Mayor Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore reacts to rising murder rates there…

The New Neo Posted on by

…by firing the police chief:

Rawlings-Blake said her motivation for replacing Batts was a spike in murders during the past month and not a police union report criticizing her and Batts for the April riots after Freddie Gray was fatally injured while in police custody…

“We cannot grow Baltimore without making our city a safer place to live,” the mayor said at a news conference. “We need a change. This was not an easy decision, but it is one that is in the best interest of the people of Baltimore. The people of Baltimore deserve better.”

To which I say: mayor, fire thyself.

As for the spike in murder, it is shared by a number of other cities in the US, among them Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans. Much of this rise has occurred after the Michael Brown (St. Louis area), and then the Freddie Gray (Baltimore) incidents. If you wonder whether something else might be causing it other than rising black anger and police frustration and reluctance to patrol because of a lack of support from municipal government, a piece that appeared in June at FiveThirtyEight (which tends to be liberal) on the statistics of the Baltimore rise tends to substantiate the fact that there is indeed a relationship between the Freddie Gray case and the rising murder rate there.

I couldn’t find a breakdown of the race of the victims and the perpetrators in Baltimore in 2015. But I would guess that the vast majority involves black-on-black crime. As far as the police go, however:

…[T]he police union says officers are “under siege” and “more afraid of going to jail for doing their jobs properly than they are of getting shot on duty.”

Why on earth wouldn’t they feel that way? And I can’t imagine that the firing of commissioner Batts will reassure anyone. It will be very interesting to see, though, what happens with his replacement.

Iran talks: on and on and on they go…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and where they stop, nobody knows. But we can be pretty sure it won’t be anyplace good.

I’ve written a lot about the current Iran negotiations, but don’t take the fact that I haven’t written about them lately to mean anything has changed. If anything, it is rumored that things seem to have only gotten worse in terms of our concessions, and I suspect that as time goes on the administration will become more and more desperate for a deal, any deal.

But just to fill you in on current developments:

John Kerry, in his usual clear-as-mud manner, says that “We will not rush and we will not be rushed.” On the other hand, negotiations “will not be open-ended.” That tells us pretty much—nothing.

He also said the agreement needs to “withstand the test of time,” and that “It’s a test for decades.”

In other words, we dare later administrations to change whatever we decide, and the consequences of the deal will start flowing immediately anyway. Just try and stop us.

That last idea was underlined by the fact that “the White House believes that even if Congress votes against allowing the president to implement the deal, it will have support from enough lawmakers that the critics won’t be able to override a presidential veto.” In other words: Democrats, note what we did to your fellow esteemed member of Congress Bob Menendez. Now, you wouldn’t want the same thing to happen to you, would you?

And if you’re inclined to excoriate the Republicans in Congress for agreeing to the Corker=Menendez bill requiring their approval for a negotiated deal, and you think that it actually decreased their power over what Obama and Kerry do regarding Iran, I disagree. As I wrote in a previous post on the matter:

Lots of conservatives think it’s a bad deal because without it, a 2/3 vote would be needed to approve the deal as a treaty, and with it, a 2/3 vote (because of the necessity for a veto override) will be needed to block it. But they are ignoring reality, which is that without it there is not chance it would even come up before Congress at all, because Obama would consider it not to be a treaty, and he could win that argument.

If you think Obama would ever have agreed to regard the deal as a treaty and subject it to Senate approval, think again. It is not technically and unequivocally a treaty, and they could not force him to act as though it is. The fact that other previous presidents might certainly have acted that way out of deference to Congress and public opinion does not change the fact that Obama could not care less about these things when he has a goal as important to him as conceding to Iran appears to be.

[NOTE: See more on Iran here from Michael Totten, and this and this from Powerline’s Scott Johnson.]

Psychopaths who murder their parents

The New Neo Posted on by

Now, there’s a pleasant subject, you might say (sarcastically, I hope). But I take the topic up as a public service.

Let me explain how I came to research this. Sometimes when I’m working, either on the blog or around the house, I put the TV on as background noise. It’s often tuned to the news, but I get very tired of that, and lately I’ve sometimes been watching reruns of “Forensic Files,” an investigative series that focuses on the use of forensics in crime. It’s a sort of CSI without the glam actors: just the facts, ma’m, just the facts. I’ve found that truth is often stranger—and to me more interesting—than fiction.

The other night a segment on the Porco murder case aired. It was a murder so grisly and brutal that I’m not going to go into the details; you can find the show here, or more information here. The murderer of the father, and attempted murderer of the mother, was the Porcos’ college-age son Christopher, a handsome, intelligent young man who clearly was a psychopath and had shown signs of it for years although he had never before been violent.

I became curious about the trigger that turned Christopher Porco from non-violent to violent, and I found this fascinating article about that murder and other similar cases. It describes a group of parent-killers with a pattern similar to Porco’s. They were distinguished by having previously committed a series of petty crimes involving property (usually stealing, either money or goods or both) against the parents, a lack of remorse or change of behavior, and an escalation to violence in response to a perceived threat of exposure or punishment.

Porco, for example, had forged his father’s signature on large checks, had stolen goods from the home and tried to sell them, had falsified college transcripts, and a host of other deceptions, and his parents were aware of at least some of them. They reacted by admonishing him, trying to implement consequences, and yet assuring him they loved him. In other words, they seemed more or less to be doing the right thing. However:

There were several e-mail correspondences between Porco and his parents that exemplify the tensions between the parties and accurately support research stating that conflicts and arguments are a catalyst for parricide. The parents eventually confronted Porco on his fraudulent behavior and threatened to go to the authorities to take action against him. In one e-mail, the father wrote, “Did you forge my signature as a co-signer? What the hell are you doing? You should have called me to discuss it. ”¦ I’m calling Citibank this morning to find out what you have done and am going to tell them I’m not to be on it as co-signer” (as cited in Perri & Lichtenwald, 2008)…

…Despite the chaos Christopher Porco brought into his parents’ lives, they told him how much they loved him. Unfortunately for them, though, their love was irrelevant for what he planned to do next. Less than 2 weeks from the time the father warned Christopher Porco that he would not hesitate going to the authorities for his son’s fraudulent behavior, Christopher executed his plan to negate the threat. It has been the experience of the authors that the victim’s threat of exposing the fraud will force a shift in the psychopath’s strategy from employing charm, cunning behavior, and manipulation on the victim to employing violence in an effort to silence the victim.

The article describes other several cases with a similar pattern. It also makes some suggestions for parents, and I would think that anyone who faces a similar situation—an offspring who shows a pattern of petty exploitation, theft, and/or forgeries, especially if directed at the funds of parents—or who knows someone with a similar situation, should read it; it could save your or your friends’ lives.

I did my own research on a couple of cases in the public domain in which teenage or young adult children cold-bloodedly killed their parents—for example, the Menendez case and the Dingman case—and sure enough, they fit the pattern. Most of us remember the Menendez case, for example, but how many of us remember (I hadn’t) that the brothers were already guilty of theft committed prior to the murders?:

In 1988 the Menendez brothers became involved in a burglary and a grand theft. These burglaries were not inconsequential; they involved money, property, and some serious jewelry, in the $100,000 range, taken from the safes in neighbors’ houses.

In that case, the father learned of the theft but protected the sons by extra-judicial means rather than have them face the consequences; he returned the jewels and made monetary restitution to the neighbors.

The Menendez parents were extremely wealthy (the Porcos were middle-class, however, as were the Dingmans), and one of the motives for the murder was that the boys were the beneficiaries of the will. They apparently feared that they would be written out of the parents’ will and lose access to very substantial assets in the future. That was also a motive for Porco as well. And in the Dingman case, the older brother “was afraid Eve and Vance Dingman would find out he had stolen money and a .22-caliber pistol from the gun cabinet in their Rochester home.”

Christopher Porco never alleged that his parents had abused him. But the Menendez bothers made that accusation towards their parents and offered it as part of their defense to murder. We will never know the truth about that, but even if they did abuse their children (which I doubt for a host of reasons, but that’s outside the subject matter of the post), the young men were 21 and 18 at the time of the murders, free to come and go, and could have just left the situation and made their own lives.

The point of it all is this: be aware of the danger signs. Someone with a child behaving like that may think that a certain approach will help—love and acceptance, or its opposite tough love and consequences—but the evidence is that there is nothing the parents can do that is enough, and whatever you do it is wise to be aware and take precautions. Again, the article goes into what those precautions might be (for example, don’t give the child a key to the house or the combination to a security system, or passwords to any cyber accounts). And don’t threaten to do something like cut the child out of your will; if you’re going to do it, just do it.

This requires the jettisoning of what is probably a very natural and deep desire to deny what’s happening and the fact that you are parent to a psychopath. And of course not all children who defraud their parents go on to murder them. But realize that such a pattern of property crime and lies on the part of a child puts a parent at risk, and that the time to exercise most caution is when you are thinking of exposing the child’s crimes and having the child face the consequences of the child’s own actions.

Stressed out?

The New Neo Posted on by

Try this.

If you’re sensitive to the f-word, avoid it. But I especially love the way the narrator manages to get the tone of voice exactly right. When I went through my many years of chronic pain, I had a bunch of the sort of tapes this one is spoofing, and I never thought any of them made a difference in my pain, although some were quite pleasant to listen to:

HUD’s heavy hand

The New Neo Posted on by

The Obama administration is going forward with its plan to engineer local neighborhoods through the executive branch.

I wrote about this before at some length, here. It’s a policy that would be highly unlikely to pass Congress, so it’s being done through new HUD rules.

The 1968 Fair Housing Law, under which the power to do this supposedly comes, was only meant to bar outright discrimination. But (as with most such agencies and most such laws) what was once a focus on equality of opportunity has become a demand for equality of outcome. Whether or not actual discrimination is taking place has become irrelevant; the administration is serving notice that de facto divisions are not okay anymore:

The new rules, a top demand of civil-rights groups, will require cities and towns all over the country to scrutinize their housing patterns for racial bias and to publicly report, every three to five years, the results. Communities will also have to set goals, which will be tracked over time, for how they will further reduce segregation…

Officials insist that they want to work with and not punish communities where segregation exists. But the new reports will make it harder to conceal when communities consistently flout the law. And in the most flagrant cases, HUD holds out the possibility of withholding a portion of the billions of dollars of federal funding it hands out each year.

HUD giveth, and HUD taketh away. And don’t think this is the end of it:

…Civil rights groups pushed for even tougher rules…

This was also made possible by the SCOTUS ruling in Texas Department of Housing, a decision from a few weeks ago that I wrote about here. If that case—which was decided, as so many are these days, by a 5-4 tally, with Justice Kennedy casting the deciding vote—had gone the other way, this would not be happening.

Local control will go by the wayside:

Civil-rights groups say that fair housing is about removing the constraints on the housing market ”” such as zoning laws that bar apartment construction in the suburbs and formulas that ensure affordable housing is built primarily in poor neighborhoods ”” so that lower-income and minority families will have more options. Conservatives see the rule, instead, as government intrusion into a market that is already open.

In his ruling in Texas, Kennedy warned to be careful:

He cautioned, though, that “disparate impact” claims don’t simply arise any time statistical disparities appear along racial lines in housing. It must be clear that housing policies caused that disparity, and that those policies don’t serve another valid goal.

The decision upholds a legal strategy that civil rights groups and the federal government have used for four decades to fight lending practices, local housing policies and zoning laws that have had the effect of limiting housing options available to minorities.

Does anyone believe that Kennedy’s warning will be respected? I don’t; that’s not the direction in which these things tend to go.

Meanwhile, this is an excellent observation about the danger of accepting money from the federal government. Money means control by the one dispensing it, loss of control by the one accepting it:

Westchester County, New York, has been mired for years in a legal battle with HUD, thanks to a lawsuit claiming that the county misled the government by accepting HUD funding without affirmatively furthering fair housing.

The county agreed in a 2009 settlement to build 750 new affordable housing units, primarily in communities with few minorities. The settlement also required the county to adopt a law banning landlords from discriminating against subsidized tenants. As some of those benchmarks went unmet, HUD began to withhold money from Westchester. The county has since decided not to pursue any more block-grant funds, an option critics of the new rule warn many communities will chose.

“It’s not worth it because of the threat of lawsuits, the strings attached, and the control that Washington can then exert over you,” says Westchester County Executive Robert P. Astorino. “You get involved with the federal government, and you can’t get out of bed with them.”

People, black white or purple, want to live in neighborhoods that are low in crime and attractive if they possibly can, and if they have enough money they will pay to do so. If they don’t they can’t, but one of the many reasons most people aspire to making more money is so that they can have a nice place to live.

Another thing that tends to be important to people is being able to make rules about the sort of environment in which they are living. Communities that ban apartments want to—get this—ban apartments. Sometimes they want to ban high-rises. If they want to ban rental housing, and if that means they want to ban housing for low-income people, black and white, well then so be it. Such a ban would be a case of Justice Kennedy’s “serving another valid goal”—but how long will that attitude be allowed to last?

America has always had a tradition of local control. People used to—and I believe still do, at least most of them—find that precious. It’s not just a white thing, it’s an everybody thing. But this administration is determined (with the heartfelt assistance of the Supreme Court) to end that. And the more accustomed people become to not having control over their own lives, the more they will accept it as normal to not have control over their own lives.

For our own good, of course. After all, who needs autonomy?

[NOTE: The House has already passed a bill to defund enforcement of these new rules. Will the Senate follow suit? And will that actually stop implementation of these rules? Plus, of course, I can see the headlines now: “Republicans further discrimination against poor black people; block remedy.”

Also, this article points out that these new rules are a back door way to introduce more Democrats into Republican districts. While that may sometimes be the case, I’m not so sure how often it is; for example, Westchester went resoundingly for Obama in 2012 but had gone even more for him in 2008, before the HUD housing intervention happened there. The rules might even have the effect of creating a backlash against Democrats, I suppose, if they end up impacting people’s communities in a way they notice. Of course, by then, President H. Clinton already may be firmly in place.]

[NOTE II: I have a piece in the hopper on SCOTUS appointments and the phenomenon of Republican-appointed justices who move towards the left in their voting habits over time. I’m uncovering some fascinating stuff, but it’s a big topic and it’s taking longer than I thought. Justice Kennedy, appointed by Ronald Reagan, is one of those people. The story of how Kennedy came to be nominated is a complicated one, but the simple version is that (1) Democrats controlled the Senate; and (2) it happened right after the Bork debacle and the failure of Reagan’s subsequent nomination too (Ginsburg).

However, if it’s any consolation (and it probably is not), even if Bork had been on the Court all this time, he died in December of 2012 and Obama would have appointed his successor, probably a young person with many many years ahead of him/her. At least this way, Kennedy is already 78 years old.]

China stock market crisis

The New Neo Posted on by

The Chinese stock market is in big trouble, and no one seems to quite know why.

And although it’s always nice to have some company when you’re feeling ignorant, it’s not nice to have this much company.

The question, as always, is what to do, or whether to do less (or nothing). Economists have been arguing about that sort of thing since before the Great Depression, and the argument isn’t going to go away now:

[China’s] markets have lost more than three trillion dollars in value, and so far the bottom is not in sight. Perhaps it can’t be fixed because it’s not broken, or rather that it’s been broken all along and this might be a tough-love cure. One analyst tweeted that this is actually less of a crisis than it is a long-overdue correction…

If the stock prices were “appallingly overvalued,” that’s probably due in part to China’s policies, and more intervention won’t fix that problem. One has to wonder whether a rational revaluation would be possible in a panic sell-off, which this appears to be, and whether intervening only on behalf of state-owned firms might exacerbate that problem even further. Regardless, it’s a situation that bears watching, especially for any hint that the contagion may spread to other markets.

Great.

China has been interventionist, trying to protect certain stocks. But its moves seem to have had a paradoxical effect, if I’m reading this right:

China’s tumbling stock market showed signs of seizing up on Wednesday, as companies scrambled to escape the rout by having their shares suspended and indexes plunged after the securities regulator warned of “panic sentiment” gripping investors.

Beijing, which has struggled for more than a week to bend the market to its will, unveiled yet another battery of measures to arrest the sell-off, and the People’s Bank of China said it would step up support to brokerages enlisted to prop up shares.

The CSI300 index .CSI300 of the largest listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen closed down 6.8 percent, while the Shanghai Composite Index .SSEC dropped 5.9 percent.

With nearly half the market on a trading halt and another round of margin calls forcing leveraged investors to dump whatever shares could find a buyer, blue chips that had been supported by stabilization funds earlier in the week bore the brunt.

“I’ve never seen this kind of slump before. I don’t think anyone has. Liquidity is totally depleted,” said Du Changchun, an analyst at Northeast Securities.

“Originally, many wanted to hold blue chips. But since so many small caps are suspended from trading, the only way to reduce risk exposure is to sell blue chips.”

You might say that the best thing to do would be nothing. But the human impulse is to cry out “Help!” and the government’s is to respond—especially in a country used to having a lot more control than this.

[NOTE: Meanwhile, there’s some sort of “technical issue” at the NY Stock Exchange that has halted trading. It seems to have something to do with computer problems—hacking? They say it’s not a cyberattack, but I wonder. I wonder.

Other exchanges are still open.]

EU to Greece: well maybe we’ll bail you out, if…

The New Neo Posted on by

Will Greece get another chance?:

Merkel and French President Francois Hollande worked together on a plan to save Greece from plunging into economic turmoil and possibly having to ditch the euro. This involved a medium-term conditional program and a short-term interim financing deal for a few months, the sources said.

However, a solution still depends on Tsipras putting forward convincing reform proposals and rushing key measures through parliament by the weekend to make Greece’s public finances sustainable.

Some of them are becoming a mite perturbed [remarks in brackets mine]:

Some of Athens’ 18 partners in Europe’s common currency vented exasperation at five years of crisis wrangling with Greece. Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite complained [mixing linguistic metaphors]: “With the Greek government it is every time manana.”…

Euro zone finance ministers complained that their new Greek colleague Euclid Tsakalotos, while more courteous than his abrasive predecessor Yanis Varoufakis, had brought no new proposals to a preparatory meeting before the summit.

“I have the strong impression there were 18 … ministers of finance who felt the urgency of the situation and there is one … who doesn’t feel the urgency of the situation,” Belgian Finance Minister Johan Van Overtveldt said.

Greece is acting as though it’s in the driver’s seat, and not the other nations in the EU. And perhaps it is; they appear afraid to pressure Greece too much.

Right-to-die bill stalled in California

The New Neo Posted on by

Religious opposition has blocked the advancement of a right-to-die bill in the very liberal state of California—at least for now:

The authors of the right-to-die bill did not present the legislation to the Assembly Health Committee as scheduled because it did not have enough votes to advance.

The panel includes multiple Democratic lawmakers from heavily Catholic districts in the Los Angeles area, where the archdiocese actively opposed the legislation.

I don’t know where those districts are, but my best guess is that they may represent a heavy concentration of Hispanics (who tend to be Catholic), although that may be incorrect.

I’m surprised at the roadblock, but I predict that in a few years the obstacle will be knocked down. Perhaps advocates will go the court route; that seems to be the way around balky legislatures which sometimes have a pesky habit of paying attention to the will of their constituents.

Peter Singer and the trap of logic: Part II

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Part I, which was posted about two weeks ago, can be found here.]

Not only has Princeton bioethics professor Peter Singer advocated infanticide for profoundly disabled infants if parents request it, he also has done a lot of writing about animal rights, which he champions. As one interviewer says, it was Singer:

…who wrote that our refusal to grant other animals moral equality is like saying that all human beings – even psychopaths and murderers – are superior to any dolphin or chimpanzee.

A startling statement, but Singer specializes in startling positions. In what way does he consider human psychopaths and murderers either no better than certain animals or perhaps even inferior to them?

Now, I certainly have not read all or in fact any of Singer’s books in their entirety. But I’ve read an enormous number of articles about him and many interviews with him, as well as some essays by him summarizing his thoughts. This sample of his writing offers the following important clues [emphasis mine]:

…Bentham points to the capacity for suffering as the vital characteristic that gives a being the right to equal consideration. The capacity for suffering – or more strictly, for suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness – is not just another characteristic like the capacity for language, or for higher mathematics. Bentham is not saying that those who try to mark “the insuperable line” that determines whether the interests of a being should be considered happen to have selected the wrong characteristic. The capacity for suffering and enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful way. It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer…A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being tormented, because it will suffer if it is.

If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering – in so far as rough comparisons can be made – of any other being.

It’s hard to read that without the feeling that something is being left out of the equation. But what is that “something”? Religions have a lot to say about that “something,” and about the difference between animals and humans. But it isn’t even necessary to be a religious person to get a sense that Singer is missing an essential element in the equation he sets up.

To take an animal’s suffering [see * below] into consideration is something many religions do. For example, it is a basic principle of the Judaism which Singer has rejected (he is an atheist, and has been since childhood). But this does not mean that an animal’s suffering must be taken into equal consideration. Judaism (and many other religions, but we’ll take Judaism for the purposes of this discussion) has a great deal to say on the subject of the proper treatment of animals by humans and their place in the hierarchy of the world:

All of God’s creations are deserving of our humane consideration and can serve as pathways for sanctification. In his essay on animals and Halakhah, Rabbi Edward Friedman speaks of two opposing attitudes toward animals in the Torah: In Genesis, human beings are given mastery over the animal kingdom on the one hand, and are seen as potential partners, ”˜helpmates,’ for human beings, on the other hand. Rabbi Friedman writes: “Halakhah seeks a compromise between these two extreme positions. We are thus called on to be compassionate to other creatures, even though we are allowed to use their labors and even the bodies of these same creatures to fulfill various needs in our lives.”

So, according to Judaism and the Book of Genesis, which is also part of the foundation for Christianity, humans stand above animals in the hierarchy and can use them and even kill and eat them, but must always be cognizant of doing it in a way that does not cause unnecessary suffering. Humans and animals are not equal, but that’s not based on their capacity to suffer but on their capacity for consciousness and decision-making, and their relation to God and to each other.

But if we take religion out of the equation, we still can come up with the same conclusion. Animals themselves are morally neutral as agents. Only human beings can, and do (as Singer himself demonstrates), ponder moral and ethical issues. Even if one looks at the Garden of Eden story as a mere parable, even if you remove it from any consideration of religion, one message of the story is that animals and humans are different in their moral awareness. In fact, you could say the story is one of the dawning of moral awareness and the differentiation of humans from animals. The acts of animals stand outside of the system we might call morality; they are beyond right and wrong in terms of what they themselves do, and as such they can be neither morally superior nor inferior to humans. They do not have free will. They have not, as it were, eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, unlike Adam and Eve and all their actual or metaphoric descendants, humankind.

And so the way in which humans are “superior” to animals is that they act within a moral system: they make decisions, they are conscious of themselves, they know right from wrong (or at least they think about it and wonder about it). As human beings, they have made decisions that mean in some cases that they have done wrong (for instance, murder) and must be punished. They are punished precisely because they can make thoughtful decisions and therefore, as agents, they must be held responsible. And when humans do wrong they are punished by the justice system; animals who do wrong (bite humans, kill humans) are put down if they are deemed dangerous to others, but they are not punished.

So, to finally respond to Singer’s point, even murderers and psychopaths are human beings, and as such they have more rights than animals but they also have more responsibilities than even the highest-functioning animals that Singer mentions, such as dolphins and chimpanzees.

[* “Suffering” and “pain” are actually two separate, although related, phenomena. Animals feel pain and have physiological reactions that indicate when pain is present. But there is evidence that they feel pain to different extents depending on their complexity and development.

To what degree animals suffer is an even more hotly debated question. Although I’ve done a search to see whether Singer ever even considers the distinction between pain and suffering, I have as yet found nothing that indicates he does; he seems to treat the two words as more or less synonymous (see for example this from Singer).

If Singer ignores the distinction, he’s certainly not the only one. But the difference between the two means a great deal to me, based on my own experience with many years of chronic pain. One of the most important books I ever read on the subject was by Eric J. Cassell, entitled The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine. I recommend it highly, but the gist of it can be summarized in one sentence of Cassell’s: Bodies do not suffer, only persons suffer. Cassell is not talking about animals there, he’s talking about the fact that the amount of suffering a person undergoes is related to a host of other issues, in particular the meaning and context in which he/she interprets and explains his/her pain: does it have a purpose? Is it just or unjust? Is it random or punishment or an opportunity for heroism? Is it temporary or will it last for a long long time? Does anyone care, and can anyone help?

I suppose that’s another post for another day.]

[ADDENDUM: By the way, the status of humans as beings with free will and a moral sense, and therefore moral responsibility, does not lie in their individual personal characteristics or degree of functioning. Singer might argue that the lack of those characteristics in a very disabled infant or certain other disabled people, for example (see Part I of this series), puts them on a plane equal to that of animals, or at least puts animals on the same plane as them. But the moral status of a human being, however disabled, injured, or diseased, lies in his/her identity as a human, a group of beings with certain characteristics that are different from those of animals. A deficient or ill human is nevertheless a human, whereas no animal—however smart and/or beloved—ever possesses the characteristics of moral responsibility and free will, nor do animals possess such characteristics as a group.

Religious people, of course, tend to deal with the issue by saying that only humans have souls. But that argument will not convince an atheist like Singer.]

[Part III can be found here.]

A few more thoughts on the Greek referendum

The New Neo Posted on by

To add to what I wrote yesterday—

Perhaps the large size of the “No” vote in the referendum represents an amalgam of interests. There are some on the left who want to play chicken with the EU and perhaps force it into agreeing to give Greece better terms for a bailout without Greece giving anything up. There are also the Party faithful who vote “no” because the government told them to. Then there are those on the right (is there a right in Greece?) and left who dislike the EU and want to break away from it and to have Greece stand or fall without having to answer to the EU, and who think it would be better in the long run for Greece to do this.

What that “better” would look like is different for right and left, of course.