Backdated: Dance Dance Justice

I've been in a rut with the Theory Of Justice posts, obviously. And I couldn't find anything for it. I finished the chapter 24, about the Veil of Ignorance. I stopped after that, trusting that the concept would interact with everything else I've been reading, from Bolano's the Savage Detectives to Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami.

In something approximating idiomatic English, the Veil of Ignorance is a concept that says that principles we ought to abide by are ones that we could decide on if we were looking in on the Earth before we were born, without knowing what the lottery of our birth would be. Some people would gamble, yes. But people, mostly, not knowing where they would end up would likely, rationally, choosing principles that would be most beneficial to the greatest number of people and would set up a system that would levy the apparatus of our society not at the expense of the multitudes, but in favor of them.

That didn't swirl or interact with anything that I could find. I tried a drink to figure it out and I was left with a five euro bill and watching a pretty girl leave to go to a dance club I couldn't afford. C'est la vie. Life, right? Or maybe I've been reading waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much 100 Bullets. Regardless, nothing was coming and I'm still about five posts behind here. Last night, with the remnants of my computer's battery power, I posted some Murakami lines on Facebook and started the downtempo of going to bed, slipping into my pajama bottoms and brushing my teeth.

Tonight was going to be the same, too. Too much noir, and not enough actual progress here, but when I berated myself about not getting the work done, something finally interacted. There was a catalyst. And it was that Murakami quote from Facebook.

"Yougotta dance. Don'teventhinkwhy. Starttothink, yourfeetstop. Yourfeetstop, wegetstuck. Wegetstuck, you'restuck. Sodon'tpayanymind, nomatterhowdumb. Yougottakeepthestep. Yougottalimberup. Yougottaloosenwhatyoubolteddown. Yougottauseallyougot. Weknowyou're tired, tiredandscared. Happenstoeveryone, ok? Justdon'tletyourfeetstop."

A note on its context is important: The speaker is a extra-dimensional entity, with its own floor of existence, phasing in and out of a hotel. The person hearing it is a minor writer that makes his living not writing pieces he likes, but pieces he can turn in quickly, efficiently and also on time. It is a warning to a young man to live, live while there is still time, from outside normal time and space.

That's how the two pieces swirled and suddenly, as I feel the light, chilling breeze at eight minutes past midnight, I'm looking out at the city of Rome. From behind that veil of ignorance, would I choose life if it was an option for me? Would I choose to dance, to use Murakami's language?

And more to the point, what does dancing constitute, philosophically? Dancing is obviously a way of expressing the idea of working, hard, like you mean it, at what excites you, but in the case of being behind the veil of ignorance, does it mean leveling the playing field or upending it? Or...is it something else entirely? I think it's something else entirely, or ancillary to Rawls' point. But still. Dance. Dance. Dance!

I remember the first time someone told me about the Arcade Fire. I ignored her because she liked Guster, Moe and Fountains of Wayne. (Which, in my defense, might constitute an actual axis of evil.) But she also recommended the Arcade Fire, who have since won a Grammy and before that become Pitchfork darlings.

But. They have this song. This song is called Modern Man and it confounds me. It's a slow but steady buildup to the crescendo and just when I expect the singer to start losing his shit, they just neatly tie the whole thing down, like testing a hot air balloon for takeoff. I'm waiting for the band to cut the ropes on the song every time, but they never do. Anyway. Modern Man is also a song by Bad Religion. But this is not Bad Religion.

Eldritch Contract Law.

I've been reading a lot of Dresden Files recently and it got me to thinking, between sunbathing with John Rawls and sips of prosecco, that there exists a number of differences in fae contract law that are exploited repeatedly.

Also: Fae can be spelled fey. Or! Fey can be spelled fae, apparently. Additionally: If any readers are left, bravo. Contract law and fairies. If you keep going, you might deserve a Medal of Honor from the internet.

Point is. Fey (fae?) contract law (at least in Dresden Files) is almost exclusively oral, with few written components and most, if not all of the important terms and consequences knowingly obscured by murky language. It's like a deal with the devil. Except the devil is usually female, totally hot and has a court of labyrinthine motivations and aims to keep track of.

And, of course, this court of incredible, accessible power runs on misery, most of the time or at least an intractable web of lies, deceit and half-truths, lorded over by appallingly pretty women with petty worries and apocalyptic schemes. (Makes me wonder who wrote these stories and why.) Wayward, bumbling humans are the the gasoline on which this society runs, and through cunning use of incredibly high stakes and verbal trickery, this position is maintained.

(This is, in case there was ever any question, the opposite of the way any agreement should work.)

Fey bargaining is based, I think, on a loose system of "if I get you to say something when you're bent over a barrel, you're totally liable and I'm in the clear, I just offered you a deal," which we can shorten to bullshit. But supposing we can't shorten it to bullshit, the fae (yes, I'm going back and forth with the names) when pressed will say something to the effect of we had a deal, to which there is an obligation and a tie to that obligation.

Rawls, of course, says that that obligation and that tie presupposes just institutions, or institutions that are as just as can be, given the situation. But, even if we ignore the fey society, there's still one foundational point on contract law that the fae are missing: Informed consent.

Informed consent is basically what the fae contract law runs away screaming from. It means that basically meant to show that all parties agreeing have a minimum understanding of what the terms, consequences and facts are in the agreement, which has never historically been a strong point for fey bargaining. But informed consent is also a goddamned standard of any agreement ever, the basic point that people who are making agreements, need to know, on a deep level, what they are getting into, what they are giving up and what they are getting, which is a standard the fae don't tend to meet.

So: At least on earth, or an agreement signed to here, one would hope our laws apply and not theirs. And if our laws apply, well, their deals might be something you don't have an obligation to keep.

Thus: Here are some ways you can avoid fairy trickery.

1) Don't make deals.
2) No, seriously. Don't.
3) Repeat.
4) Vocalize, explicitly, using the most unequivocal words possible that you want to know exactly what you get and what you give up. And if they don't want to do that, you might know that you have a bad deal. (That said, few people make good deals with the fey.)
5) If you have already made a bargain with the fae, I'm sorry. You're deep in the hole. Try telling them your consent wasn't informed and force the issue. They're a stickler for rules. Maybe this'll help.




If you're reading this and you're involved with fey, then you might not want them reading over your shoulder. I'm not sure about all fae, but hardcore punk seems like it would be a little abrasive for them. Thus, This Is Hell's cover of 108's When Death Closes Your Eyes. Throw that in with some straightforward lyrics about hiding behind words, and well, I'm pretty sure they'll leave you alone. Good luck.

Justice, On A Timeline.

Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

A friend of mine has that tattooed on his arm and it's a cool idea. I'm for it. It's French, right? And it means something, yes? How much does it mean, though, when the country lets in dictators, like, recent ones. Mubarak is just the latest, yes? (Of course America engages in the same behavior. Wanted to make that clear.) I guess liberty must apply to former strongmen as well, but...it just seems so at odds with the motto of the country.

Of course: Every country is like that. Every country has its nasty secret, the things that undermine its greatest ambitions, the things that hold it back and the little deals made to keep it going. America's are obvious. Look at the history of the CIA and the little things agreed to in the name of the people of democracy become clear.

It's in Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, though that Rawls tries to tie into A Theory of Justice, saying that the liberty parallel is obvious, equality under the law and fraternity in the difference principle. And liberty for all, I guess, really means liberty for all, unless, say, you're Muslim and want to wear a hijab, but didn't these dictators kind of...say, by virtue of killing a lot of people, get their personhood card revoked? That's a thing.

And yet we're still treating them as people. Why? Because of what we're still doing now. Mubarak was an ally in the War On Terror. Camus didn't just die of a car crash, but a broken heart. Eastern Europe, I guess, is ocassionally happy to have our political prisoners to torture until they confess to murdering Santa Claus, or whatever their hosts want to hear them say. Eastern Europe tortured our prisoners so we could keep our hands clean. And probably still does.

And yet, even after reading Rucka's Private Wars, that has an intense scene about just this (and also about justice, later on, kind of), a recent book, I can still sit here and type about any kind of justice without laughing.

It would give Bolano something else to write about, if he wasn't already dead. Funnily enough, I finished By Night In Chile and it made me angry. I'll write about it for Friday.





Why Fall Out Boy's Grand Theft Autumn? None worth giving. I wanted to hear it again. I'm not sure what to make of the bits with the girl. I'm not quite sure of the politics. If you have a better idea than I do, comment!

Community. Buses.

I was on one of four buses on yesterday. Someone else's broke down on the highway about dinnertime. Lost a tire and in the dark, the drivers of my bus and the one with the lost tire scampered betwixt the traffic to find it.

Within a quarter of an hour, at least two people around me suggested the other three buses should leave. With the road service not arriving for 2+ hours, I tried not to think about what that would mean. It would mean abandoning an entire busload of people so three for every single one could make it back to the compound on time for dinner. It's not barbaric. It's not even cruel. It's...just without empathy or an understanding of what it means to be a community.

And that's not even strictly a utilitarian analysis. It avoids the question of how much it would cost the people left on their own on a bus in a place where they can't urinate or defecate for two hours while the lucky people get to carry on so they can get dinner. Let's not misplace my outrage. I'm sure, given enough of a timespan, I'd say to leave the bus. But it didn't even get to forty five minutes before people were talking about ditching their fellow travelers so they could be more comfortable while affixing more suffering to their fellow travelers. People they know! Maybe even like!

I know there's the joke about cannibalism that people resort to it too early, but seriously! Gimme 45 minutes. At least! That, apparently, is far too much to ask. It's disappointing. Are people really that selfish? I tried to convince myself, when I was on my hands and knees, cleaning up broken glass, at 7 a.m. yesterday morning, in the dark, that people really aren't that bad. It's harder to sustain that line of thinking when you're being insulted by the same guy whom you let in when he was interrupting your sleep 4 hours ago, cleaning up tiny pieces of glass, apparently too loudly.

Man, fuck that guy. And to be fair, there's a little bit of him in me, when I feel like being imperious and an asshole and who knows what the shit else. Of course, it's not for him that anyone is kind, right? They're kind and generous and patient because they want to be, feel like they're compelled to be, ought to be, or maybe, because they don't want to be like him or contribute to that.

I hope.



Songs For Teenagers seems appropriate here, if only for it's title. It's a great song in its own right, and if you look around on youtube for it, you'll find not only the original version by Florida's Fake Problems, but also a cover by The Gaslight Anthem. Enjoy.

Trapping Justice

Chapter 14 is about two different constructions/conceptions of justice. The one I'm focusing on, because I think it's more interesting is the idea of justice as purely procedural. This conception of it is something that makes justice seem less...divinely inspired.

Justice as a construct as best practices, constantly revised. Or in other words, improving by increments. We do not simply become more just by existing, we become more just by putting in place and keeping in place rules that reinforce justice, as we see it on the ground of 2011.

Justice becomes a kind of efficiency, unless equality is preferred. One part of justice becomes setting up a system and then trying to replicate the process. (Of course it can't work.) Justice not as an ideal, but a reflexive process. Maybe this is really basic stuff that I don't know because I never took a course on it, but the process as something evolving is new to me, when I'm forced to think about it.

There was a limited series comic called Cry For Justice. (It was terrible, and the rumor mill has it that DC editorial had their hands in it, contorting it, Twister-style.) The title gives off the idea that justice is something with a capital letter and that it's conferred upon something. And that's not quite right, according to what I believe the book to be saying.

Justice is what you make it. Maybe? Literally. If you make justice some cowboy western arithmetic, it's going to be cowboy western arithmetic. How much value that has is up to you. Justice is a product of the construction process. If you have more tools, it can be refined pretty far. Whether it's a good conception of justice or not, I don't know. But the idea sounds intriguing and feels fun to play around with. I think that's what this blog is for and it makes a pretty okay ending.



I saw Trap Them recently and they were wonderful. I describe them using a description from Greg Rucka's Private Wars. They're a IED slathered in rat poison. The rat poison is an anti-coagulant, which means that if someone is bleeding from the blast, the blood will not clot and they'll continue to bleed out. Trap Them sounds, on record, like that, with the anti-coagulant level of attention to detail.

They started off their set with Fucking Viva, which is a stellar opener. It's methodical and it builds in a way that lets you know there's so much nasty heavy coming. Fucking Viva opens the record it appears on with this line: So, in the rivers float your modern times and your alpha death decree. Ignore the alpha death decree part, for a moment since it makes explicit what's floating in the river.

What's important is that the record opens with the idea that modernity has a price and it's paid, brutally, in front of us. Modernity might be good for us in terms of justice, but Trap Them reminds us there's a price. Or: Think of Fucking Viva as the evil answer to We Will Rock You, which is another description that I got from somewhere else, but I can't remember where. Anyway. This is a metal band. Play loud and bang your head.

A Theory Of the Second Day of 2011.

Since I've finished 2666, this leaves a vacancy in the A Theory Of.... posts. This will be replaced, so far as I can tell, by Whatever The Hell it is That I'm Reading. So. One week it might be A Theory Of The Long War, another week it might be A Theory Of The Last Run and another it might be The Three Trillion Dollar Theory.

In short: A Theory Of Justice is in the title not because it's always going to be in the title, but it's one of the two formidable books I'm reading. Subsidized Sincerity being conceived in a moment of just do it and figure out how later, the idea of doing it is paramount. It might take a while to finish, but it's something I'm engaged in as opposed to not.

For Subsidized Sincerity, I should always be jumping in, head thrown forward proudly. (Or maybe just for the book posts.) I will, of course, smash my head on rocks. Hopefully, less often than I don't smash my head on rocks, but I'm reaching the end of this metaphor's range. I think hope it's clear what my idea here is: I'm going to say yes to big ideas. This figures into my next idea for 2011: Increments.

I don't like where I am and I know I have to change. I can't think myself to change, as Johnathan Hickman put it in Secret Warriors #23, I have to get up and fucking do it. But there's a mountain between where I am and where I want to be. And every time I think about the mountain, I think of how big it is and how small my steps are. That it's never going to work and I'll just sit here, again, eating chocolate covered pretzels or thinking about anything other than A Theory Of Justice or a book/author that intimidates me.

Instead, my counter-idea for 2011 is simply do it and keep doing it. It's easy to get depressed and nihilistic when I'm on page 71 of a 500+ page philosophy book, but by the same token, just a chapter a week. Or a chapter every couple days for weeks on end. The same goes for exercise. I don't have a goal. I just want to put one foot in front of another and repeat the process throughout 2011 and see where I am after this year.

So: Stick around. There will be a proper return to form here next week with full A Theory Of Justice bits, but the station ID stuff got so long that I think it's worth its own post.





I listened to this song walking home while the wind played with my hair. Utterly magical in an extremely comforting way. It wasn't even that cold, either! Happy new year.

Two Fuses

There's a passage from the chapter I read that says it all: "There are...many efficient arrangements of the basic structure...The problem is to choose between them."

There are different philosophies (or ordering theories) for how to do it, but necessarily better ways of going about those theories. At this point, that's about as far as I can go with A Theory of Justice. I've read the chapter, but I'm struggling to find something external to relate the lessons to. There's always politics, but I'm not quite caught up with the moves yet.

If I'm going to run my mouth about that, I can talk about how Obama is being strung out by two different camps, the news media and the centrists for not being bipartisan enough and then by the left for caving too much to the Republicans that will never give him anything. In the case of the extension of the full Bush tax cuts, I'm conflicted.

The GOP said they wouldn't sign anything without a promise that the full Bush tax cuts would be extended and for a whole week, it looked like the Democrats were going to fight it. Krugman was leading the chest beating, saying if they say no, just let the tax cuts expire, all of them, even the ones for the rest of the goddamn country and make the Republicans explain what their obstructionism cost the American people.

Which, for the record, makes a lot of sense to me, because fuck 'em, that's all they've been doing over the past two years. Then, Bill Clinton shows up with Obama saying that the tax cuts have to go through, the country needs it and we can't be pulling this brinksmanship garbage. Well, shit. He's a smart guy and is in no position to have to step out with Obama on anything. Maybe I've been playing too much political football and not enough seeing the wider picture.

Well, the tax cuts will probably go through and we'll still have a huge deficit, as opposed to one that was hacked into a little if the full tax cuts weren't passed. But. If the Democrats have capitulated on this, then I hope they'll use this opportunity to force votes on repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell and acting on a number of their other bafflingly large agenda for the lame duck Congress.

Now, finally to the point: There are two narratives and only two narratives. It goes between Obama not being bipartisan. He addresses that and the next day, he's being blasted for caving too quickly. When Obama turns to address that, trying to use compromise to achieve his goals, he's blasted for caving too quickly. They're burning Obama at two fuses and frankly, I hope he can keep it together for another term.

He can choose whichever, but there's better and worse ways to go about either, qualitatively and otherwise. I just hope he can figure out what they are, because, hell, I'm a leftist liberal and I'd like things that seem moral no-brainers like 9/11 responders health care coverage and the DADT repeal not to be held up much longer.

It's things like that which make me wonder: Is there really any justice and Rawls reminds me, no, not unless we work for it.

When I'm aggravated politically, I turn to the Suicide File, who wrote one of the, if not the, definitive political song of the Bush years, Ashcroft. ("If what it boils down to/is that you're either for us or against us/well, I guess I've got a tough, tough choice to make," is how Ashcroft OPENS. Yes.) They wrote it, in 2002, before it was clear just how fucked the United States was. That guitar riff will be in your head for the rest of your life. Have fun with it.

That they broke up before they could come up with a second full length of material, in the dark, dark heart of the Bush years, when we needed it most is tragic. Well, not really tragic, but sad at least, because I can only imagine how they would have been inspired by Bush's second term. It turns out that Ashcroft was one of the sane voices in the room on some matters, which, speaks volumes about the administration and runaway cabinet. Anyway. Ashcroft live. It's fun.

One Part Monday, One Part Everything After

"Injustice, then, is simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all."

There's more of the meat of A Theory of Justice, but I'm struck by the consiseness of that sentence. Look at it again. It carries a couple ideas, that inequalities are things that are unevenly distributed and can be discussed as something that benefits people. Injustice as a benefit. Huh. It happens all of the time in cities and in places we don't care to pay attention, but stated outside of a context of a particular injustice, it resonates even more with me.

It's only after I grew up that I'm even thinking in the process of inequality as as a possible positive. And here I am trying to dissect a single sentence of injustice years after the fact. Bad things happen, this is a part of life, but, when they're done to benefit a specific party, therein lies the injustice.

It's a sentence that clarifies conflicts. Not what happened, but why, to whom and for what? Who profits, but years later. Injustice as a thing that can be calculated, almost real, like an element. Injustice that straightforwardly expressed. At 530ish pages of words, brevity isn't Rawls' strong suit, but it's hard for me to understate the force inherent in the economy of that sentence.

That sentence meant to be the culmination of a bunch of philisophical steps, but it also works as a statement of purpose. It's the kind of thing I wish I could write.




No dance music this time: Thursday's cover of the Buzzcocks' Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't Have?) There was one day, when I was young, I ended up playing this song on Rock Band 2 with the other side of a love triangle I was in. I played "guitar", he sang (his range is really impressive), the girl watched. There's bitter moments in my life that make me smile. That one was magical.

On A Monday

I got a bee in my bonnet about the kids talking about Fight Club like it was some incredibly deep shit. I, of course, am pretty sure there is nothing new under the sun.

Fight Club is to philosophy as Rent is to musicals. That is to say, it's an introduction that smarmy self-proclaimed independent thinkers use to say that they know the genre while having experienced nothing else. Okay. Seriously, Rent is saccharinely melodramatic but well-intentioned. Hell: The bad guy in the production is called Coffin. As for Fight Club, track this: think of every person that mentions Tyler Durden, ask yourself: have they gone further, or do they all love that quote "self-improvement is masturbation?" Yes, in short, I care, far, far more about where they go once they've seen these things.

Yes, I'm judgmental.

I'm in philosophy. It goes with the territory. I didn't get into this so I could hide behind something. I got into this so I could run my mouth. And thus, I'm going to talk about chapters seven, eight and nine of A Theory of Justice. Chapter seven, entitled Intuitionism (which I initially thought was institutionism) is about how people decide between competing ideas. of, for example, balancing equality and total welfare when talking about justice. As Rawls explains: put total welfare on the x axis and equality on the y axis, and put a generic upper left to downward right curve on it and we're off. He uses the phrases indifference curve and ceteris paribus, the second of which might be my favorite piece of latin since quid pro quo motherfucker.

Put two non-intersecting indifference curves on there and it's a neat visual way of representing two different ways of viewing justice. (You can have a great amount of total welfare unevenly distributed over a given number of people that might mathematically be equal but be unworkable otherwise.) Obviously, the further to the top left one goes, the better the theory is, since it balances equality and total welfare in a way that maximizes both better.

Rawls then speaks about intuitionists, and how they would agree that such a mathematical proof exist, there are not "constructive moral criteria" to help define it in real world terms. He says that the way to defeat the theory is to show that the constructive moral criteria exists. This leads into chapter eight, of how to solve the priority problem. Rawls posits the lexicographical order of principles, a not so complex system that puts principles like links in a chain. Each new principle must hold the principles before it.

He favors the lexicographical order insomuch as it helps indicate the larger structures and conceptions of justice, not that it's a perfect fit. He acknowledges in chapter nine, that nothing is perfect and everything is flawed, but we end up judging by how often the theory is correct versus how often it is flawed.

I mean, yes, I was attracted to philosophy because of the phrase no answers and about how everything is flawed, but up until this point, I never had a real good conception of what that meant. I think in RPG terms. I'll explain. I think in terms of games and statistics and there's always one best, most powerful piece of armor or weapon that is the best fit for whatever class you're going for. A trinket that is most perfect above all other things, and maximizes all of the statistics more evenly than anything else.

That doesn't exist here. The whole book is about working towards it, but Rawls admits: "justice as fairness moves us closer to the philosophical ideal; it does not; of course, achieve it." I'm used to searching for the special, special drop of some benevolent designer, which would appear only if the right things were maximized or minimized. Here, though, it's admitting that I'm never going to get there. Ever. Even more damning: "It is obviously impossible to develop a substantive theory of of justice founded solely on the truths of logic and definition."

Well...shit. That's not a sexy thing to admit in a book called A Theory of Justice, man. And that, simply put, is why I'm still attracted to philosophy today.





Blaqk Audio's Cex Cells was a CD that I heard about when I first heard about it, I liked only one of the singles from it and more or less forgot about it, except for Semiotic Love. I found it again last night and am liking On A Friday, a song about dancing in clubs. Oh! Right! Blaqk Audio is Jade Puget and Davey Havok from AFI doing electronic music. It's fun and not close to the AFI canon. (I've been dancing with strangers for all of my life, sings Davey, and it's hard to tell whether that's him talking about his day job or dancing in clubs on his own.)

If you couldn't already tell from dropping Katy Perry in one of the other ...Justice posts, I have a fondness for putting dance songs next to Rawls for the purpose of a little sugar with the medicine and subverting the austerity and academic nature of philosophy with songs about nothing more (and nothing less) than dancing and pretty people you're attracted to.

Not quite nihilism, but certainly a counter-argument to the all-encompassing and dead sober nature of judgments, principles and the original position. It's not that nothing matters, but instead that dancing with people, correctly articulated, has demonstrable, meaningful worth.

If You're Looking For a Patsy...

There's a comment at the end of chapter...5 of A Theory of Justice, which I think...well. Here's the best and worst part about utilitarianism: Utilitarianism does not take seriously the difference between persons. That, for Nietzsche, is kind of important.

In glib terms the difference is basically, between a single human being and dudes, generally. Or, in even more glibly: What I'm calling the inverse ninja theory. One ninja is a terrifying, unseen menace that can kill and destroy without sound at terrifying speeds. One hundred ninjas are chumps.

I can't put it any clearer: the difference between people returning passports and stealing from mom and pop stores, the difference between Toshiro Mifune and, uhhhhh, me. En masse, people are really goddamn stupid. 100 million Bon Jovi fans can't be wrong, quoth one ad campaign. On their own, people can be shockingly prescient and fun to spend time with. The difference between people in aggregate and people as persons. The difference between people, anonymously, and persons, individually.

(Note now that Anonymous is a whole other breed and could easily be its own philosophical post. Hrm. Can I do that? I mean, I can, but, if I stop doing Theory of Justice explicitly now...what was it? Breaking a rule is only hard the first time. Yeah. Not 'till I'm done.)

Of course, the difference between people could be terribly little. But it's unknown or, at least, not easily converted into math. The math is what utilitarianism is based on, the idea that good and bad can be boiled down and added up, according not just to number of people but sheer volume of good or bad to all parties.

Nietzsche, of course, would have a heart attack. That individual spark, he believes is the last hope for human beings caught up in the gigantic, globe spanning system.

Today, the best example of people trying to get out of a globe spanning system, or at least one that leaps to mind quickly, is the Tea Party. Their philosophy boils down to less government means more freedom. Everything else spins out of that. They're scared, basically, of the idea that citizens need government to protect them from forces beyond the control of the citizens and believe that by returning to the practices of a time when the world was less connected, it will better insulate the United States. It won't, of course.

But together, they're reduced to pathetic caricatures with lots to talk about, but nothing to say in crazy costumes. Maybe they'd be better when taken individually, I think Niezstche would hope. Utilitarians would throw it out and seeing as one of their primary politicians is not clear on where the American Constitution talks about the separation of Church and State, I think the joke might finally be on Nietzsche.


Bad Religion's Better Off Dead is a song that's almost certainly about a failed relationship now becoming poisonous, but it's applicability here is in one line: If you're looking for a patsy, why not try the entire human race? Otherwise, it's a fantastic punk song, with a chorus that centers around the bitter lyric "the next time I create the universe...". It's under three minutes. It rips. Press play already.

The Justice in Burning Houses?

One of the ideas I read in A Theory of Justice recently was something to the effect of "[The theory] enables one to distinguish what is good from what is right." I was trying to come up with a way to apply that and found nothing. Not a thing and then I remembered something I read earlier on today and I suddenly, I was saved. Here we go.

First things first. All of the facts I'm dropping are according to a Mother Jones article, viewable here.

I'm not sure how I avoided this juicy little tidbit until now. Apparently, a fire department truck in Obion County, TN, showed up to the scene of a burning building (the Cranick's), then watched it burn. On the face of it, that sounds horrible. A fire department is there to help people and save each other from drastic harm from fire. It's insulting, outrageous and unthinkable. This feels wrong on a gut level. The emotion I felt was disgust when I read the story.

Then the details come out.

Turns out the county doesn't offer a fire service and contracts out with the nearest town, South Fulton to provide one. South Fulton's fire department is subsidized by tax dollars, but where the Cranick's lived did not pay those taxes, but instead the county had an agreement with the town, that for $75 a year, the town's trucks would come out to Obion County. The Cranick's didn't pay the fee, and so calls that went to the fire department went unanswered.

Which, reading that last sentence, sounds horrible. It's callous. The fire department only responded when the fire reached the neighbors', a family who had paid the fee. Still, it feels ridiculous. The fire department sat back and watched it burn, because the guy hadn't paid a fee? That's unconscionable.

Well, the county did have a proposal in 2008 to raise funds to converge all the county fire departments and extend service to the county, by raising property taxes less than 1%, a meter tax increase or a subscription service. In short: the Cranicks knew they weren't covered in the case of fire by the county, and then refused a $75 annual fee to be covered by the city closest to them in the case of a fire. When the fire in the Cranick's began to endanger the nearby house which had paid the $75 fee, the fire department did show up to protect their house.

When asked why he didn't pay the nominal fee, Gene Cranick said: "I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong." So: The family chose not to insure their property, and then when the thing they didn't have coverage for happened, they called up the fire department and the fire department had to tell them no, they hadn't paid the $75 annual fee, they weren't coming.

From other news reports, it doesn't sound like anyone was in the house when it was on fire, in which case the fire department probably would have responded, regardless of whether the Cranicks paid their fee or not. But, it's not good that the fire department came to the scene of the fire and watched, but it was the right thing to do. It proves a couple points:

1) If persons want play the odds on whether your house will catch fire and save $75 a year, they can, bug ought not to complain when the odds don't come out like they expect.
2) The fire department needs to be able to count on a set amount of money every so often to function. Paying as you go doesn't work for something that needs a lot of equipment and expertise at a constant state of readiness.
3) No, seriously, this is why disaster coverage exists, and perhaps ought to be impossible to opt out of, because no one plans for their house to catch fire.

The media gets a eye-popping headline out of this by painting the Cranick family as the only aggrieved party here, but really, the South Fulton Fire Department made a really tough call. They didn't want to be taken advantage of in a situation where no human lives were at risk. That doesn't make anybody evil and it certainly doesn't make the firefighters scum.



I'm not sure why it took me this long to use Auto Tune the News (it is exactly what it advertises itself to be) here, but the chorus of "it's the smoke, it's the smoke" works well here. It's not political so much as silly. Well, Senator Junkie Einstein begs to differ, but that's another story. Enjoy.

Me and John Rawls Down By the Schoolyard

Titles aren't always great. Sorry.

Much of what I read was preface. Someone said it takes a philosopher a couple paragraphs to clear their throat and there's at least 10 pages of throat clearing before the main feature starts. Admittedly, it's an explanation of the changes made for the 1999 revision of the book published in 1971.

And, honestly, it's kind of impenetrable to me. I don't think I got as far as the parts that were revised, so I can't tell where a difference was made. The preface also sees Rawls talking about the changes he would have made to the book had he written it now, which include Chapters II and III. As an editor, it almost makes me want to scream. If a book is going to be reissued, especially in the case of a book that has a shadow like a crater in Hiroshima, then give the author the opportunity to revise it completely.

Then I look again at the reissue date: 1999. Printers and word processing programs were not as ubiquitous as they are now. And even if they were, maybe it was too much work for the aging Rawls. There might not be enough hours in the day for him to devote to a revision that sizable. It might not even be the same book.

In the words of my spiritual adviser, X-Man Bobby Drake, that's probably a thing, right?

(Then again, when the first edition of the book has a printing for the sole and express purpose of students seeing what mistakes were made in it, there's a precedent set.)

On a third hand, just doing a book with a word processor is hard enough, let alone a 500+ page tome where you need to connect every goddamn dot, leave no link in the chain unattached and do so when word processing programs and computers are only really coming into not exclusively techy use. Shit, this book that has not just defined its field, but made an entire other one in critical commentary, was written on a fucking typewriter, if not by hand.

Think about that. Now think harder. I can't even write 50 pages on Word without changing topics, so writing 500+ on a typewriter or by hand is as foreign to me as our favorite extra-terrestrial, Galactus, Devourer of Worlds. And, it's not like their jobs or responsibilities go away when they're writing, unless they've got grants. Sorry, this idea is mindblowing. I'm writing this on a word processor, with like 4 printers within a 45 second walk. How do you even review a chapter, just to cast another eye on it?

Anyway, the book get to the thesis pretty quickly: Justice as a social scheme, is to be understood as how rights and privileges are distributed. This would be arrived at from the original position, a position that sees people, without knowing how they would fare in the lotteries of birth, ordering a society. Rawls believes it is reasonable for human beings to protect the downside, to use a colloquialism, if they don't know how life is going to turn out.

It's called the veil of ignorance. From behind that veil, Rawls believes that human beings would freely and rationally choose to order a society where the minimum standard is as high as possible, because he believes they'll believe the odds are they're gonna be near it. I'm only four chapters into it, but the idea that jumps out to me is that this presupposes a level of education between all parties that may not be equal.

Aside from that, I don't have much else to say about the first four chapters. I'm a B.A., and this all makes sense to me, with enough re-readings. I'm capable of synthesizing and analyzing information, but...damnit. I don't want to sell myself short here, but this is a stone cold classic that makes a bit of sense at least in the first four chapters. I mean, sure, one could choose to gamble and argue that the baseline should be set lower, with more opportunity to accumulate wealth and advantages. But that's a point other people made that I read about.

That is the point of this feature, to go and see what, if anything I find, synthesizing regularly. 2666 next week! Somehow, that's the easier book to read. Who knew?

I've been listening to Katy Perry's song Teenage Dream non-stop. Here it is, to stand, happily in defiance of the super-abstract and unfun Rawls. Love the dissonance, folks.