Newsflash: Beck Guilty

Glenn Beck loses his court battle with Mr. Isaac Eiland-Hall, who started a website that employed Beck’s beloved Argument from Ignorance:

http://didglennbeckrapeandmurderayounggirlin1990.com./

Beck is guilty of losing the court case after Eiland-Hall raised significant questions about Beck’s involvement in the sordid rape and murder of a young girl in 1990. As a door-prize in this affair, the owner of the aforementioned URL, Mr. Eiland-Hall, has graciously forfeited his unwieldy domain name to Glenn Beck. He has instead shifted all content over to a new, easier to type, domain: http://gb1990.com/.

Shot Through With Swastikas

A book review in the NY Times covers the forthcoming publication of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. I haven’t yet seen the book, but it sounds like a preposterous thesis to me.

It must be false to assert that Heidegger’s work is thoroughly imbued with Nazism. It’s an outrageous claim; far more outrageous than even the claim that Marx’s work is thoroughly imbued with Marxism. On one way of thinking, Marx’s work obviously is thoroughly imbued with Marxism, since Marx wrote it; but it’s not at all clear to me that all of the thoughts in Marx’s work are thoroughly “Marxist.”

Plus, there’s the added complication that just because it may be imbued with a particular view (which I don’t think it is), that therefore it ought not to be taught.

This article a few weeks back generated a storm of criticism. Check out the comments section for a few chuckles.

The Unraveling of Private Property

The New York Times has a nice story on the property rights struggles of Moscow residents.

The Soviet government’s land monopoly may have ended some two decades ago, but the ability of the authorities to give and take away territory has not, real estate experts here say.

While private land ownership is not forbidden today as it was in the Soviet era, current real estate laws are vague: residents can buy homes and apartments, for instance, but not the land they stand on. In all cases people are left open to the caprice of corrupt officials and businessmen.

Aw, but come on. They should rejoice in this ambiguity. In such ambiguity lies emancipation. Here, from the 1844 manuscripts:

The abolition [Aufhebung] of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use.

See? All clear now.

Urban Environmentalism

I was just turned on to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. As a transplanted New Yorker, I have particular affections for the urban solution to our environmental problem.

Pretty interesting stuff.

The Parable of Horseshit

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, has written a scathing review of Levitt and Dubner’s imponderable geoengineering tripe in the New Yorker.

A taste:

But what’s most troubling about “SuperFreakonomics” isn’t the authors’ many blunders; it’s the whole spirit of the enterprise. Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are. Leaving aside the question of whether geoengineering, as it is known in scientific circles, is even possible—have you ever tried sending an eighteen-mile-long hose into the stratosphere?—their analysis is terrifyingly cavalier. A world whose atmosphere is loaded with carbon dioxide, on the one hand, and sulfur dioxide, on the other, would be a fundamentally different place from the earth as we know it. Among the many likely consequences of shooting SO₂ above the clouds would be new regional weather patterns (after major volcanic eruptions, Asia and Africa have a nasty tendency to experience drought), ozone depletion, and increased acid rain. Meanwhile, as long as the concentration of atmospheric CO₂ continued to rise, more and more sulfur dioxide would have to be pumped into the air to counteract it. The amount of direct sunlight reaching the earth would fall, even as the oceans became increasingly acidic. There are eminent scientists—among them the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen—who argue that geoengineering should be seriously studied, but only with the understanding that it represents a risky, last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe.