Jonathan Turley, Alan Dershowitz And A Guy I Know

Turley

 https://jonathanturley.org/2020/09/16/dershowitz-sues-cnn-for-300000000-in-defamation-action/#comments

Dershowitz:

 https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16520/cnn-lawsuit-dershowitz

Basman:

“That misrepresentation was not a matter of interpretation. The New York Times took a clearly unrelated posting and portrayed it as incitement for murder. Dershowitz conversely is undermined by the very fact that his argument was so nuanced.”

And, so, Turley seeks to distinguish the basis of Sarah Palin’s defamation case from Dershowitz’s. The claimed defamation in Palin’s case is a straight ahead misrepresentation, having nothing to do with interpretation but the basis of Dershowitz’s claim is hobbled by its nuances and *is* a matter of interpretation. 

This distinction is mistaken. 

It may be that on the question of motive Dershowitz is unclear or so nuanced that his proposition is subject to interpretation—though I don’t think so—but that’s not the gist of his complaint. 

It’s that CNN purposefully edited out the anchor of his argument, namely that the *quo* of the quid pro quo MUST be illegal or unlawful. 

By doing so, CNN turned his argument on its head, purporting him to be arguing that a president’s belief that his illegal act would lead to him being re-elected and his belief that that is in the public interest absolve him of any impeachable wrong doing. 

To use Turley’s words on this precise point, “That misrepresentation was not a matter of interpretation.” On this precise point, namely non interpretable misrepresentation, no principled distinction exists between Palin’s claim and Dershowitz’s.

Literature Profs, Love What You Teach

Mark Edmundson’s essay:

 https://theamericanscholar.org/teach-what-you-love/#.X1_y3i1q2hA

My two cents:

Nice essay. I’d be less tolerant of what Roger Scruton calls the “meta-merde” pouring out of the French dudes. And Edmundson is too rhapsodic about the soul broadening effects of great literary works. The strongest reason to study and teach them exists for its own sake: which is to say, engaging what the greatest in thought and creativity have thought and created is its own justification. That seems self evident to me. And that engagement does enlarge us insofar as we have a better understanding of Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton and so on. Are we improved morally by that; do we become more virtuous, beneficent, generous, open, in a word, better people by that? Edmundson thinks so. I don’t. We essentially become more cultured, which is a different thing. When I studied English literature there were, roughly, as many self-dealing, petty creeps teaching in the English department as there were in the other sectors of life I experienced. But all that said, the underlying theme here is surely right: teach what you love; love what you teach; and “Don’t be so negative!”

R:

I agree.  But the rot began in the 19trh century when universities became research instiutions because science was the now the basis of knowledge.  The effort to oppose this was made by religious folk who were what were called Christian humanists.  They lost, so English departments had to find things to research.  The first subject was the history of the language, which used literary works to illustrate that history, as literary works had been used to teach Latin and Greek.  Then literary history became the basis of research, not history as whatever background knowledge was needed for appreciation, but as an end in itself.  New Critcism figured out a means to make the interpretation of literary works a form of research, but it became clear that endless interpretation did not progress, just demanded new ways to interpret.  The last of these was deconstruction, which ended it.  This was replaced by the "new literary history," and what we have today is its current incarnation.  Both the old and the new literary history assume that the works are more or less readily understood, and the focus then shifts to one form of history or another.  

One cannot oppose this with appreciation, since that is not a basis for research.  The assumption now is that we understand Othello, and what we understand is how the implied values are bad.  In a way, what goes on today is appreciation, only what that reveals is the moral wrongness of the values that were assumed at the time.  Call it moral criticism.  

On Removing David Hume’s Name From A University Of Edinburgh Building And A Few Related Issues

 Tweet:

The university of Edinburgh @EdinburghUni, folks:

ed.ac.uk/news/students/…

"The David Hume Tower will be known as 40 George Square, [because] asking students to use a building named after the 18th-c philosopher....rightly cause[s] distress today."

F: 

Tough one.  First impression was that this was madness.  Then did a little research on him and thought, yes he did say some racist things and apparently participated in promoting slavery and removing his name was ok.  But, were they celebrating him for being a great philosopher of for his racist activities?  I think for his contributions to philosophy?  Then I thought, what if some guy discovers a cure for cancer but drove his girlfriend off a bridge while drunk and killed her.  Do we celebrate his achievement or not.  I don't know anymore.  Will have to think on it.   

Me:

To my mind, presentism, the imposition of our values on the past and judging the past accordingly, is an anti intellectual affliction. 

We’re creatures of of our time and we invariably in our growing up imbibe and share in many of the attitudes, conventions, mores, values, beliefs, principles, ethics and on and on of our most immediate environments and our cultures. And even when we try to cast a heterodox view on some of those, we can’t do that free from what Martin Heidegger calls our “background,” which we’re in the nature of things thrown into—our “thrownness,” he also calls it. He argues we can never get behind our thrownness. It’s too pervasive and, so, it can’t be unraveled.

So we of necessity will have strengths and blemishes that will be acutely apparent to later generations looking back on us. Moral purity is a delusion in those who believe they’ve attained it and it’s an impossible standard by which to judge the past, especially the past’s inevitably compromised giants, like Hume, who some, who are competent to make these judgments, judge to be the greatest English philosopher.

This willingness to reject, “cancel,” him for being a man of his time and, so, scuttle his immense achievements, is of a piece with the insanity of our moment, which is evident in North America’s more extreme left, which itself is, as I keep going on about, in many troubling ways continuous with the Democratic Party. 

The Toxic World View Of Ta Nehisi Coates

 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/the-toxic-world-view-of-ta-nehisi-coates-120512

A Definition Of What A Poem Is

Isn’t written poetry anything coherent first word to last set in broken lines, lines that stop short of the margin?

These poems may be excellent or terrible but poems they are.

If not, why not?

A paragraph from say a John Deere manual with broken lines: 

Voila, a poem. 

If there’s a better definition of a poem, I’m open to it.

I’ve looked but haven’t found one.

I reject the idea of prose poems because no principle exists dividing them from prose that’s just prose.

A prose poem in my view is but poetic prose, if in fact it’s poetic.

The Joke Is On Heidegger

Heidegger was an anti capitalist.

Joke’s on him.

His analysis is of a non-fleeing, resolute, authentic dasein confronting groundlessness and his anxiety, doing the specific, appropriate thing in the unique situation and not the general thing.

Nice description of entrepreneurs.