So let's see.
Rachel Chalmers pointed us at
the
Slacktivist's close readings of the "Left Behind" series
(infinitely better than actually slogging through the books,
I expect).
One
of those postings
led us in passing to
the
poem that that "a poem should not mean, but be" line that we're
always abusing comes from.
It's a good poem.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
Also on
Slacktivist,
an item
that's changed my whole attitude toward those car fish:
There's a good summary of the history of the fish symbol at
religioustolerance.org,
in which they trace the symbol's pre-Christian meaning.
The symbol, originally, was not a fish but rather, ahem, an
image representing fertility. (The fact that it also resembled
a fish was a very ancient and very, very dirty joke.)
From the mysterious HTML o' the Day,
the
Laws of Guano Islands!
Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of
guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful
jurisdiction of any other government, and not occupied by the
citizens of any other government, and takes peaceable possession
thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at
the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to
the United States.
...
The discoverer, or his assigns, being citizens of the United
States, may be allowed, at the pleasure of Congress, the exclusive
right of occupying such island, rocks, or keys, for the purpose of
obtaining guano, and of selling and delivering the same to citizens
of the United States, to be used therein, and may be allowed to
charge and receive for every ton thereof delivered alongside a
vessel, in proper tubs, within reach of ship's tackle, a sum not
exceeding $8 per ton for the best quality, or $4 for every ton
taken while in its native place of deposit.
(48 USC Chapter 8)
And another bizarre site from the reflog tricks me into
linking to them
with these words:
Log -- David Chess
Asset protection, offshore bank formation, tax shelter and
formation of international business companies.
Is that what I ought to be writing about, then?
Paul Ford writes
a piece
that includes a reference to tiny cameras, which started a little
email thread, which led me to actually read
my 2004 NaNoWriMo novel.
And you know, it was actually pretty good!
The Bubble itself has not been free of camera dust since that
first day; some got in on the bottom of someone's shoe, or in
a puff of wind, or a box of chocolates. They would like to have
devices to hunt down the individual specks, or fields to disable
them, or sweepers to sweep rooms clean of them. So far they
have no such thing, and the world (including presumably whoever
launched the dust into the clouds in the first place) can watch
them (sporadically; some rooms are more contaminated than others),
and they can watch the other labs that are doing the same thing,
and none of them have succeeded. There may, Mary points out,
be a lab that has succeeded, but that shoulder they would not
be able to look over. They have heuristics running, watching
the cameras, watching for any sudden suspicious failure of a
large group of them in a small area.
Lightning strikes seem to be effective, sometimes.
And meanwhile it has become common again to make love with
the lights out, and conversely to make love with the lights
on and everyone watching. There are services that track
which cameras are the most-watched right now, and the most-watched
in the last hour, and the last day (because the cameras track
and broadcast that about themselves also; "here's how busy I
am, how popular"). Cameras showing attractive naked people,
and attractive naked people together in the throes of passion,
are very popular. The fashion shows no sign of abating so far.
What a mass of hacks we are, Keda thinks.
Maybe I'll try to sell a publisher on it or get it onto
amazon dot com through some vanity electropress or something.
Or maybe I'll just
review
it.
*8)
"And after the spanking, the oral sex!"
We all sat on the couch last night and watched the DVD
of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
It was silly.
Two things:
- Treading water in the deep part down at the lake is sort
of like a mild aerobic thing at the Gym, except that it's in a
lovely natural setting, and that if you get tired and stop doing it
without sufficient preparation you might die.
- It would be really cool in some Director's Cut of that
last Star Wars movie (the "Return of the Jedi" one) if, in
that last scene where the big Ewok party is going on and
Our Heros are waving at the ghosts of the dead good guys,
if there was an additional bit of like five or six seconds
where the ghost of Sidious (Palpatine, the Emperor) walks up
and joins the other ghosts, all smiling and waving like they
are, and Our Heros smile and wave back.
It would give a whole nother level of depth to the series.
Readers have mixed reviews of
our previous entry:
Denotation: "Yawn".
We'll see how much yawning there is when they start lopping
off ears for Insufficient Piety, eh?
Mark my words, whippersnapper!
On the other hand, a reader of taste and discernment writes:
Subject: Re Ferrets
I'm no Bill Perkins but I loved your "the creature in this box" thingy.
And perhaps you might give tea another chance.
(I looked for a transcript of the Monty Python "I've got a
viper in the box" sketch ("Some people think it's an asp;
more fool they, I say"), but I couldn't find one.)
I haven't given up entirely on tea; it's just not my
preferred class of hot drink lately.
(It'd probably help if I could smell better.)
I've been reading Vidal's Creation.
Really slow going, but the occasional nice image.
"...and there is no pleasure on Earth to equal
that of dining aboard a boat
tied to a willow tree
in the Wei River
at the time of the summer moon."
Lineation mine.
Today two readers do us the great compliment of paying
attention.
This
one needs no particular amplification (but definitely
gets extra points for the first several words):
I must concur in part and dissent in part with your earlier
reader. Tea is tannic, but not bitter, when made properly.
However, tea is often over-brewed, and when over-brewed, tea is
both tannic and bitter.
As a point of comparison, red wine is tannic (some types more so
than others; Cabernet Sauvignon tends to be especially tannic)
but never bitter (unless something's gone horribly wrong with
the wine).
Possibly then I think of tea as bitter because I make
it Wrong.
Or perhaps I'm just Undiscerning.
*8)
This next one, on the other hand:
David,
I read with interest your comments about Scalia's recent speech and
his views of "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution.
I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to pretend to understand the
nuances of the issue, but it seems to me you're wandering into
the very position that Scalia is warning us to avoid. That is,
you seem to want the current Jurists to connote what the Constitution
means. Connote is defined as "To suggest or imply in addition to
literal meaning." So, whatever five of nine jurists believe a
clause may suggest or imply today becomes the law of the land.
That's what you want?
It MAY be possible to determine, based on whatever evidence
we can discern from history, case law, etc., what the original
authors of the Constitution might have considered cruel and
unusual, for instance. That, I believe is the vaguely
empirical starting place that Scalia wishes us to address.
Then, if we today want something different then there are
democratic mechanisms in place to get there. But if five
jurists believe it is cruel and unusual to spank a child
or place a prisoner in isolation or deny prisoners access
to 'Playboy at Night', and so rule, its a done deal unless
some latter Supremes reverse it.
This necessitates the confirmation gymnastics we see going
on whereby everyone wants to know what a potential jurists
believes in, not whether they are a capable lawyer, because
who can guess the connotations their values, childhood and
nightmares might unleash on us. Again, exactly what Scalia
said.
Connotation does not interpret the law, it embellishes it
with whatever baggage a jurist might bring to the case.
That's the job of the lawmaking bodies, not judges.
Bill Perkins
Well, the easy part of that is that no, when I say
"connotation" here I don't mean it in the sense of
"vague subjective non-literal meaning" like in that dictionary.
I mean it in the more technical sense; in (in fact)
the "sense" sense, as in Frege's
Sense
and Reference
(Sinn und Bedeutung, which I think I did a
junior paper or something on back in the day).
Not literal versus non-literal so much as
what words point to versus
how they point to it.
So at a given time it may be the case that
The creature in this box
refers to the same thing (has the same denotation) as
The ferret which is number 47222119 in the Big Registry of
Ferrets
(if, of course, the creature in this box is the ferret which is
number 47222119 in the Big Registry of Ferrets).
But even if those two phrases refer to the same thing,
have the same denotation, they mean different
things: they have different senses, different connotations.
So if at that original time you have sworn that
I will love and nurture the creature in that box.
and then at a later time I take that ferret out of the box
and put in some iguana or something, there's an
interesting open question about whether you're now
supposed to love and nurture the ferret or the iguana.
It depends on whether the words of your vow were
working by denotation (just a shorthand for whatever
was in the box at the time the vow was made) or by connotation
(a vow about whatever comes to be in the box at a particular time).
So when I say that I'm (at least often) a connotationist
about Constitutional intepretation, it means that I think
that when the Founders wrote about (for instance) "cruel
and unusual punishment", I think they meant to be writing
about punishment that is cruel and unusual.
I don't think that they said to themselves:
Let's see,
we want to outlaw crucifixion, and drawing and
quartering, and the stocks, but not execution or
imprisonment or -- hey, look!
By an amazing coincidence, the things that we want to
outlaw are exactly those things that we consider to
be cruel and unusual!
So we can save lots of paper in the Constitution here
by just writing "cruel and unusual punishments"!
Now that's a parody of a denotationist position,
of course; no one thinks that the Founders actually
thought that way.
But it seems nearly as obvious to me that they intended
to outlaw those punishments which really are cruel and
unusual exactly because they are cruel and
unusual; so if we want to respect what they wrote we
are obliged to figure out for ourselves which punishments
are cruel and unusual, not punt by doing
historical research into what they thought
on the subject.
(On the suggestion that
if we don't like what the words meant in 1789, we
can always use "democratic mechanisms" to change them,
I will just say again that much of the role of the
Constitution is to allow minorities to assert rights
against often unwilling majorities; so "if you don't
like it, get the majority to agree to change it" isn't
really very comforting.)
You're quite right that Scalia would probably approve of
the argument that connotationism leaves the meaning of
the Constitution to the opinion of "five of nine jurists".
I think that that's wrong and/or a red herring, though.
Look at it this way.
When we look for the correct reference (denotation) of words in the
Constitution, we have various choices of what to look
for.
Some include:
- What the original authors of the Constitution thought.
- What the American people thought at the time the Constitution
was adopted.
- What the Justices of the Supreme Court think today.
- What the American people think today.
The first two have us doing historical research, which is
fine as far as it goes.
The first one seems to privilege the opinions of
a tiny (tiny) group of people somewhat too much (among other things).
The second one isn't actually possible to determine; at
best we can get some evidence for the opinions of the fraction of
the American people wealthy or powerful or literate or
lucky enough that their thoughts have survived.
That's interesting, of course, but I see no reason it
should be definitive; those people are mostly dead,
after all.
The third one is what Scalia tends to imply that connotationism
must mean (actually he never acknowledges that connotationism
as a position exists at all, but he sometimes derisively hints
that the only alternative to originalism is the opinions of
individual Justices).
And it's the position that leads to worries about confirmation
battles; if the Supremes are going to vote based just on
personal opinions, then we'd better be very careful about
those personal opinions!
But connotationism, or at least what I mean by it and what I
suspect most other non-originalists would mean by it if they
were introduced to the term, is actually the fourth
thing up there.
Rather than doing historical research into what people
thought in 1789, let's instead figure out what people
think now.
By which I don't mean public opinion polling (polls
invariably lie), but I do mean the thing that good judges
constantly do: looking at the law, and the cases, and
the previous decisions, and the state of society and
public opinion, and making judgements that are
appropriate and correct today.
And that pay due attention to what people thought in
1789, and 1868, and 1920, but that are not bound
by any of those as the One True Denotation.
It would definitely be bad if we had judges who thought
that the right reference for words in the Constitution
was determined by their own personal opinions, and that
denying a prisoner access to cable TV was cruel and unusual;
that is to say, you can have a bad connotationist judge.
No doubt about it.
It would also be bad if we had judges who
thought that the right reference for words in the
Constitution was whatever their intuition told them
that people probably thought in 1789, and that lopping
off a prisoner's ears was not cruel and unusual; that is to say,
you can have a bad denotationist judge.
No doubt about it.
Possibilities of badness aside though, when choosing
between a good connotationist judge (one that
honestly and wisely tries to determine the right
sense of the words in today's world)
and a good denotationist judge (one that
honestly and wisely tries to determine what the
reference of the words was on the day they were adopted),
I far prefer the former.
Not least because, to get all meta about it,
it seems extremely likely to me that that's what
the Founders intended!
Is there any evidence at all that they intended us to
be bound by the reference, rather than the sense, of
the words that they wrote?
(Whew! That was fun.
Thanks, Bill, for the chance to think about it again.
And to use the Big Registry of Ferrets in a weblog entry.)
