This is a view of Lake Huron from Mackinac Straits Roadside Park, which is midway between Mackinaw City and Cheboygan, Michigan. I have stopped at this park many times, because it's the first place where you can see the Mackinac Bridge. The weather was gorgeous. Click to enlarge.
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To the Editor:
Re “Obama Issues Rare Apology Over Bombing” (front page, Oct. 8):
The president’s apology is welcome but insufficient. Gen. John F. Campbell, the United States commander in Afghanistan, told Congress that the Doctors Without Borders field hospital in Kunduz was “mistakenly struck,” but the question is what kind of mistake.
If the mistake was that the military knew that the building was a hospital, as Doctors Without Borders has said, but believed that the Taliban were using it or its grounds for military purposes, the attack was still unjustified under the Geneva Conventions without prior warning and efforts to minimize harm to civilians.
Believing that the Taliban were present at a known hospital is no excuse for the deaths and destruction the United States caused.
The United States has been a leader in international forums to end the global scourge of attacks on hospitals and health personnel. That leadership is now in jeopardy, and if the facts show that the United States military knew of the location of the hospital but did not warn and seek to minimize civilian harm, prosecution of those responsible for the attack is imperative.
LEONARD S. RUBENSTEIN
Alexandria, Va.
The writer, a human rights lawyer, is director of the Program on Human Rights, Health and Conflict at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and chairman of the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition.
Note from KBJ: Why is Barack Obama not responsible? If George W. Bush were president, he would be responsible. The double standard is palpable and outrageous.
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Journalists have long since abandoned any pretense of objectivity, impartiality, or fairness. The overwhelming majority of them are progressive, and they can't help but let those views and values influence their coverage of politics. To give just one of hundreds of examples I could provide, the other day, on CNN, the anchor said, "We have disturbing new video" of something. Guess what? What was "disturbing" would have been disturbing to a progressive, but not to a conservative.
This same anchor would never have said, of the undercover Planned Parenthood videos, "We have disturbing new video of a Planned Parenthood representative talking flippantly about selling fetal body parts." See how it works? The progressive worldview becomes the worldview. If you're conservative, you're by definition weird or scary (or both). Ben Carson is fed up with the bias, as are legions of other Americans. If I were a Republican presidential candidate, I wouldn't give progressive journalists the time of day. CNN in particular would get no access to me.
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Here is a column about Alvin Plantinga.
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The American Philosophical Association (APA) publishes a brochure entitled "Philosophy Student Performance on the Law School Admissions [sic] Test (LSAT)," the clear implication of which is that majoring in philosophy causes one to do better on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). No evidence is provided for this startling claim, which is repeated so often by so many people in so many contexts that one is inclined to accept it as fact. Given a correlation between majoring in philosophy and doing well on the LSAT, and given that the former occurs before the latter, there are two possibilities:
I have never seen any evidence in support of the first of these possibilities. It seems much more likely to me that the second is true than that the first is true. So why would the APA imply that the first claim is correct? I think you know the answer: dishonesty motivated by self-interest. The APA wants students to think that majoring in philosophy will cause them to do better on the LSAT. The more philosophy majors there are, the more lucrative the discipline of philosophy is for everyone who is involved in it or earns a living by it. This is another reason why I'm proud to have dissociated myself from the APA. It's politically biased and dishonest.
Addendum: My philosophical colleagues both home and abroad will criticize me for addressing this issue. My question to them is this: What is your evidence for the first of the possibilities listed above? For surely we philosophers should not be making bold empirical claims without supporting evidence. Isn't that what we teach our students? I haven't even mentioned the ethical question. How can it be right to induce students to major in philosophy when the basis of that inducement is questionable? I hope other philosophers join me in calling upon the APA to withdraw its brochure, at least until empirical research (by nonphilosophers!) establishes the requisite causal connection. Philosophers have a chance to practice what they preach.
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The virtue of people who honor their duties of judgmental justice and respect the rights of others to be fairly appraised is called "fair-mindedness." Whatever job our voiced and written judgments may do, whatever changes they may effect in the world, they also form part of the human record, and all persons, or at least all fair-minded persons, have a double stake in that record. Everyone will wish to make his own record as good as possible, but all fair-minded persons will also wish the record itself to be accurate and untarnished, partly as a matter of common interest, but also, as we say, as a matter of justice, and justice in a quite basic and underivative sense. Nothing makes the head spin more than the death and burial of a known truth. Those who have read the passages about rewriting history in Orwell's 1984 will understand the "dizziness" which another writer, Albert Camus, cites as his response to "the absolute murder of a truth." Our concern for the truth is also at the root of that feeling which is sometimes called "guilt" and is prominent in the consciousness of fair-minded people who sense that their own position in life implies a judgment of their merits that is too favorable, that they are therefore posing as something that they are not in fact. The moral principle behind these phenomena is that every person has a right to be treated and judged as the kind of being he is, and since this principle derives its persuasiveness and its impersonal authority from the alliance between interest and the objective truth, it also imposes a duty to accept no more favorable judgments from others than those that are in truth warranted. The alliance between personal interest and the truth may not always be present, and even where it exists, it may be short-lived, but the truth itself is timeless, and it is the truth's prestige that supports judgmental justice even when all connection with personal interests is severed. James Flexner writes that it is "unfair" to call George Washington a racist, given that he ardently and conscientiously opposed the institution of slavery. Notice how the biographer naturally thinks of doing justice to his subject well after the subject, having long been dead, has any personal stake in the record.
(Joel Feinberg, "Noncomparative Justice," The Philosophical Review 83 [July 1974]: 297-338, at 325-6 [italics in original; footnotes omitted])
The catcher is always the smartest person on the field. As evidence, consider this. Ten managers made the playoffs this year. Eight of them were catchers:
Hurdle was primarily an outfielder, but he played catcher occasionally, which means he had the tools (including the intelligence) to do so. The only two managers in the playoffs who were not catchers are Terry Collins of the New York Mets (shortstop) and Don Mattingly of the Los Angeles Dodgers (first base). By the way, all 10 playoff managers are white.
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Here.
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