What GWOT?

An impending timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq? Think again, and again, and again.

(PE) IDA on Vivisection

IDA's (In Defense of Animals) page on the "truth about vivisection."

See also, New England's antivivisection society and the American Antivivisection Society.

Does Piper Fetishize Fetishism?

(A&P) Adrian Piper claims that we errantly fetishize art objects if we see them as unique, their spatio-temporal locations and histories not amounting to a full-fledged "identity, and their putative power to influence us a mere reflection of our own displaced capacities. Human beings, that is, are alone inherently creative, "alive," and non-reproducible. Her complaint with fetishism is Marxist in spirit (as he applies the concept to commodities and economic "laws"), though I suspect that the impulse to fetishize in aesthetics (as in human sexuality and religion), while clearly an epistemological and metaphysical error (the object of our fetish does not in fact possess the properties we ascribe to it), is relatively harmless. We oftentimes willingly submit to exaggerated or false accounts of the nature of art objects in order fully to appreciate their aesthetic dimension. (We "lose" ourselves in a novel, for example, tacitly attributing to its characters and setting more reality and power than they possess.)

It may be that Piper would not count these as legitimate examples of fetishism in art (because we are at least partly aware of our impulse to fetishize). At any rate, the very idea of fetishism seems to lose much of its force when transferred from the life-and-death realm of political economy to the highly subjective world of art.

Passivity Not Eliminated

(A&P) Here's a link to my January post on the passive voice. Excessively passive note: to be read by students before essays are rewritten.

What 'Is' Is

(A&P) The 'is' of existential predication:

My name is David.

The 'is' of moral identification:

War is evil.

And, related to our present concerns, Sherri Irvin's critical commentary on Danto's "is of artistic identification/constitution" (eg., "x is a work of art"):

When Meat Goes to your Head

(E&A) An article outlining a nexus of concerns about Alzheimer's, "Mad Cow" disease, and meat-eating.

Animal Rights Ambiguities

(E&A) An interesting article raising some anti-individualist, Paxton George-like objections to ethical vegetarianism.

Apes R Us

(E&A) A recent discussion of nonhuman ape sensibilities as precursors to human morality.

I'm with Katrina

On this, the 4th anniversary of the war in Iraq, some welcome comments on the delusion of military power from the Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel.

The Department of Injustice

Alberto "Bush-before-the-Constitution" Gonzales admits, in a Nixonian moment of selfless passivity, "mistakes were made."

An Inconvenient Truth about An Inconvenient Truth

(E&A) True or False? The "meat" industry produces more global-warming gas emissions than all cars and trucks combined.

(Answer)

Our Current Nuclear War

Yet another reason -- as if we needed one more -- for ending immediately the US's illegal, immoral, incautious, etc. occupation of Iraq:

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0311-21.htm

Much Ado about Very Little

(E&A) While trans fat-free junk food is still junk food, I suppose choosing less unhealthy items is better than making no changes at all. Michele Simon directs our attention to the larger social-political-nutritional picture:

"Trans fat is a politically safe target. To ban it doesn't rock anyone's world. Food manufactures and restaurants can find substitutes and keep on churning out slightly less unhealthy new versions of the same old junk food. KFC, Frito-Lay and Kraft can conduct business as usual. And the public won't change its eating habits, so all remains well in junk-food sales."

Defining Vegetarianism

(E&A) There are several types (and degrees?) of vegetarian diets. Most, though apparently not all (see "pesco-" and "semi-" vegetarianism below) exclude all animal flesh. Here's a list from www.bodybuilding.com:

"Lacto-Ovo Veggie - The most common type of vegetarian diet in which one omits all flesh from the diet but does include dairy products and eggs.

Ovo Veggie - The term used to describe a vegetarian diet with the addition of eggs only (no flesh and no dairy).

Vegan - Excludes all foods and products of animal origin including honey, wool, and leather.

Raw Vegan - Same as above but consumes raw or 'living' food only.

Semi Veggie - Also referred to as a 'part-time vegetarian.' Red meat is eliminated from the diet but fish and chicken are still consumed on occasion.

Pesco Veggie - Eliminates most animal flesh but allows the consumption of fish, seafood, eggs and dairy products.

Semi vegetarian and pesco vegetarian are a bit of an oxymoron, but you will come across people who use these terms to describe their eating habits.

Pudding Veggie - A vegetarian of any sort who lives on a "meatless" junk food diet.

Social Veggie - A 'pick the meat off the pizza and it will be ok' kind of vegetarian."

Open Yet Definable?

(A&P) Morris Weitz claims that art is an indefinable-because-open concept.

I want to suggest that he conflates indefinability and openness, overlooking in the process the possibility of a definable-yet-open conception of art (hence the inconsistency in claiming that "Art = x, therefore, art is indefinable.")

Weitz -- or perhaps Wartenberg -- apparently assumes that a satisfactory definition of art must be an intensional one (a specification of the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions required of each member of the set under consideration). But Weitz's preferred extensional (in this case, ostensive) definition of art is still, obviously enough, a definition.

Even so, I remain hopeful that we might construct a satisfactory -- however inclusive and broad -- intensional definition of art. See Jeff Strayer's handout for a brief summary of the relations between necessary and sufficient conditions and the attempt to define art.

Dwight D. Eisenhower vs. Alberto "Torture" Gonzales

"From the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend -- or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there with-out charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus act, and we respect it."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus."

Alberto Gonzales
Attorney General