Month: December 2002

Judge’s Rhyming Scheme Criticized

The most amusing story I read this past year had to be a New York Times article about the rhyming Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice.

Justice J. Michael Eakin has been writing his case opinions in verse to the consternation of both his fellow justices and the people who argue cases before the Pennsylvanian Supreme Court. Eakin defends his judicial rhyming by saying that, “You have an obligation as a judge to be right, but you have no obligation to be dull.”

Here’s an example, from a dissent Eakin wrote on a prenuptial agreement case. A wealthy man gives his fiance a ring he says is worth $21,000 but is in fact cheap junk. Later they get divorced. She sues, saying that the fact that the man lied about the ring should be enough to void the couple’s prnuptial agreement. The court ruled against the woman, but Eakin weighed in with this poem which was his entire dissent,

A groom must expect matrimonial pandemonium
When his spouse finds he’s given her cubic zirconium.
Given their history and Pygmalion relation
I find her reliance was with justification.

Source:

Justices call on bench’s bard to limit his lyricism. Adam Liptak, The New York Times, December 15, 2002.

The New York Times Is Dreaming

Via National Review comes this excellent gaffe from the New York Times that is further evidence of their Raines-era fall into kneejerk American-style liberalism.

The British milieu that the Clash emerged from called out for punk. When the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, draped on his microphone, intoned, “No future,” it was the cry of youth coming out of school to discover that there were no jobs in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain and refusing to accept that as reality.

Ah yes, if young Brits were pissed off, it had to be Thatcher’s fault. Of course, as National Review points out, the Sex Pistols predated Thatcher’s election by three years. The bleak future Johnny Rotten faced was the UK’s declining welfare state led by a Labour government.

Source:

No Second Acts in Punk? Ed Ward, The New York Times, December 29, 2002.

Hindu Extremism in India

In the United States, we’re aware of the dangers of homegrown Christian extremism, and 9/11 and other events brought the dangers of Muslim extremism to the fore, but Hindu religious extremism — a major problem in India — rarely makes headlines.

While doing research for a story about animal rights I came across news stories about an October 15, 2002 atrocity in India.

Five men who were Dalits — the lowest and so-called “untouchable” caste — were seized by a mob and lynched. Their crime? The five were accused of killing a cow.

These men were trying to eke out a living by skinning dead cows and selling the skins for leather products. When accusations that they had killed a living cow circulated, police said a mob of 4,000 to 5,000 showed up, seized the men, and lynched them.

The next day, Hindu extremists were quoting Hindu religious writings to the effect that the life of cows and pigs are worth more than the life of a Dalit, and that one of the scriptural penalties for killing a cow is death.

This is especially troubling because it is part of a pattern of Hindu religious extremism and right wing politics. In the United States, for example, there is a lot of consternation when Christian fundamentalists want equal time for creationism in biology textbooks. In India, Hindu religious groups have managed to reintroduce astrology into universities and the military is wasting resources trying to develop weapons based on literal readings of ancient Hindu texts.

And, of course, there is the often deadly interplay between Hindu extremism in India with equally dangerous Muslim extremism in Pakistan.

Which is why this atheist counts his blessings that he lives in a secular democracy where the political system by and large keeps such religious extremism on the fringes (and where our neighbors to North and South seem to have also largely escaped the scourge of religious extremism).

M V Ramana on Maneka Gandhi and Hindu Extremism

As I wrote about earlier, animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi was removed this month from her position chairing India’s highest authority regulating animal experimentation. Princeton University physicist M V Ramana wrote an interesting op-ed in Pakistani newspaper Daily Times earlier in December highlighting the sort of nonsense that went on under Gandhi’s watch.

Ramana writes about the Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals inspection and recommendations of primate research at India’s National Institute of Immunology. After that inspection, the CPCSEA claimed that most of the primates at the NII were undernourished and suffering from tuberculosis. The CPCSEA then suspended the NII’s authority to conduct primate research, although that decision was stayed by an Indian court.

According to Ramana, although the CPCSEA made its charges public and used its inspection to justify suspending the NII’s primate research program, it still has not made its inspection report public nor supplied a copy to the NII or anyone else.

The report probably hasn’t been made public because it is likely full of errors. The claim that most of the primates at the NII facility suffered from tuberculosis turned out to be false — only two of the 207 monkeys suffered from TB. Ramana writes,

It turned out that the CPCSEA team, not being well-versed with the procedures followed at the NII animal facility, had assumed that animals with crosses in their records — indicating that they had not been tested for tuberculosis, which is common for infant monkeys — were suffering from TB (which were denoted by plus signs). This could be laughed off as an error but for the “wastage for public funds and credibility of both NII and CPCSEA.”

Ramana, too, sees this as part of a disturbing rise of Hindu extremism in India (with Gandhi’s recent firing, on the other hand, being a welcome sign),

There is a more dangerous underside to these actions, and that is the connection, albeit oblique, to Hindu right wing ideology with its fatalistic notions of Karma theory and its support for a caste hierarchy where upper castes claim superiority partly on account of their vegetarianism and not coming into contact with “dirty animals.” Some go further: activists belonging to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad justified their lynching of Dalits in Haryana by suggesting that the cow is more precious than a human being. The recent saga of the CPCSEA is thus dangerous at many levels: the distortion of an official institution, obstacles to scientific progress, and ultimately a challenge to rational democracy.

For those not following Indian current events, Ramana is referring to the October 15, 2002 lynching of five men in Haryana. The men — all members of the lowest “untouchable” Dalit caste — were accused of killing cows and taking their skins to make leather. A mob of 4,000 to 5,000 people lynched took the men form police custody and lynched them.

Immediately after the lynching, members of the extremist Vishwa Hindu Parishad quoted Hindu religious writings to the effect that a cow is more valuable than a human being and that the penalty for killing a cow should be death.

Source:

Animal rights and wrongs. M V Ramana, Daily Times (Pakistan), December 19, 2002.

The Hedonistic Imperative

I’ve been meaning to link to David Pearce’s manifesto, The Hedonistic Imperative for some time now.

I have not had the time to really read this online book closely (in fact I strongly disagree with some parts that I have closely read), but regardless of how realistic or off-the-wall Pearce’s argument is, he highlights the sort of things that will be possible sooner than later and which society and individuals are going to have a difficult time wrapping their heads around.

Pearce argues that it will soon be both technically feasible as well as morally good to use genetic engineering to eliminate psychological suffering. He maintains that psychological suffering is simply a lousy (for individuals at least) byproduct of evolution,

Darwinian evolution has powerfully favoured the growth of ever more diverse, excruciating, but also more adaptive varieties of psychophysical pain. Its sheer nastiness effectively spurs and punishes the living vehicles of genetic replicators. Sadness, anxiety and malaise are frequently good for our genes; they’re just psychologically bad for us.

So, once we have the technology, why not rewire human physiology to eliminate psychological suffering? Well, one answer might be that maybe we don’t really want to be happy all the time. After all, some psychological pain helps us realize the negative consequences of our actions and encourages growth and development (imagine if young children were incapable of feeling psychologically painful remorse for harming living things, for example). There are also a lot of issues over just what sort of being a person who was unable to feel psychological pain would be.

But if the current market for legal and illegal mood-enhancing drugs are any indication, there would likely be a vast market for something that even came close to what Pearce is proposing.