Top blogging, third quarter

 Since I don't post here as often as my main blog, I don't do a monthly update of the most-read items.

But, I do post a quarterly roundup, and here we go.

With all of them, I'll have a bit of explainer, but more with ones more than a few months old, as well as nothing their original time provenance, etc.

No. 10? Aeon, in a piece puffing John Rawls and puffing the author's new book about Rawls, ignored that, at the time, Walter Kaufmann crushed Rawls. I helped Aeon out.

No. 9? From not quite a year ago, with the help of Paul Davidson of "Is That in the Bible?", I riffed on Idan Dershowitz about the development of the book of Deuteronomy and other things.

No. 8? From more than a year ago, but timely for upcoming US elections, I talked about fascism in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

No. 7? A recent book review. Tim Alberta's "The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory" was sadly lacking in several areas, above all, a failure to discuss eschatology, millennialism and US support for Israel.

No. 6 was another recent book review. "Catastrophe Ethics" was wrong from the start.

No. 5? Back to biblical criticism, and again, bank-shotting off Davidson. My "Paul, Passover, Jesus, Gnosticism" piece from back in 2009 takes a critical look at 1 Corinthians 11 and the institution of the Eucharist by Paul.

No. 4 is my takedown of Chris(sy) Hanson, someone who isn't totally what they claim, but with whom the AcademicBiblical subreddit is infatuated.

No. 3 looks at some other r/AB stupidities, like the burial of Jesus.

No. 2? Another extended book review! Joseph Horowitz butchers what could have been a great concept about 20th-century musicians exiled to the US.

And ... No. 1

Inspired by my summer vacation this year?

Per the old philosophical bon mot, indeed, de gustibus non disputandum on natural beauty.

New political-personal poetry: Middle-class precariat pseudo-leftist

Middle-class precariat pseudo-leftist

I know that I am the first and the second
And that they are intertwined.
Does this make me a pseudo-leftist as well.
Am I too afraid
Of giving up the scraps of security
In a bank account and elsewhere
That I have scraped for
To put myself in that middle class
And to try to avoid that precariat
(Even in a precariat career)
To be a "real leftist"?

As I get older
Maybe I'll know the answer
Or at least know it in larger part than now,
And as I learn it,
Maybe I'll be honest with myself.

It's easy to make excuses
But, in a dysfunctional life,
It's also easy to blame oneself,
Or to use the vocabulary of blaming oneself
To avoid deeper thought in general.

At the same time, where is there a dictionary
That can authoritatively, and unambiguously,
Define the term "real leftist"?
"If it feels leftist, then do it"?

Per old Idries Shah, sometimes overquoted
If there are more than two sides to this issue,
There's also a continuum of some sort.
And, I'm on that, and not at the zero point.
Real leftist in progress, or sympatico fellow traveler.

Democracy: An intrinsic good or "only" a utilitarian one?

A British philosopher of science, Philip Kitcher, makes the argument that in at least some science issues, and specifically that of anthropogenic global warming, it's clear that democracy's "good" in general is "only" utilitarian, and that in the specific case of AGW, it has, at least right now, no intrinsic good at all.

In other words, to put this bluntly, sometimes, as in this case, democracy is bad.

Do we need this, or Kitcher to tell us that, though? Probably not.

Stereotypes about it aside, specifics of how democracy was structured in Weimer Germany show it was utilitarianly bad, in the end. Ditto for the fledging socialist democracy of Russia between the two 1917 revolutions.

When democracy in a specific situation is bad for structural reaons, that doesn't mean other versions of democracy would be bad in that situation. The more stable-post WWII Germany democracy might well have survived Weimar. A different Russian leader than Alexander Kerensky, western democracies not threatening a loan cutoff if Kerensky took Russia out of the war, or both, would have increased the survival odds for 1917 democracy.

That said, those historical issues all center on matters readily understandable by laypeople. The average citizen, though, as the SciAm blog points out ... just doesn't get global warming. Or other science issues.

Now, as the article notes, Kitcher's proposed solution is both expensive and unwieldy. Beyond that, psychologically, as Chris Mooney and others have noted, many people reason and argue to strengthen in-tribe beliefs, and Kitcher's program simply isn't likely to overcome that.

So, in a place like the U.S., a nonparliamentary democracy where the use of executive orders has steadily expanded over the last decades, how much democracy should a president "sacrifice" if he or she is really ready to "go to the mat" on this one?

I should add a bit about my philosophical inclinations, as part of why I think Kitcher has some good thoughts.

I'm an anti-absolutist in general, and specifically, somewhat related to this, an anti-idealist. So, I generally shy away from claims of things having intrinsic value, unless it's something like clear, evolutionarily-grounded questions of ethics.

At the same time, though, I'm not a utilitarian, certainly not ion the narrow philosophical sense, because utilitarianism has a boatload of philosophical problems, some of them ethical (as Sam Harris, probably unwittingly, demonstrated in "The Immoral Landscape.") What means are "allowable" to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number? If we decide, in dire emergencies, to "weight" needs of children vs. senior citizens, by how much do we do that? And who decide? How much of a supermajority, speaking of democracy, should be required for many "hedonistic" calculus" issues? Bentham, Mill and their followers, including Mr. Harris, basically ignore or dodge these and related questions.

So, really, my answer is that democracy doesn't have an intrinsic value, and that, in principle, we can never agree on how much utilitarian value most things in life do or do not have. That's kind of where Walter Kaufmann comes from on "Without Guilt or Justice" which pretty much demolishes Rawls, and by extension and indirectly, utilitarianism in general.