To qualify as a refugee, someone must have a “well-founded fear of persecution” either by governmental actors, or, what is often crucial for social-group applicants, by non-state actors that the government is “unable or unwilling” to control. This language will come up a little later, as Sessions’ decision attempted to morph it into something quite a bit more restrictive. Read more »

by Richard Passov

Milton Friedman, in his essay The Methodology of Positive Economics[1], first published in 1953, often reprinted, by arguing against burdening models with the need for realistic assumptions helped lay the foundation for mathematical economics. The virtue of a model, the essay argues, is a function of how much of reality it can ignore and still be predictive:

The reason is simple. A [model] is important if it explains much by little, that is, if it abstracts the common and crucial elements from the mass of complex and detailed circumstances surrounding the phenomena to be explained and permits valid predictions on the basis of them alone.

Agreement on how to allow predictive models into the canon of Economics, Friedman believed, would allow Positive Economics to become “… an Objective science, in precisely the same sense as any of the physical sciences.” What Friedman coveted can be found in a footnote:

The … prestige … of physical scientists … derives … from the success of their predictions … When economics seemed to provide such evidence of its worth, in Great Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, the prestige … of … economics rivaled the physical sciences.

Friedman appreciated the implications of the subject as the investigator, to a degree. “Of course,” he wrote, “the fact that economics deals with the interrelations of human beings, and that the investigator is himself part of the subject matter being investigated…raises special difficulties…

But he loses the value of his observation to a spate of intellectual showboating:

The interaction between the observer and the process observed … [in] the social sciences … has a more subtle counterpart in the indeterminacy principle … And both have a counterpart in pure logic in Gödel’s theorem, asserting the impossibility of a comprehensive self-contained logic …

The absence of an ability to conduct controlled experiments, according to Friedman, was not a burden holding back progress or unique to the social sciences. “No experiment can be completely controlled,” he wrote and offered astronomers as an example of scientists denied the opportunity of controlled experiments while still enjoying the prestige he coveted.

But though moving economics forward as a positive science – one where predictions are formulated through math and then tested against alternative formulations – he did not want to see mathematics supplant economics. “Economic theory,” he wrote, “must be more than a structure of tautologies … if it is to be something different from disguised mathematics.”

When Friedman penned his article, the simplest mathematical formulations exhausted computational capacity. Read more »