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READY FOR GRADING (but please continue to comment!!) |
| | POSITION: That's a valid response. Keep them coming. I'll give you a less frustrating paper in the third exercise -- the exercise that the school encourages to pretend to not be written by a person -- the exercise in which, as in sibling rivalries and pissing contests,
Long peers learned to long
To be ranked by uniform
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< | Not in spite of it.
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| | -- the exercise that you probably won't read anyhow. |
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| | -- AndrewGradman - 31 Mar 2008
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| | Surgeon : body :: "first do no harm" : organs :::: lawyer : society :: "first do no harm" : bodies
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< | POSITION: Alan Dershowitz (who defends unpopular plaintiffs and makes their narratives symbolic of social malaise) is the best doctor among us. |
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> | POSITION: Alan Dershowitz (who defends unpopular defendants and makes their narratives symbolic of social malaise) is the best doctor among us. |
| | -- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008
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| | -- TheodoreSmith - 05 Apr 2008 [paraphrased by AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008] |
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< | Some say we're losing forests for trees -- some say we're finding more forests than we ought to! (cf. Heller, we're finding more "Commons" than we ought to ) To use your terms: 1. No system can define how many trees becomes a forest; 2. A system whose mandate is to operate on forests, but not harm trees, will bias his work towards the trees, which are easier to define. ... SO: YES, you're right, that's what I'm saying. |
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> | Some say we're losing forests for trees -- some say we're finding more forests than we ought to! (cf. Heller, we're finding more "Commons" than we ought to ) To use your terms:
1. No system can define how many trees becomes a forest;
2. A system whose mandate is to operate on forests, but not harm trees, will bias his work towards the trees, which are easier to define. ... SO: YES, you're right, that's what I'm saying. |
| | -- AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008 |
| | -- TheodoreSmith - 05 Apr 2008 [paraphrased by AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008] |
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< | Ted, I agree, this dilemma is real. I mention it in my response to Jesse in the next section.-- AndrewGradman - 06 Apr 2008 |
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> | Ted, I agree, this dilemma is real, I couldn't "reject" it. I mention it in my response to Jesse in the next section.-- AndrewGradman - 06 Apr 2008 |
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| | -- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008
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< | Is your premise, that all objects of perception are bound by conceptual forms, that we created and use as the context in which they can be perceived? If so, I don't think "law is the voice," but simply one of the voices (and probably not a very powerful one at that). |
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> | Is your premise, that all objects of perception are bound by conceptual forms, which we created and use as the context in which they can be perceived? If so, I don't think "law is the voice," but simply one of the voices (and probably not a very powerful one at that). |
| | Also, along with what Sandor mentioned in 3, I think that your dichotomies (good vs. bad) may not be helpful, and may distract from your central point.
-- TheodoreSmith - 05 Apr 2008 [paraphrased by AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008] |
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< | I responded to Sandor: You're right, law is one voice among many; but only the lawmaker passes judgment on revolutions. |
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> | You're right, law is one voice among many; but not everyone passes judgment on (perpetuates) attempted revolutions. |
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< | And given that the law, like medicine and science, gets implemented in binary (i.e. plaintiffs ask questions, and courts say "Yes" or "No" / inpatients present symptoms, and doctors say "intervene/don't"), I think that "good"/"bad" is as useful as any other dichotomy. |
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> | As I responded to Sandor: given that the law, like medicine and science, gets implemented in binary (i.e. plaintiffs ask questions, and courts say "Yes" or "No" / patients present symptoms, and doctors say "intervene/don't" --> teaching citizens when to become "plaintiffs," and humans when to become "patients"), I think that "good"/"bad" is as useful as any other dichotomy. |
| | -- AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008 |
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< | Why can revolutions only be judged by the law? Even if you "define" all acts as revolutions, they'll get judged constantly in all kind of non-legal, e.g. social and individual, contexts, and are more definite and far-reaching than what we call "law" (the pronouncement of the king in the "ingenious patriot"). Good/bad is as useful as any other dichotomy, but the dichotomy is unnecessary in the first place. Courts, for example, are not limited to Yes and No. Dichotomies make your argument more punchy, but also harder to understand; they distract from your real point. |
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> | All acts, whether or not you call them "revolutions," get judged constantly in all kind of non-legal, e.g. social and individual, contexts that are more definite and far-reaching than what we call "law" (the pronouncement of the king in the "ingenious patriot").
Good/bad is as useful as any other dichotomy, but the dichotomy is unnecessary in the first place. Courts, for example, are not limited to Yes and No. Dichotomies make your argument more punchy, but also harder to understand; they distract from your real point. |
| | -- TheodoreSmith - 05 Apr 2008 [paraphrased by AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008] |
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< | The important dichotomy is the successful attempted revolution, the illegal behavior that accumulates into a groundswell that eventually changes the law. For example, Rosa Parks on the bus, and Hitler at his 1923 trial for the beer hall putsch. |
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> | The important dichotomy is successful vs. unsuccessful -- the illegal behavior that accumulates into a groundswell that eventually changes the law. For example, Rosa Parks on the bus, and Hitler at his 1923 trial for the beer hall putsch. |
| | Here you say "my real point," and elsewhere you said my "thesis." I'm not going to offer you any clear ethical advice, if that's what you mean by that. We're all first year law students. Why should I tell you what to do, when none of us will be able to do it for at least a decade? |
| | I agree that it's really-really-hard to come up with a binary system that is both falsifiable and really-really-hard to falsify; so how should I presume? |
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< | But we're faced with a real problem: [as Ted commented to 3. above,] society actually does sort continuous phenomena into binary categories (e.g. by means of scientists, judges, doctors). So (as you know), we as advocates need to ask, "How does one upset the structure of the assignments between terms and things?" My long-term strategy is to upset assignments by upsetting people. My near-term tactic is to upset their understandings of texts they associate with stability. |
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> | But we're faced with a real problem: [as Ted commented to 3. above,] society actually does sort continuous phenomena into binary categories (e.g. by means of scientists, judges, doctors). So (as you know), we, as advocates, need to ask "How does one upset the structure of the assignments between terms and things?"
My long-term strategy is to upset assignments by upsetting people. My near-term tactic is to upset their understandings of texts they associate with stability. |
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< | That's why I prefer tracing functionalism to Rousseau, when, you're right, anyone would do. It's old news that "The rules change as the rules are applied." By contrast, the notion that Rousseau, the very Framer of the West's vision of "society," defines "lawmaker" flexibly enough to include any artifact -- e.g. the identity of the butterfly that started Hurricane Katrina -- that's a threat from left field. |
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> | That's why I prefer tracing functionalism to Rousseau, when, you're right, anyone would do. It's old news that "The rules change as the rules are applied." By contrast, the notion that Rousseau -- the very Framer of the West's vision of "society" -- defines "lawmaker" flexibly enough to include any artifact (e.g. the identity of the butterfly that started Hurricane Katrina) -- that's a threat from left field. |
| | -- AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008
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| | -- SandorMarton - 05 Apr 2008 [paraphrased by AndrewGradman - 06 Apr 2008] |
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< | Actually, I don't think that " the fact that there's no such think as a profit motive helps us predict much. |
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> | Actually, I don't think that " the fact that there's no such thing as a profit motive helps us predict much. |
| | The corporation appears to have a survival motive, like any legal person, because the opposite of profitability is death. I think that gives the act of Investing some moral weight: Investors tie CEO pay to some opaque algorithm balancing near-term and long-term stock price; then they increase the price of those stocks for which the CEO's rhetoric about present assets symbolizes growth in discounted long-term profitability. Investors are just gambling on the order in which corporations will die. |
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I have a nightmare, that in my lifetime technology will continue to improve. And as the menu of possible breads and circuses grows more complex, Americans will be unable to distinguish their options; and they will have only faith that their options are different; and, being Englishmen, they will lose faith in anyone’s ability to make the "choice" that is right for them. They will call their confusion Pluralism, and their agosticism Science: and they will replace legislatures with bureaucrats, and bureaucracies with corporations; elections with marketing, and monetize all Value; Senates with Boards of Directors, Presidents with CEOs ... The publicly-held corporation will assume the function of the democratic state ... but our language will continue to contrast the two.
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< | POSITION: I have a dream, that one day CEOs will use those moments when they're not being watched by Boards Directors to increase consumer rather than shareholder value. |
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> | POSITION: I have a dream, that CEOs will learn to use the moments when they're not being watched by Boards Directors to increase consumer rather than shareholder value. |
| | That's really my dream. My dream is to someday teach at a business school, and share my nightmares with those people. |
| | "What holds the parts together?" "Why the obscurity?"
1. The act/actor/observer dilemma ( trilemma? ) holds it together -- |
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- The Haiku in "Background on this paper," cf Veblen on uniforms, what's the sign and what's the substance? Regarding our papers: Given that Eben is the observer, what's the act -- our papers, or us?
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- The Haiku in "Background on this paper," cf Veblen on uniforms, what's the sign and what's the substance? Regarding our papers: Given that Eben is the observer, what's the act -- our papers, or us? Given that the paper is the act, who's the observer -- Eben or us?
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- In "Freud on Socrates," truth/justice/beauty become moving targets when you try to distinguish them. It's impossible to control variables.
- Hippocrates on health: When an intervener ("observer") tries to improve society by improving a subset of it (whose boundaries he defines, good god, in terms of PROPER FUNCTION), he compromises his proper, larger goal. [Ted explained this one to me.]
- Rousseau: See "Freud on Socrates:" Here, act/actor/observer = the problem of praxis -- when you make an idea real, how do you then verify that you haven't compromised your idea?
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