President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Personally I think the only thing more disheartening to discuss than a bunch of lawyers working in politics is to discuss a bunch of lawyers working in politics arguing about which lawyer to pick for the Supreme Court.

However, Judge Sotomayor apparently made some comments that have Conservatives arguing that she views her role as a Supreme Court Justice would be to represent the Hispanic community instead of legislating objectively. I could care less about whether the Conservatives are right about Ms Sotomayor, but I think it does bring up an interesting philosophical question. Immanuel Kant wrote a whole big chapter about how ideally people will have a public and private self. In private you can believe whatever you want, but in public you are forced to interact with other people and therefore your beliefs and arguments have to guided by reason, which is something everyone in the public sphere shares.

So here’s the question, is that public v private identity even possible? Can someone like Ms Sotomayor but her Latina heritage or upbringing completely behind her when she acts a judge? John Rawls, a devoted Kantian, thought that the only way to come up with a valid social contract was to create a society that could be agreed upon behind the veil of ignorance. Behind this veil you know nothing about who you are so you would create laws that are just toward everyone. It is an excellent idea, but how feasible is it? (As an aside, I wrote a bunch of stuff about how I think Rawls is actually overrated because he ultimately contradicts himself and his theory sort of falls apart. But I’m in the minority in that opinion.)

Set up on the other side of the Rawls/Kant spectrum on this issue are Communitarians who think that you identity is wholly caught up in all these little variables that you experienced. Put simply, if you were born somewhere else or in a different time or even just had or didn’t have certain experiences; you’d be an entirely different person. The most ardent of the Communitarians believe that you are totally defined by your particular experiences and that’s called being ‘radically situated’. I tend to think that you aren’t radically situated, but your personal experiences do in fact have an impact on who you are and who you become. Therefore, Judge Sotomayor can’t be entirely objective as a judge; no one could. She would make different decisions if she’d grown up as a white man in Oklahoma.

The goal, in my opinion, is to try and be as objective as possible when operating in the public sphere. But that’s just my opinion so let me know what you think about being radically or slightly situated by your unique personal experiences and whether or not anyone can be objective and what that means for the public sphere.

I was watching Real Time with Bill Maher for the first time in a long time last night and he mentioned that people were arguing about President Obama’s sort of secular humanistic approach to politics as well as the supposed defeat and marginalization of Christianists (by Christianists I mean people who aren’t just Christians, they actively try to have their value set imposed or implemented by the government). He concluded that we were entering a Post-Christian America. Allegedly, this is becoming a popular little phrase, post-Christian America or society, but I’d never heard of it until Bill Maher said it. Whether I’m out of the loop or this is actually not as popular a phrase or idea was Bill would have me believe, I have a problem with this idea and I think it raises some good questions so here we go:

Is Bill Maher reading Way too much into this? He makes it out like President Obama is only religious because he couldn’t get elected if he didn’t pretend to be a church-goer. Bill’s convinced that President Obama is at least agnostic and possibly an atheist like Bill. While I wouldn’t put it past any politician to fake religion in order to get elected, I’m not buying in the case of President Obama. My impression is that the President is religious; he just knows that part of living in a diverse democracy requires that you not govern by rules that are justified by faith instead of reason.

Given that, I have to wonder what exactly is meant by “Post-Christian Society”? Does it mean a society that is, as Bill would desire, intellectually beyond the ‘silly’ tenets of a faith based morality? Or does it mean, to return to my impression of the President, that it’s a society in which people remain religious but acknowledge that diversity and multiculturalism dictate that faith cannot be legitimately used as the basis for governing because it will only garner consensus among the faithful but fail to cross those parochial boundaries? In other words, if you are Catholic and someone tells you there is a law and the reason for it is based on Islam or Buddhism or even a different brand of Christianity you won’t consent to the law and a law without general consent is invalid.

Ok, those are the two smaller points. Now here’s my main, and lengthier point. If you can’t be bothered to read this longer part that’s cool, just drop in any thoughts on the smaller points. If you can read the following one person self debate I hope you find it interesting enough to respond (even if it’s just to say, ‘Trey, you are a hell-bound idiot’). Here goes:

First of all, I think the idea that Bill is trying to make is ridiculous in the sense that even if President Obama were an atheist, which, just to be clear, I’m pretty sure he isn’t, he’s actually the political equivalent of a religious figure. The reason Bill dislike religion is that it’s based on faith and faith is necessarily improvable. It’s a little frustrating when you’re trying to argue with someone that so faithful that they go for all that Biblical inerrancy and whatnot, but it’s also kind of beautiful. I mean if you could prove God’s existence, what would be the point? The fact that you have to make a leap of faith makes it meaningful and something that I find interesting, beautiful, and valuable. However, it, in my opinion, also makes religion separate from rational pursuits. Note that while I think it’s separate, I’m not saying it is less important or less valuable than reasoned and rational pursuits.

In college I took a class called Philosophy of Science where we read this book by Ian Barbour called When Science Meets Religion. Basically the book tried to decide if religion and science were totally compatible, totally incompatible, somewhat compatible or just plain separate things. Barbour tries to argue that they are somewhat compatible but does so unconvincingly. What I took away is that religion proposes to answer the really large ‘why’ questions like “why are we here”, and science then goes about figuring out the ‘how’, as in “how did we get here” (hint: evolution). The problem is that the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ often get conflated. Overly religious people tend to think the ‘how’ is out to get the ‘why’, while overly anti-religious people insist that the ‘how’ negates the ‘why’. Furthermore, religion goes on to assert meanings whereas science is solely concerned with facts. I’d argue that this prevents productive dialogue between religion and science because they are simply asking different questions and each tends to overreact to the other. Barbour would disagree with me because he thinks a dialogue can exist between religion and science. I’ll admit that religion does initially overlap with science in the largest sense, but after that they’re pretty much just two different pursuits. Science can’t tell you how to live your life, but it can tell you how the stuff around you works whereas religion can’t explain the mechanics of things (and often incorrectly explains how things work) but can (allegedly) explain the meaning of these complicated workings.

I know that seems off topic, but the connection is that I think politics and religion are just like science and religion, two separate entities. I’m not saying that politicians can’t be religions just like it’s absurd to think that scientists can’t be religious, but I am saying that ideally politics is based solely on reason because the ability to reason is the only thing that connects people universally. We can all reason no matter what religions we subscribe too. Logic requires that we use factually proven premises to deductively or inductively arrive at conclusions that derived from the initial premise. For example: all bachelors are unmarried men is factually true and from that premise we can observe the fact that I am an unmarried male and logically concluded that I am a bachelor (If A then B, A is true, therefore B is true). Religion has to start with the presumed assumption that God exists and holds the basic tenets of your chosen religion. So it’s an ‘if A, then B’ sort of logical statement but the “A” in that series is not provable; it’s that initial leap of faith and not everyone is going to make that leap of faith or maybe they’ll make a different leap of faith. Hence, you can only justifiable assert logical arguments based on factually provable premises if you are to gain legitimate consent across a diverse society.

Getting back to Bill Maher, the point that Bill misses is that President Obama doesn’t get us closer to that ideal situation; he continues to move us further away from it. President Bush openly informed his governing decisions based on his religious beliefs, which obviously not everyone shared. What President Obama does is more covert but just as empowered by faith instead of reason. The entire Obama campaign was “Hope” and “Change We Can Believe In” and people bought that because ultimately people are suckers for the idea that tomorrow will be better. Religion promises that after all the shit of this life you get rewarded in the afterlife. Obama promised that once he was President, everything would change. In each of those two scenarios you’re going solely on faith; faith that there is an afterlife or faith that things actually can be changed. So supporters of President Bush would say, ‘well he’s right to do what he’s doing because he’s informed by his faith (which they shared)’, and supporters of President Obama say, ‘he’s right to do what he’s doing because he’s trying to implement the change we can all believe in’.

Maybe I’m too much of a cynic, but the idea that President Obama could achieve any sort of meaningful political change even if he wanted too (and let’s face, he’s not going to get rid of a lot of negative things because those negative things keep you in power and everyone, Democrat or Republican, does what it takes to stay in power) is a giant leap of faith. I mean think about all the problems we have and then tell me it is entirely rational to think that someone could fix all that crap in 4 or 8 years while dealing with a bunch of self serving politicians, bureaucrats and advisors. Isn’t it true that at the end of the day it takes a substantial leap of faith to think that President Obama is the answer to this country’s problems? Aren’t we deifying him and then using that leap of faith to justify rational arguments that follow from that presumed premise?

So isn’t the idea of a Post-Christian Society patently absurd insomuch as we’ve just replaced religious faith with a Presidential cult of personality faithfulness? Isn’t Bill deriding one non-rational justification for another, more undercover brand of non-rational justification.

What’s the point in all this anti-AIG economic populism? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for good old fashion class warfare, but at the end of the day what is all this anger going to accomplish? The bonuses the AIG people got were contractually guaranteed so there is no legal recourse against them so really all that can be accomplished is shaming the people who got the bonuses in order to get them to voluntarily give the money back. But doesn’t that miss the larger point?

Who in the hell gets a bonus worth tens of millions of dollars? And who has that bonus contractually enshrined? And who missed this fact when they gave AIG bailout money? And doesn’t this issue undercut President Obama’s decision to bail out these people and those of their ilk in the first place and make it essentially impossible for the administration to got back and ask for more bail out money, which is something that will almost certainly be necessary?

To me the whole situation seems like a partnership by necessity that oddly mimics the Cold War mentality of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). AIG and the government are looking at each other knowing that they need their counterpart to survive. AIG needs a good economy and the government (allegedly) needs AIG to keep the economic going. So they sit across the table from one another nervously twitching like two detoxing heroin junkies unable to do anything productive while the rest of the world just melts away.

The problem isn’t AIG specifically, although what they did (great article by Joe Nocera on what they did here) was egregious, the problem is the system as a whole. Without going into too much detail, (I’d like to write individual articles [one of which will probably end up in the newsletter] about the philosophical pitfalls of debt and rampant moral egoism that is embraced by modern society) let me describe the overall problem.

AIG insured banks who made bad loans to people because it could use that money to count toward their profit and to make their own investments. In other words, knowing that the initial loans were not going to get paid back, AIG piled on top of the situation because they knew they could make money and would eventually get bailed out. So to prevent this corporate greed, the government has to not only resuscitate the economy, but also perform reconstructive surgery on it. They have to change the system so that corporations cannot use the grey areas of debt and futures to make money where money doesn’t exist. They have to create oversight, which the markets will not respond well too initially but those changes in the long term will create a more stable economy. On the individual level, there is really nothing that the government can do. Individuals within companies compete against each other and are therefore rewarded if they can finagle the rules in order to make more money for the company than the guy next to them. Furthermore, these individuals are so greedy that companies like AIG have to try and keep employees on board by guaranteeing them huge bonuses. Nevertheless, these people move from company to company and from the private sector to the public sector. They’re all interconnected, they’re all friends, and they all help each other make money and escape exposure.

So while I’m glad that people are finally deciding to open the door on these modern carpetbaggers, I really don’t think the government or the American public have the wherewithal to force the necessary changes to the economy and corporate machinations that could prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. We may get the AIG money back, but the economy as a whole will continue to operate along failing parameters and nothing in the larger sense will have been fixed.

(For an article I did for the newsletter about the bailout click here to view it online)

So on March 4th The Daily Show ripped apart the financial networks because they act like idiotic cheerleaders who hyper inflate bubbles and the idea that you can make easy money, which means they aren’t actually journalists. Apparently this ruffled some feathers. CNBC’s Jim Cramer, aka the guy who thinks giving serious financial advise requires jumping up and down and screaming like a mourning radio shock jock, responded to Stewart with an article saying that the clip The Daily Show used of him talking about Bear Sterns was taken out of context. So on March 9th Stewart reviewed the clip and apologized because actually Cramer was only saying that if Bear was your broker then your money would be “fine”. However, Stewart points out that 5 days earlier, Cramer did actually say buy Bear Sterns. And 7 weeks before that, he specifically tells people to buy Bear.

Cramer’s predictable response was that all stocks are down so there were really no ‘right’ picks and feels bad for his bad advice. Cramer went on NBC’s Today Show and MSNBC’s Mourning Joe to go further. He accuses Stewart of just being a “comedian” who just sits back and makes fun of people. Of course Joe Scarborough agreed and also dismissed Stewart as someone who isn’t going to predict the financial markets but rather just sit back and make fun of the people who do. Joe says he does the same thing to politicians. So again, Stewart responded to this criticism (by going on Dora the Explorer).

In terms of the overall point I’d say Stewart is the only one doing his job. He is like Socrates in that his purpose is to expose the bullshit that public figures insist on shoveling. No he isn’t going to tell you what stocks to buy and he isn’t going to solve the countries problems. What he will do is point out instance when the people charged with those jobs screw over the American people. If politicians and ‘journalists’/pundits like Joe and Jim did their job, Stewart would have nothing to make fun of them for. In a perfect world, The Daily Show wouldn’t exist. However, since there are an abundance of idiots out there who need to be exposed for the damage they are doing to the country and world at large, The Daily Show is a necessary piece of satire. In other word, to quote Mr Stewart, “FUCK YOU!”

Here’s the video in chronological order so you can see Stewart’s Socratic genius followed by the NBC family of networks attempting to force hemlock down his throat.

Jon Stewart is destroying financial reporters and well he should. Seriously, his show this past week was spectacular. On March 4th Rick Santelli, the guy who flipped out on CNBC because the President wanted to bail out some of the homeowners who can’t pay their mortgages, was supposed to go on The Daily Show but cancelled at the last minute. What follows is Stewart doing a piece that completely exposes financial reporters and financial ‘news’ channels for what they are: corporate shills who either pretend to be retarded or actually are retarded (guy from Mad Money, I’m looking at you). For God’s sake they interviewed that Allen Sanford guy and asked him, “is it fun being a billionaire?” A high school news paper asks harder hitting questions than that. God forbid these people do actual reporting that would require them to look into the guy and therefore uncover that he’s STEALING PEOPLE’S MONEY!

Just watch the video and smile at the fact that at least someone is pointing out how absurd these jackasses are. Further evidence that giving Jon Stewart 2008 SPPOTY was a wise decision on our part.

 

*EDIT*

Actually below is the interview that I caught and made me go back and look up the first part of the show which is in the first posted video. In this interview with NY Times Financial Columnist Joe Nocera Jon Stewart perfectly captures all the valid outrage and befuddlement that we all feel. The hurricane metaphor is simply the greatest thing I’ve heard in terms of the financial crisis. So enjoy.

Crap, I can’t make it appear in the post but here’s the link. Trust me on this. Click this link and hear the greatness.

So I said on the Stormy Present main page that I’d be putting up a post about the quixotic nature of the stimulus package here at the Politics page. Well I guess I lied because I’m actually going to put that post in the Procrastinator newsletter. So if you were waiting with bated breath you’ll just have to read the newsletter. (Hey, if you missed an issue go to this site and read all the articles that have appeared in the Procrastinator newsletter)

But to kill time until that comes out I’d like to pose an open question to you the reader(s) that is at the core of the piece that was supposed to be here but is now in the newsletter. I hope this will generate some discussion because I think it’s an interesting thought and gets into a lot of different issues. Also I haven’t actually finished writing the article so it’d be nice to get some comments on this issue so that I can steal your thoughts and present them as my own. Here’s the question to consider:

What if a magical genie (as apposed to a non-magical genie I suppose) came down from space and said to America, “Ok look, this whole economy thing is completely screwed up and you people are going to suffer for a long time. However, I am a genie empowered with the ability to allow a civilization the chance to go two years back in time knowing what they know now so that they can do everything in their power to avoid this situation. Essentially, what I’ll do is make it 2007 and everything will be exactly as it was in that year. However, you’ll know that you’d better do something to avoid the coming economic crisis. This way, you’ll have the opportunity to save yourself from total financial collapse.”

Alright, let’s assume for the sake of argument that America decides to take the genie up on his offer and we travel back in time to 2007 knowing everything we know now. And let’s also assume that if we make all the right moves in 2007 we could prevent the financial collapse we’re going through. The question I present to you is this:

Even if we went back in time and had the ability to avoid this by correcting our actions, would we? I mean even if we went back to 2007 would people be willing to make the necessary sacrifices to right the ship even though they knew that not making these sacrifices would lead to financial collapse? Are we that sacrifice averse? Even if we went back in time knowing everything we do now, would people be less greedy? Or would be just use the time travel opportunity to be even greedier and stockpile a bunch of money to prepare for the coming financial crisis?

I’m inclined to think that even if we had the opportunity to travel back and time and make corrections to the system, we wouldn’t make those corrections. The financial crisis, in my opinion, is an economic representation of what’s wrong with society. And society is just a collection of people. So the sickness in us is the sickness in the economy. Thus, because no one wants to cure themselves, no one has the capability, even if that capability includes time travel, to rectify the economic crisis.

But that’s just my misanthropic view; let me know what you think.

No I don’t like Communism. It has been historically proven to be a faulty theory and philosophically it is based on hopelessly idealistic premises. Communism not only doesn’t work, it typically descends into totalitarianism. Thus, it is what political scientists call, “sucky”.

However, I think we need communism. Fox News Sunday spent the first half hour of their show with four governors, two Democrats and two Republicans. Predictably one of the Republican governors was Mark Sanford. The first thing out of our state’s governor’s mouth was (not an exact quote), “[The stimulus package] reminds me of communism’s central planning committee saying that the government is going to create X number of jobs.”

This is actually a common caricature of the stimulus package presented by its opponents. But even if you disagree with the stimulus package, it isn’t communism. The government isn’t going to own businesses or fix consumer prices (although I do think that the government will ultimately be forced to nationalize the banks, or at least some banks including Bank of America and CitiBank). The stimulus package is just that, a stimulus. It is an infusion of money to kick start the capitalist economy; not the government running the economy.

So we need communism because people who don’t take the time to study political philosophy don’t know what communism actually is. Hence they erroneously compare things to their own misconception of what communism is.

You know for a long time I’ve begged people to see that morality is primarily a grey area (but I do believe that at the edges of this grey area there are spaces for things that are objectively right and wrong). Maybe I was wrong to advocate this. Maybe people need black and white moral distinctions. If there’s too much grey area people make say absurd things (like what Gov. Sanford) or do whatever they want because they’re too lazy to sift through the grey areas to find the objective Truth. Isn’t that how this whole financial crisis went down; a bunch of unscrupulous people took advantage of the fact that right and wrong requires thoughtful consideration and most people are too lazy to do that?

So the open ended question I offer up to you is this: is American society actually ready for or capable of understanding and dealing with anything more complicated than a hard and fast black and white morality?

BBC has a good feature “viewpoint” article where Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes about the difference between anger at American policy decisions and anti-American sentiment around the world. He also speaks to the importance of President Obama’s election and the potential fallout if he fails to live up to the promise of his campaign.

It’s a good read; take the time to look over it. I promise you won’t regret it even though it is sort of long. The Archbishop is incredibly smart and insightful and I can tell you right now that if have kids and therefore have to start going to church again, I think I’d be an Episcopalian solely because I like how Episcopalian Archbishops like Desmond Tutu are incredibly thoughtful and posses a great deal of knowledge beyond the realm of religion.

So I implore you, read the article. And if you want, leave a comment about the article in the comment section.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7897206.stm

The chairmanship of the African Union rotates and this year it unfortunately rotated to Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. In one of Gaddafi’s first statements as AU chairman he questioned the feasibility of democracy in Africa.

“We don’t have any political structures [in Africa], our structures are social,” Gaddafi told Reuters. “Our parties are tribal parties – that is what has lead to bloodshed.” (source: BBC World News)

Gaddafi is known for playing political philosopher. He wrote the Green Book, which is supposed to be Africa’s version of China’s Little Red Book. The Green Book espouses an Africanized version of socialism, which is achieved through what Gaddafi kindly refers to as popular democracy. Of course ‘popular democracy’ just means that it is assumed that the leader, Gaddafi, knows what is best for ‘his people’ and therefore should be empowered to do whatever ‘the people’ need and want. The bottom line is that Gaddafi knows that using the veil of Islam and socialism you can centralize power in the state and that ensures your hold on power. As a result, Gaddafi has been presiding over Libya since his successful coup in 1969.

Despite his faux intellectualism, the question he raises about democracy in Africa is interesting. The BBC article points out that Gaddafi’s overarching argument is that due to deeply entrenched tribal distinctions, political parties in Africa inevitably affiliate themselves with a particular tribal ethnicity. If tribal identity is the basis for political parties, compromise and actual political discourse become impossible and ultimately tribal animosity will lead to bloodshed. He points out how this happened most recently in Kenya. All of that, I would say, is a fair observation.

My entire master’s dissertation was about how developing countries were affected by globalization and how it forces traditional social, political, and economic structures into a conflict with modern social, political, and economic structures. At the end of my dissertation, after much sophomoric intellectual argument, I concluded that this amalgam of traditionalism and modernism could indeed be balanced (so Marx was wrong when he said that capitalism makes everyone the same because it actually allows you the ability to become more diverse by incorporating modernism into your traditional setting). Therefore, I am obviously in disagreement with Gaddafi in that democracy can work anywhere so long as it isn’t a copycat version of Western democracy, but instead one that incorporates certain democracy promoting aspects of traditional structures.

But I won’t bore you with the details of my master’s dissertation. Instead I put the question to you: given that it seems like it should be possible to have democracy in Africa and the sad fact that democracy in African has typically descended into either state weakness, tribal violence, or a democratic government that morphs into dictatorship, is democracy in Africa a hopeless cause or is it something that can work and should therefore be pursued?

Other questions to be considered separately or within the primary question’s answer: Is democracy a Western-centric political philosophy (think Iraq)? If you were in charge of a developing African country how would you set up the government? Why does democracy continually fail in Africa?

Now that’s a press conference!

I got home after working out so I missed the President’s speech, but I did manage to catch the question and answer section. I’m glad I caught that because President Obama really rose to the occasion. That is until the thing started to wear on.

For the first 3/4^th of the press conference he hit homeruns with his answers to every question. He clearly laid out the economic problems, what he intended to do about it, and why something needed to be done. His answers were long and answered the initial question completely. He broke down the complex issues into short hand problems that non-economists like myself could understand. He then spoke eloquently about bipartisanship. It was amazing. He was analytical, professorial, and ultimately very convincing. No kidding, it was the greatest instance of deliberative discourse I’ve ever seen from a public figure.

Then, I guess the quality of reporters asking questions sort of decreased and the President got tired of answering questions that varied widely in subject. He started answering only half the question and refusing to let the reporter ask a follow up. Once the questions splayed out into Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vice President Biden, the President got a little cantankerous. It’s possible that he shared my sentiment that those questions were freaking off the wall and totally unrelated to the current subject, the economy. Plus, some of those questions were framed in a way that didn’t invite a thoughtful, discussion-like answer.

If this tells us anything about what to expect in the future then I think the best case scenario is that we get the deliberative discourse that we need (and I pine for) and at the worst case we get Bill Clinton-esque press conferences in which he gives a bunch of slick half answers. Of course a Bill Clinton-esque style is slightly better than a Bush-esque  style wherein the President just says the same thing over and over and refusing to answer questions.

The lowlight was the reporter from the Washington Post asking what the President thought about A-Rod using steroids. Good job buddy. Did they teach you that at your fancy pants journalism school? Seriously dude, the previous question was about the failing economy and the following question was from Helen Thomas about Afghanistan and whether or not a Middle Eastern nation had a nuke. So way to go Washington Post guy for really using the President’s time and the American public’s time wisely.

But let me hear your thoughts in the comment section.