Happy Chanukkah

Posting has been light lately. I have been busy, as usual. For those of you who do not know, I defended my dissertation last week. I am swamped with papers that need to be graded, and I am feverishly working on some writing. So in sum, there is lots going on. I apologize if I have been slow to respond.

I hope you are all having a happy Chanukkah.

Key Food

Everyone in the neighborhood knows Mamadou Doucoure, or at least they know him as Mohammed the snappy dressed manager at Key Food on Montague Street. He is the nicest and friendliest employee at the Key Food in Brooklyn Heights for at least 15 or 20 years now. In some sense he is a neighborhood institution. I have no doubt that Key Food is screwing him, and they need to get their act together. It is good to see the Times picked up on this story that has been floating around the nabe for a few weeks. Mohammed is the greatest asset Key Food has. Given their high prices, mediocre selection, and the fact that Gristedes recently reopened, they really can't afford to generate any more ill will.

Everyone likes Mohammed. No one really likes Key Food. Do the math.

Jacob and the well

Thoughts on this week's Torah portion:

This week's parsha had me somewhat annoyed. I was reading something rather annoying about the patriarch Jacob. I hope the following is not reading in to the text too much, but it seems to me to be the surface meaning of the text and I assume I am not the first to notice this. (This seems like something Steven Brams might think up. I should really read his book.)

While Jacob was walking through the land of the people of the east in search of his relatives in Haran, he comes across a bunch of flocks of sheep and their owners surrounding a well. Apparently the group of people who used the well did not trust each other or anyone else very much. So the group devised a clever system for preserving access to their water such that they could all see who is taking what, and also be reasonably certain that no one was taking more than their share and that no stranger took their water.

Here is what they did: they covered the well with a boulder of some sort that was so heavy that it could only be moved by all of them together. So if a stranger came and wanted to take some water himself or water his own flock he could not as it is unlikely he could move the boulder alone. The same holds if one of the members of the group wanted to take some water without the others. The only way one of them can get water was if all the others agreed. That is, they all gathered at the well and moved the boulder together and all saw how much each other took.

It is as if the only way to access a safe that we share in common was for each one of us to have a key, and the safe could only be open when we all insert our key. This way the only way to access the safe is if we all access it together. It is a great system that eliminates the need for trust and presumably allowed some desert people who would otherwise have been fighting over water rights to the well, to share the water.

But then along comes a stranger Jacob who is somehow capable of removing the boulder himself, presumably through brute physical strength. He notices that if he did so he can earn some advantage for himself and his relative, but mostly he would impress some girl who he thought he had a shot at because she is a relative. So he removes the boulder and allows his relative to take water from the well without waiting for the rest of the owners.

If I were one of the shepherds there, I would have been both elated and scared. I get to water my flock early, but on the other hand, I now know that Rachel can water her sheep at any time without the rest of us. She now has access to the water any time, and we still need her, or at the very least, we still need most of the rest of the group. A well has a finite supply of water. If one of the members has unlimited access, and the rest have to ration themselves, the one has a definite advantage and the potential to deprive the rest of water.

Jacob single-handedly broke down the system that enabled trust between the various shepherds, and probably screwed the whole neighborhood.

Naturally Lavan wants Jacob to work for him and tend his sheep. Jacob has access to the water anytime making Lavan no longer dependent on the coalition.

Lavan then invites Jacob to stay with him, which he does for 30 days. Then seemingly out of nowhere Lavan offers to pay Jacob for his services. We were not told that Jacob had begun to work, so it seems to be Lavan's way of asking him to stop freeloading. Lavan then conspired to keep Jacob on for 14 years. This advantage was worth both of Lavan's daughters and two maids.

Jacob became Lavan's shepherd, and there is no reason to think that he did not use his strength advantage for Lavan's flocks. That is why the flock multiplied as much as it did; their flock was able to get more water than all the other flocks - Jacob was able to get as much as he wanted for his flock.

Lavan and Jacob were now conspirators. Rashi claims that when Jacob was first sent word to Lavan that he was around, he alluded to his ability to be Lavan's "brother in deception". Rashi of course meant that Jacob was warning Lavan that he could not be conned, but in reality what Rashi should have intended was that Jacob was saying "you can't con a con man".

And this is exactly what seems to happen. Jacob manages to take possession over a good chunk of Lavan's household. His wife steals stuff from her father's house. Jacob takes his father-in-law's camels and sneaks out of the town, where Lavan is now pretty powerless to do anything.Jacob wins in the end.

Jacob does not seem like the good guy here.

Song in the Key of WTF???

Erran Baron Cohen (Sacha's brother) just released a bunch of Hanukkah songs and videos. I have to admit I kind of enjoy the new twist on the old tunes, but can someone please explain the following two things:

1) Why are they using an Israeli dreidel in (what I presume is) England?
2) Why are they spray-painting Yeshua (Jesus) on the wall in the background of the video? (Is there another meaning or an inside joke I don't get?)

Moore's paradox (With a(n evil) twist)

I just thought about the following:

Here is an ethical version of Moore's paradox, or more precisely an ethical instance of Moore's paradox:

Consider the following:

1. P
2. I am morally barred from believing that P
3. If I am aware of P, psychologically, I must (believe P or believe not P)
4. I believe not P (from 2-3)
5. Moore's paradox(from (1) and (4))

(Moore's paradox is what results from saying "P, but I don't believe it.")

The above argument holds with the assumptions (1)-(3). I do not think that they are difficult to argue for. (1) claims that some P is true. Easy enough.

(2) is a bit trickier, and may be where the weak point here is. Are there some facts that are so immoral that one should not believe in them even with evidence?

There are some beliefs X such that if you believe them you are evil. Consider a sentence of the form:

#=Members of race x are all liars in virtue of their being members of race x.

Presumably believing # makes one a racist. Racism, let's say, is evil. So believing # makes you evil. One is morally barred from doing things that make one evil. So one is morally barred from believing #.

(3) is a Jamesian Epistemic-Moral Law of Excluded Middle (JEM-LEM). William James argues, I think convincingly, that as a matter of rational psychology it is impossible to be agnostic about certain things. I take it that there are #-like Ps that are susceptible to the JEM-LEM.

Hence the paradox. Here, we have a case of "P, but I am not allowed to believe it". Can this happen?

Note as an aside that if you deny (4) because you don't accept (2) then you may be committed to cases like the following:

There are also also arguments that I take seriously that claim that there is some knowledge that compel moral action in the same way that some knowledge will compel rational belief. Let us say that you know that your neighbor is dying and with negative effort, cost and risk, you can call an ambulance and save his life. (That is to say that you know that you will be rewarded for doing so after the fact.) It is hard to argue that you are under no moral obligation to help.

So beliefs can compel actions. And if you deny that you may have certain true beliefs P, you can get a situation where you have an action that you are obligated to do (from the fact that P is true and you believe it) but may be barred for moral reasons from doing it because it is immoral.

Yes we can

I never understood the Shabbatai Zvi phenomena . . . until now.

Elections

The voting place in my hood was totally run by morons. There were essentially two lines, and zero signs, except for the ones that said "vote aqi". The first line was long and only for people in election district 111. the second line was for all others who did not know which election district they were in. If you were not in 111, you went on the other one, or looked for someone to show you the secret line for people in 112, 113, and 130. There were only two people doing this and they were way overwhelmed. They spent most of their time asking people if they were in Election district 111 or "other". So most people ended up on the 111 line, only to find out that they were on the wrong line and had to talk to someone to find out which election district they were in. A little sign that said "111 - this line, don't know - that line, and all others - inside", would probably have saved the average voter in my election district about 10-15 minutes this morning.

Moreover, at least 20 percent of the people on line, and in the polling building were wearing Obama shirts or buttons. I really thought that was illegal.

Economic regulation

I am loath to have an opinion about why the recent market crisis happened, as I know little about markets or crises. But it seems to me that the problem does not lie in the fact that the market was too regulated or too unregulated, but rather poorly regulated. I suspect that Richard A. Epstein seems to have gotten it right. In his defense of libertarianism, he suggests something like this (and I may be getting this very wrong): when government subsidizes some loans and guarantees others, who wouldn't want to be a lender or own such a loan? The return is almost guaranteed. And as the law of supply and demand has it, when everyone can now afford to borrow money for homes, the prices will go up. But this is not sustainable for long. How high can prices go, and how many subsidies can be issued? And how long can people live beyond their means? So too many people start defaulting on their loans, the price drops for everyone, and now homes that were bought on the assumption that there was a high demand (and so at a high price) are now worth less because there is now a lower demand. And since the people who buy and sell things like loans are able to spread this risk throughout the system in diversified portfolios, when the mortgage market went bad, lots of portfolios started faltering. When lots of portfolios dip, everyone is scared and pulls their money out of the market. The rest is familiar. Less money in the market, the less business have to work with, and thus the poorer our country and hence investors, become. (How the libertarians get blamed for a problem the government started is beyond me.)

But anyway, it seems to me that the government is not doing a bad job regulating the credit markets, but rather it was undermining the credit markets when it found a way to artificially increase the price of houses temporarily, by making the money used to buy them cheaper and easier to get. So people who could afford less were buying more, and it didn't dawn on too many people that this can only hold up so long because the government seemed to be keeping the money cheap.

Look, we have all had to make sacrifices to get what we want. Modernity generally implies finding ways to do more with fewer sacrifices. The government seemed to think it found a route to home ownership without the sacrifice. It didn't. The government's plan needs work. I hope that we learned a valuable lesson in what sorts of economic policies do not work, so maybe we can get it right next time.

The man who cheats students

Nick Mamatas is the bane of my teaching existence. He calls himself a writer. I suppose he is entitled. He does write and he does make a living off it. He writes term papers for students who can't write their own. He writes mediocre papers and and sells them to college kids who are desperate enough to pay him some $500, so they can spare themselves the half-hour of reading and five pages of writing.

The first amendment allows him to write what he wants. Any wrong doing that comes from what he does come from the students who submit Mamatas' work as their own, not from Mamatas himself. It is a bit annoying that he gets the $500 for a class I am teaching, and not me, and maybe I should get in tot his business, but that is another story. But what gets me is the arrogant self-righteousness in his article.

Though Mamatas really does not need to defend what he does, he certainly manages to get very defensive. He explains that though he might have felt a bit "skeevy" doing this, the blame really lies with the universities:

The students aren't only cheating themselves. They are being cheated by the schools that take tuition and give nothing in exchange.

Clearly if he is doing their work, the students are not being evaluated and forced to learn.

It is hard to imagine where he gets off saying this. The universities accept all sorts of students. We give them instruction and then we evaluate them. If the students manage to bypass our evaluation schemes, then how is that our failure? And the man who manages to do the bypassing for the students is now blaming the university??? Clearly many students are getting nothing out of their college education - he is the reason why. The students should fail. And I have caught many papers that have been ghostwritten and failed many students. Perhaps I should spend less time teaching and more time coming up with ways to make sure that students do their own work.

Fuck him.

Now they tell me . . .

Apparently there is a prayer now that gay Jews recite over anonymous one-night stands. The relevant piece of Talmud used to justify this has just been discovered (by me) and I include it here.

Ta Shma: On experiencing unexpected intimacy one makes the beracha "who created passion and wove it throughout creation" as it says [in Genesis] "In the dark, in a strange place, our father Jacob encountered a stranger with whom he grappled all night".

But is not this [verse] talking about an angel or a messenger of god - not interested in gay sex? Yes, but it was a male angel, and male angels are always interested in gay sex. Is this verse not talking about wrestling and not grappling? Yes, but grappling is the same as wrestling, and wrestling is the same as "doing it".

[The bracha] is made by everyone, according to the house of Hillel. The house of Shammai claims it is only for homosexual sex. Both agree that one makes the beracha if both people are Jewish, and Beit Shamai is more stringent claiming that one makes it if he or she is the only Jew in the hook-up. Hillel however agrees that if the sex is so anonymous that you don't know if the other person is Jewish then there is a safek and you don't make the beracha as it is a safek over a d'rabanan. However, if you picked up the other person in a synagogue, in New York, in a bank, or a bookstore, there is a chazakah that he or she is Jewish and even the house of Hillel holds that one makes the beracha. What kind of bookstore does the saying refer to? A New age-bookstore, but not in a bookstore chain.

But did we not learn that Rabbi Dorf says "A one-night stand is officially an act of prostitution in the Jewish tradition"? Yes, but there is no conflict, because in the case of prostitution, if it is good, you would pay for it again, in the case of a one-night stand with someone you met in a bar, you do not want to repeat the experience with the same person because situations like this devolve in to same-sex marriages.

A new low

When someone invents a new "chumra" or stringency for Orthodox Jews it tends to spread till all Orthodox Jews have to do it and it becomes ingrained as part of the society. This is true for all sorts of bizarre practices. If this new institutionalized Orthodox racism / Ashkenazi supremacy comes to the U.S., I will have a second very good reason never to send any children I may have to a Jewish school. (Institutionalized covered-up child molestation being the first.)

Chai Elul

Just to make this clear: Chai Elul is not a Jewish holiday.

Unlike Americans, or members of some other countries, who make holidays out of individuals' birthdays, Jews do not do this. We do not honor individuals in this manner. Catholics tend to honor saints like this. I wonder where Habad picked it up.

It is admirable that Hassidim want to assimilate so much that they take on such local and Pagan practices, but when traditional Jews invent holidays, it is to celebrate events, like the events surrounding the Hannukkah story, the Purim story, and perhaps the founding of the state of Israel.

Who wants Peace Now?

I was reading the headline for this article: Americans for Peace Now: Engage with Iran and I thought, y'know what might work: If the group Iranians For Peace Now demanded that their government engaged in good faith talks with the US. Surely with that kind of pressure from their core constituencies neither Ahemedinejad nor Bush could resist open negotiations with the other.

Then I realized that a) no one cares what Americans for Peace Now thinks. Certainly not mainstream America. b) When the time comes that Iran tolerates an organization called Iran for Peace Now that advocates open dialogue with America, there will be no need for discussion, and as long as there is no such organization, it seems like there is not much we have to say with them.

One thing that these Peace Now-type groups will never seem to get is that when there are two sides and one advocates non-violence and the other advocates wiping the Great Satan from the face of the Earth, it makes little sense to talk. What can they offer each other? Peace on non-violent terms can only begin when both sides understand that there can be some middle ground.

In the case of Iran and the US, I don't see the US moving toward a position where it agrees to partially wipe itself or its allies off the map. So perhaps Iran has to make the first rhetorical move, and show that it has demands and interests that are more in line with what Americans can negotiate with.

Americans for Peace Now will continue to stay irrelevant until they stop smoking all that weed and realize how naive their positions really are.

In the Organic Market

This was in the organic market in Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn Heights / Downtown Brooklyn last week.

Seriously?

Yeah.

ACLU fights to keep religion in public schools

The ACLU has a long history of fighting to keep religion out of public schools. Of course, sometimes we should not blame them for failing to do this, they cannot fight every case. But now they are fighting to keep religion in a public school.

Sally Ferrell is an open Quaker. As such, her religion preaches pacifism. And she is taking this religion to a school in North Carolina. In a bizarre twist, the ACLU is citing her right to preach her religion in public school and claiming it as a first amendment issue!

The CNN article is pretty clear about the Quaker roots of Ms. Ferrell's pacifism:

Ferrell knew she would never let their son enlist. Growing up in a Quaker household, she remembered her mother, Anna Schuder, espousing nonviolence.

And again when she looked to a source for pacifism:

She began collecting materials from anti-war groups like the Quaker House in Fayetteville.

So the origin of her fanatical religious views are not in questions.

That is all not to say that the views are not admirable, many religious views are. Take the Jewish sabbath. Who cannot admire a day where one just has to relax and divest themselves of toil, labor, and many of the trappings of modern life. But that is still a religious view, and preaching that in school is unconstitutional and should not be defended by the ACLU. And if a man with a long beard and yarlmuka walked in to a public school and demanded that he have the first amendment right to preach taking a day to unplug from their wiis and X-boxes in a public school, we would accuse him of trying to foist his religious views on our impressionable youth; and rightfully so.

(The same is of course true for Gandhian pacifism. Though he might have had some admirable beliefs about resisting tyranny, Gandhi was a pacifist because he had some bizarre belief about the purity of the soul being diminished by the performance of violence. Clearly these views were pernicious when seen in the light of his exhortation to Jews to merely allow themselves to be killed by Nazis rather than resist.)

When creationism is taught in high school by a fanatical evangelical Christian, no one pretends that the creationism and the Christianity are independent. One can try to argue that their teaching of creationism is motivated by a yearning for finding the truth about human biology completely independent of their biblical beliefs, but no sane person would believe that.

The same is true in the pacifism case. One can try to argue that Ms. Ferrell's views are independent of her religion, but she is pretty open about the source of her Quakerian pacifism, and she should be treated as the religious fanatic that she is. Someone like that should not be allowed in to public schools to force her religion down the throats of the students - and the ACLU should not be defending them.

In Quaker schools it seems appropriate to let them preach their religions there. But in public schools, which are run by the government, perhaps only the government should be allowed to preach. And the government is not allowed to make any law favoring one religion over another. Presumably, there can be little objection to the government promoting agendas favorable to the country in government schools, providing it doesn't unfairly stigmatize a political party that it out of power, or its members.

But one can argue that by allowing the Army in they are favoring non-pacifist religions over pacifist ones like Quakers. And this would of course be true. It would be about as true as saying that since all school lunches are neither kosher nor hallal, they are promoting all other religions over Judaism and Islam. This is of course true, but beside the point. In both cases the government is simply not taking in to account any religious beliefs - not about food or war, it is merely promoting its interest in the absence of any religious input.

So the ACLU should not be defending this. And, as an aside, Ferrell seems to have many complaints about recruiter tactics. However, one should keep in mind that whatever recruiters do to get people to sign up, they are apparently not as bad as the tactics the ACLU uses to get people to donate. (You know something is wrong when even the Village voice is complaining about the ACLU!)