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    • Death and Taxes: The Real Story Behind Tennessee’s Electric Chair

      Yesterday, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed a bill to bring back the electric chair as the default method of execution, should lethal injection drugs become unavailable or unconstitutional. While the first version of the bill restricted its application to death sentences issued after July 2014, a last-minute amendment lifted this restriction, making it applicable to those who are currently on death row. Theoretically, this means that we could be facing an execution by electrocution in Tennessee as early as Oct. 7, when Billy Irick is scheduled to be killed.

      It is tempting to decry this return to the electric chair as a “barbaric” lapse into brutal forms of violence that do not befit a democratic nation such as the United States. It is also tempting to affirm this legislation as a more “truthful” display of what is really going on when the state kills, and to hope that the unconcealment of state violence will lead to more vigorous opposition. But it’s not at all clear that more truth leads to more activism, nor that brute violence is incompatible with US democracy.

      In order to understand what’s happening in Tennessee – and in other states that are currently going out of their way to kill people, such as Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Utah – we must move beyond moral discourses on the death penalty and trace the material, political connections between state violence, economic inequality, and white supremacy in the United States.

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    • The Problem of Captured Attention

      Readers of the Brains blog might know about a symposium there concerning a paper by Philipp Koralus. In his commentary on the paper, Felipe de Brigard mentions the problem of captured attention: 

      "I have a hard time understanding how ETA may account for involuntary attention. Suppose you are focused on your task—reading a book at the library, say—and you hear a ‘bang’ behind you. A natural way of describing the event is to say that one’s attention has been involuntarily captured by the sound. Now, how does ETA explain this phenomenon?"

      Koralus' response is binary: 

      "So, you might have been asking, as part of your task of reading the blog, 'What does the blog say?' Now, you are getting the incongruent and irrelevant answer 'There’s a loud noise behind you.' There are now two possibilities, similar to what happens in the equivalent case in a conversation. One possibility is that you accommodate the answer, adopting a new question (and thereby a new task) to which 'There’s a loud noise behind you' would be a congruent answer, maybe, 'what sort of thing going on behind me?…You could also refuse to be distracted and then exercise some top-down control on your focus assignment to bring it back to something that’s relevant to your task.'

      When I coined "the problem of captured attention" in my 2012 Synthese paper, "The Subject of Attention" (not cited by Koralus/de Brigard), I took a similar line, but focused on the activity of the subject, rather than on questions and answers:

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    • On friends and lovers

      One of the most frustrating things about getting married in the United States is that for two days you are surrounded by all of these old friends, but then with all the preparations and whatnot you have no time to have decent conversations with any of them.

      I used to think this was a significant bug, that if we were going to persist in moving our domiciles across such a huge country, then marriages should last at least a week, enough time to get a couple of meals alone with old friends. But now I'm wondering if not having enough time is a feature.

      When you've lived long enough and moved enough times you start to get walloped by affective connections withering away.

      It's just weird. You can maintain intensely warm regard for a person you haven't seen in years yet when you get a chance to share space again find yourselves struggling to know what to say next. What happened? Sometimes alcohol and other people being there can help. But sometimes that doesn't even work very well. The distance between what was and what remains is painful.

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    • Prostitution and drugs to be included in Italian GDP

      Since deficit limits in the Euro zone are indexed to GDP, Italy will "boost" its economy by including drugs, prostitution and smuggling in the calculation of its gross domestic product.   Story here.

       

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘É uma partida de futebol’

      In a few weeks, the football World Cup will start in Brazil, so in the coming weeks I will be posting a few football-themed songs. Don’t worry: I will not be posting the monstrosity that is the official theme song (with Pitbull & co. — I refuse to put the link up). I will focus instead on some classics about football in Brazilian music.

      Some may recall that the World Cup in Brazil has been surrounded by controversy, especially with the truly astonishing amount of money that seems to have gone into the construction of the stadiums. But like it or not, it will happen, so we may as well get ready for it. 

      Let me start with ‘É uma partida de futebol’ (1996) by the pop/ska band Skank (I’ve posted about them before). Both the song and the video nicely convey the fanatic, euphoric approach to football among fans in Brazil, with lots of footage from actual matches and the supporters; so quite a treat for football fans!

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    • Still more on Neil deGrasse Tyson – philosophy and biology, too

      M. Anthony Mills has a very nice reply to Neil deGrasse Tyson's dismissal of philosophy.  Among the points he makes, Mills notes:

      Helmholtz, Mach, Planck, Duhem, Poincaré, Bohr, and Heisenberg are a few noteworthy modern scientists “distracted” enough to engage in philosophical question-asking. Einstein himself read philosophy voraciously beginning from an early age (he read Kant when he was 13) and engaged in lively disputes with many leading philosophers of the era. Mach’s empiricism, Poincaré’s conventionalism, and Duhem’s holism all influenced Einstein’s thinking. Such cross-pollination between philosophy and science did not stall the progress of physics, but instead led to one of the greatest scientific revolutions in history.

      Lest we think that only noteworthy modern physicists engaged in philosophical question-asking with actual philosophers, let me point out some noteworthy modern biologists who have done likewise — a list off the top of my head, so no doubt missing some (and thus, please feel free to add names in the comments).  And to be clear, I am citing here only some of the most famous ones — there are many less famous ones who have nonetheless had important and influential (in both directions) exchanges with philosophers.

      • Michael Ghieselin – nature of species, sexual selection, and more
      • Stephen Jay Gould – importance of constraints, contingency, species selection, adaptationism, and more
      • Eva Jablonka – epigenetic inheritance and more
      • Richard Lewontin – fitness, natural selection (especially levels of selection), adaptationism, and more
      • Ernst Mayr – concepts of species, nature of speciation, and more
      • Joan Roughgarden – natural selection, social selection (different from MW's), and more
      • Mary Jane West-Eberhard – development, social selection (different from JR's), and more

      In other words, biologists and philosophers have had productive exchanges about important biological concepts, theories, processes, and (although I haven't emphasized it here) methods.

    • Pity the nicotine addict

      10341757_785651334802934_8978077757976073462_nI don't mind people smoking outside, but as one of the 15-20% of the population psychologists are now calling "highly sensitive"* I do find gum chewing incredibly distracting.**

       So this doesn't look good. All the nicotine addicts at LSU are going to walk around furiously chomping little pieces of rubber with their mouths open. Some percentage of them will do that thing where you make the gum snap, irritating even the lowly sensitive people.*** I'll be hiding out in my office blaring FIDLAR.

      On this gum business, it's really weird that the ban will apply to e cigarettes, but not to nicotine gum, even though nicotine gum doesn't really help people quit. The second weird thing there's no enforcement mechanism:

      The policy doesn’t exactly have teeth. Campus police won’t be able to write tickets for smoking, and leaders acknowledge that it will be more of a recommendation to campus visitors and tailgating football fans.

      But Sylvester said she hopes the campus community will take on the role of self-policing to stamp out tobacco.

      “We’re definitely going to use the social-norming approach,” she said. “Seventy percent of us do not use any kind of tobacco products. We are the norm, not the tobacco user.”

      So at best you are going to get all these busy bodies telling people "you can't smoke here," and smokers patiently explaining that actuality implies possibility as they continue to puff away. I don't see this ending well.

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    • Sextus Empiricus and Virtue Theory

      I may be missing something, but I really cannot see much out there about the virtue ethics as informed by Sextus Empiricus. I find this at least a little surprising since it would not be terribly controversial to suggest that we can look at Montaigne or Nietzsche as contributors to virtue theorist in ethics; and equally it would not be terribly controversial to suggest they have sceptical ideas, which draw on the antique tradition of Pyrrhonism. It is certainly not controversial to identity Pyrrhonism as an antique form of scepticism, which culminates in the writings of Sextus Empricus,writings some suspect to be repetitions or compilations of a previous Pyrrhonic philosopher, or some multiplicity of such thinkers.

      Whatever the truth of any of that, Sextus is what we have as the name associated with a set of full length writings from the ancient world concerning scepticism.  What he offers is not the abstract  speculation on possible doubts, unengaged with any possible alternative, which some (including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) have associated unfavourably with modern scepticism. Like antique philosophy in general, the Sextus texts are concerned with the good life, which  includes a properly conducted life of thought and intellectual doubt. That is to say a life of thought and intellectual doubt can only be considered a good life, rather than a loss of the goods of human life, if it is itself part of happiness and a life lived well as a whole. Still the unity of that whole seems less obvious than it would without Pyrrhonian interrogation. 

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    • What’s the point of just apologizing?

      It would be nice if the suits at N.Y.U. had some cultural exposure to the Christian tradition (or even AA), where a confession is supposed to include at least attempted resolve not to do the same kind of thing and to make things better. Andrew Ross gets this:

      “Apologizing to the workers is a good thing to do, but the university should use its resources and leverage to change the system that created the abuses,” said Andrew Ross, a professor at N.Y.U.’s New York campus and a leader of Coalition for Fair Labor, a student-faculty group that has called for better worker treatment. “N.Y.U. could help to ensure that all Saadiyat Island workers have a living wage, debt relief and the right to organize.”

      . . .Ramkumar Rai, a Nepali immigrant who worked on the N.Y.U. campus until a year ago, told The Times that he and a friend were still waiting for the last six months’ of his wages, which were 16 months overdue. Told of the apology, he asked, “When will the money come? If the money comes it will be O.K.”

      This makes as much sense as the embedded song above.* We're really sorry, and we're not going to do anything at all to rectify the situation? Why would you think that unless you really felt that there was nothing you could have done about the problem? But then why apologize at all?

      [*Upon hearing it, poor John Lennon realized that side two of Abbey Road (mixed by McCartney and Martin) was really the first Wings album (not withstanding the fact that Sun King, Mean Mr. Mustard, and Polythene Pam were his).]

    • another bit of 80s nostalgia

      This song so easily could have been an outtake from Seven and the Ragged Tiger. It has all of the hall-marks of that era Duran Duran: quasi-religious lyrics, insanely catchy chorus, O.K. verse, and not very good bridge. There's even visual shout-outs in the video to that terrible 80's Patrick Nagel aesthetic many of us associate with Duran Duran.

      I think Arcadia was the singer, keyboard player, and drummer's message to the bass and guitar player that if they wanted to keep making crap music with Power Station,* the rest of the band could keep doing this thing without them.

      The band actually got back together after that and has had its ups and downs in the succeeding decades, but they did a more than creditable job of soldiering through the grunge era with no love from the record labels they had enriched. There's a very good chance that a Tarantino or Aranofsky protagonist will praise them in a future film, and that they (sans guitarist) will be playing at a casino near you sometime soon. 

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