Siris

From Xenophon's Apology:



[Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates, Tredennick & Waterfield, trs. Penguin (New York: 1990), p. 48.]

I was a bit exasperated by the attacks on Obama's 'inexperience', but didn't say anything about it because I thought it was inevitable that someone would eventually point out how utterly absurd it is as an argument. No one really did. And now that Palin is on the scene, we have long arguments of attrition in which Palinites and Obamans argue that the other is more inexperienced, and therefore less fit for office, arguments that have gone from absurd to straightforwardly stupid. It's playground politics, with both sides shouting "I know you are, but what am I?" at the top of their lungs. (It's curious, too, in that I hadn't realized Obama supporters were running him against Palin for Vice President rather than McCain for President.) I'd like to remind everyone of a few points that seem to be overlooked.

(1) If experience were such a key issue for the Presidency, we would expect second-term Presidents always to be better Presidents than first-term ones. After all, they have the maximum amount of experience possible not just with "national office" or "executive office" but with the Presidency itself. But in fact we do not see any such increase in quality. Second terms notoriously tend to fizzle and stutter. Second-term Presidents are regularly accused of not knowing their limits and of excessive confidence in their own ability to handle the problems faced by the country. Second-term Presidents stop making some kinds of mistakes, but always end up making new kinds of mistakes.

(2) Politics is extraordinarily scalable. The basic skills used by a successful small-town mayor and a state Governor are not fundamentally different: the politics of the two positions consists of exactly the same thing. There are really only four things you do in politics: sell, bully, bargain, and organize. The policies may change, as may the rules and the stakes; but the political skills, which are the greater part of what experience in politics actually brings, are pretty much the same everywhere. What is important is not experience but adaptability: i.e., the ability to adjust one's skills to new conditions and rules. This is one of the things of which we can sometimes get a rough idea by looking at the details of a candidate's experience; but looking at a candidate's experience in this way and trying to sum up their record simplistically as "Experienced Enough" or "Not Experienced Enough" are radically different things.

(3) The features of the President that you most want to avoid mistakes with are not the sorts of things for which experience is easy to obtain outside of the Presidency itself. Being a Senator or a Governor does not prepare you for carrying around the U.S. nuclear launch codes in your pocket. Nothing in the experience of either will be adequate preparation for what to do when you are faced with the question of how to respond, in military terms, to a terrorist attack on American soil. What you need in such circumstances is not experience but prudent judgment. This, too, is something of which one can sometimes get a rough idea by looking at someone's experience; but, again, this is not a question of being 'experienced enough' but of being able to handle new circumstances well. We shouldn't be looking for people who already know how to do everything important; we should be looking for people who have developed the ability to learn quickly how to swim when you throw them into new waters.

(4) James Buchanan was an astoundingly experienced candidate for President. He had served six years in the state legislature, ten years in the House, ten years in the Senate, eight years as ambassador, four years as Secretary of State. He lost against Abraham Lincoln, who had served eight years in state legislature and two in the House. I'm not sure we are really going to cry over that one. Woodrow Wilson's experience consisted of eight years as president of Princeton and two years as Governor of New Jersey. Grover Cleveland's consisted of several years as sheriff, a term as Mayor of Buffalo, and two years as Governor of New York. Given cases like these, one wants some sort of careful analysis of the role experience really does play in the Presidency. This is hard to do, but this interesting website makes a rough first attempt at it.

Only from my casual reading on the internet would I learn the meaning of "voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate".

I was somewhat amused to find NMSU-Carlsbad listed on the Bad Education list (ht) as the "Most Radioactive," a designation due to WIPP, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, where nuclear waste (mostly in the form of gloves, clothes, tools, soil, and the like that has been contaminated by plutonium) sealed into drums is stored beneath 2000 feet of earth and salt beds. This, of course, has no real connection with this branch of New Mexico State University, and is a good 25 miles away in the middle of the desert; but, then, the list gives "members of the class of 2008 slept with an average of just 2.75 people" as a reason for classifying Harvard as "Most Overrated," so that tells you the tenor of the list.

What actually amused me more is that I graduated high school in Carlsbad, and so am quite familiar with 'Harvard on the hill', as the people there half-affectionately, half-sarcastically (or all-affectionately, or all-sarcastically, depending on their mood) call it. It's a branch of NMSU that's designed to function as a community college; it advertises itself as one and only offers smaller certification programs and two-year degrees. And, at least when I was there, it had a reputation for fulfilling that function quite well. I'm extraordinarily puzzled by the reference to "the cost of room and board"; as far as I am aware, NMSU-C has no student residences, precisely because it is a community college, and so does not charge room and board. But the authors of the list seem to have thought that NMSU-C was simply the NMSU, and thus a four-year college.

Hume, from the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section III *:



The claim that poetry is a species of painting is an allusion to a famous line by Horace: Ut pictura poesis (as with painting, so with poetry). It's found in the Ars Poetica:



Here's a decent enough transmogrification into English rhyme:



The analogy has influenced an immense amount of aesthetics, and did so particularly in the early modern period. (As I think Gilson notes, Horace's actual statement doesn't license any analogy between poetry and painting as arts; it's an analogy between reading of poetry and viewing of paintings -- that is, it is an analogy between the artistic criticism applicable to poetry and the artistic criticism applicable to painting. Some poems are to be read closely, some from afar; some look better in the shade, some under piercing examination; some are best as single shots, and some you can read again and again. But this is usually overlooked, and the analogy is taken to be between the arts.)

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* If you can't find it in your version, that's because your edition follows the 1777 (and thus final) edition of the Enquiry. Up until that edition, Hume included at the end of the section a series of "loose hints" that he said were "thrown together, in order to excite the curiosity of philosophers, and beget a suspicion at least, if not a full persuasion" that the principles in the section, on association of ideas, were true. The loose hints consist chiefly of using the principles to analyze epic poetry and its relation to history. Hume probably had these "loose hints" removed as being too much of a digression, and therefore a structural weakness in the section, but it's a fascinating discussion, one of Hume's most interesting.

How Strange Is That?

I felt I fell in love with you today; how strange is that?
Waiting for the bus, we stop and stay and chat,
then suddenly and subito my head is overturned,
unbalances my body and makes my heart to burn.
I'm not even sure I really caught your name!
Isn't this a strange, mischievous game,
where something so ungrounded and so swift
can throw everything off kilter like some new-born stellar rift!
That meeting you but once, but for a little while,
I am haunted by your eyes and the flashing of your smile!
That hardly knowing any part of you, nonetheless my brain
spins out imaginations as though your heart were known and gained!
But it all will come to nothing like the glory of the earth,
and if it pass away, what is this feeling worth?
It is a little fizzle, a little frenzy in heated brain,
and when it ever passes, nothing will remain
but a strange, wry self-suspicion and a memory that will fade
of a day that I was victim to fortune's careless play.

Somnus

Strange are the nights when one's drowses are fleeting,
Dancing swiftly across the brain like zephyrs,
Restless breezes displaced like nomad nations,
Vagrant wanderers floating down the rivers,
Homeless, friendless, and everywhere unsettled.
Can you catch the elusive god as evening
Shuffles over the swaying bridge of twilight?
Can you lay in your mind a trap, such ensnaring pitfall,
Even Somnus himself would find it a challenge?
No: for Sleep, who is like his friends, the Muses,
Like his brother, who gathers dying spirits,
Walks the path he elects and strikes whom he will.

* Mike Liccione, Scott Carson, and some others, have started a group blog called Philosophia Perennis that is already off to a great start.

* Listen close to everybody's heart and hear that breaking sound.... I had heard it was good, but only got a chance to watch it recently. If you like Joss Whedon and haven't watched Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog yet, you have to do so.


* Irish Calvinist recently had a fun and interesting post on Pollyanna Theology (ht). You really do have to watch the video clip.

* John Wilkins has a fascinating post on the first tentative steps of taxonomy in early modern biology.

* Nancy Pelosi, if you haven't heard, has jumped into boiling water recently; she is, of course, a Catholic and recently made remarks about Catholic doctrine on abortion that led to a rather vigorous response, to say the least, then a fighting response from Pelosi's office, which touched off its own vigorous response. American Papist has a timeline of the major events in the early part of the flare up.

* One small symptom of the cleverness of the Palin pick is that it has actually pushed me to talk politics this election cycle; up to this point nothing really caught my attention except Chuck Norris and Paris Hilton, and, very, very briefly, the calls for a science debate among the candidates. That's not very promising. It's true, a few things have come close here and there, but they were mostly cancelled out by something else that turned my interest off; I liked certain aspects of Obama's early start, for instance, but I don't like FoGBoM politicking at all, and you just can't pay attention to the man without getting it in large doses, so I mostly don't. And McCain is not of much interest to me, either. And in either case, it would take something so utterly unexpected to make me vote for either the Travesty Party or the Absurdity Party that I just can't expect it. But this caught my interest for a bit. In any case, there is a great deal of junk and nonsense being thrown around, because, it would seem, political faction is the enemy of all rationality; so I thought I'd point readers to the post at Historiann as one of the best things I've come across so far on the subject of the pick of Sarah Palin. See also her links to discussion in the feminist history blogosphere, where most of the more thoughtful reaction in the blogosphere is happening. Tenured Radical also has a thoughtful post that attempts to separate out several distinct issues with regard to Palin. Cobb also has some good discussion of how this shapes the race to the finish.

John Adams, our nation's first Vice President, was said to have declared the office the most insignificant that man's imagination had ever conceived. This is the sum total of the constitutional duties required of the Vice President:

(1) To break ties in the Senate. (Article I, Section 3)
(2) To preside over the Senate when it counts Electoral College votes. (Twelfth Amendment)
(3) To discharge the duties of the Office of President as the Acting President if neither the Electoral College nor the House of Representatives is able to elect a President. (Twelfth Amendment)
(4) To succeed the President if the President dies. (Twentieth Amendment, Twenty-Fifth Amendment)
(5) To succeed the President if the President resigns. (Twenty-Fifth Amendment)
(6) To discharge the duties of the Office of President as the Acting President if the President declares himself unable to discharge the duties of the office. (Twenty-Fifth Amendment)
(7) To discharge the duties of the Office of President as the Acting President if the Vice President and the majority of the Cabinet declare the President unable to discharge the duties of the office. (Twenty-Fifth Amendment)

(2) is a duty that has to be fulfilled once every four years. (3) involves being the back-up plan to the back-up plan to the Electoral College; it requires such an unlikely deadlock in our election process that it will be astonishing if it is ever required. (4)-(7) only come into effect if the President dies, resigns, or is declared incapacitated. And the record holder for (1) is John Adams who in eight years broke a total of 29 ties; so even in an extraordinarily deadlocked Senate we would not expect more than three to four cases a year (and almost certainly much less).

The Vice President has no constitutional day-to-day duties. The President is not required to brief the Vice President on anything. The President is not required to allow the Vice President to sit in on Cabinet meetings (and there have been administrations when they were not invited to such meetings). The Vice President, as Vice President, has no official authority to do anything not strictly required by any of the above. The expectation in the Senate is that the Vice President, as President of the Senate, plays a purely procedural role; this is entirely a matter of what Senate rules allow the Vice President to do. The President, of course, can choose to make use of the Vice President as an agent of the Office of the President; but this is entirely at the discretion of the President.

So it's a curious office. It serves three structural functions:

(1) To allow the Senate to have an official presiding officer without requiring any Senator to fulfill that office.
(2) To assist in giving procedural legitimacy to the counting of Electoral College votes.
(3) To prevent the executive branch from shutting down in the case of a loss of the President (for any reason).

In essence, the Office of the Vice President serves as a sort of basket for a handful of our Constitution's miscellaneous back-up systems. As far as constitutional authority goes, it carries with it only two very limited active powers:

(1) To break ties in the Senate;
(2) To declare, with a majority of the Cabinet, that the President is unable to discharge the functions of the Office of the President.

Everything else depends on what other people decide to let the Vice President do. Strictly speaking, the Vice President is not required to do anything on a day-to-day basis: all the required functions of the office are sporadic and rare. Strictly speaking, no one is required to give the Vice President anything to do, ever. It is constitutionally possible to have a Vice President who is not allowed or able to do anything important his or her entire term except open the envelopes that hold Electoral College votes at the end of the term. Of course, some Vice Presidents have been able to turn this into a productive advantage. Apparently, when Thomas Jefferson was elected Vice President, he had nothing to do -- the notion that the Vice President was supposed to be assistant to the President hadn't really taken off yet. So he spent four years working on adapting parliamentary procedure to the needs of the U.S. Congress and working on his campaign for President. Henry Wilson, Grant's second VP, spent much of his time doing historical research, out of which came his three-volume work,History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (which you can see online at Internet Archive).