For those who followed my coverage of Joel Tenenbaum’s opening statements, I have a few updates as the case proceeds to the jury.
Directed Verdicts
First,the judge granted directed verdicts on the issue of whether Tenenbaum actually committed copyright infringement. While the judge initially held off on this ruling, granting a verdict only on the question of the Plaintiff’s copyright ownership, Tenenbaum’s repeated admissions on the stand that he downloaded and distributed the songs in question pretty much clinched it for the Plaintiffs, and the judge wasn’t really left with a choice. As I said in my comment to the original story, juries are only there to resolve real disputes. If both the plaintiff and the defendant agree, there’s no dispute and no need to resolve anything.
More Nesson Antics
Again, Attorney Nesson seems to have been arguing somewhat orthogonal to the case. He was warned before his opening statement that if he tried to instruct the jury as to the law or argue that the jury instructions weren’t valid. Even with this warning, he still argued to the jury that they should engage in jury nullification, which the judge immediately put a stop to.
At this point, it’s up to the jury to award damages. It will be interesting to see if Team Tenenbaum’s strategy actually helps in reducing the damages Tenenbaum has to pay.
The East Hampton library on Long Island wants to add a children’s reading room to its services. It has already collected enough in private donations sufficient to build the expansion, but construction hasn’t started yet. Why? Because the zoning board won’t approve the expansion. Apparently, this is because the expansion would attract poor kids to the library.
Library Director Dennis Fabiszak has said that the East Hampton Village Board of Zoning Appeals has expressed concern that an expanded children’s collection would lead to more library usage by those who live in the less affluent areas of Springs and Wainscott.
As recently as July 2, the village zoning board is still requiring that the library submit to an environmental review, adds Fabiszak. The local zoning board has taken this position despite a statement from the consul for the New York State Department of Environmental Conversation (NYSDEC) stating that the library is an “educational institution” and according to regulations is exempt from such a review. The NYSDEC letter to the zoning board reaffirmed a prior determination from the state’s Department of Education.
In contrast to the prevailing trends, I’d like to state for the record that vampires are much more interesting as characters when they are threats, not love interests. Now, there can be an element of seduction to that threat (see e.g. Dracula), but they really ought to be the bad guys.
“When bad literary writers try to tell a story, they inevitably fall into the next trap of the genre: that ‘true’ stories are always dark, that ‘true’ characters always hate their parents, and their parents deserve it, and ditto for their parents’ values, unless they happened to be absolutely politically correct, in which case they have the true religion.
This sounds absolutely absurd, but in book after book, story after story, it’s the fundamental cliche of the literary genre. It’s as if you have to remain a perpetual angry teenager in order to be a literary writer; you’re forbidden to grow up enough to realize your parents were doing the best they could, and most of the time they were absolutely right about the things they tried to teach their stupid, ungrateful children.”
– Orson Scott Card
Megan McArdle rightly points out that losing weight in our culture isn’t a matter of “not enough willpower” or “needing more nutrition education.”
Some of the things Paul Campos is saying about obesity are controversial, but this isn’t. Every single study which has attempted to make overweight people get thin without very risky surgery has failed completely and utterly. Fewer than 1% of patients ever keep the weight off.
Highly educated people who have managed to get their body weight down 5-10% from where their body naturally wants to be confuse what they are doing with what someone obese enough to cause significant medical problems would need to do, which is get their weight down 50% or more from where their body apparently wants it. They are not the same thing. The amount of weight loss that these sanctimonious slenderizers have achieved has no statistically significant health benefits. Let me repeat: losing twenty pounds will not make you healthier.
[...]
If when eating a normal 2,000-2,500 calorie diet, you do not spend significant amounts of your day fixating on food–fantasizing about it, binging, hiding it, strategizing how to procure it–you do not have anything interesting to say to someone who is struggling with obesity. You do not have better willpower than they do. You do not “care about myself” more. You are not more “serious about a healthy lifestyle” because you took off the eight pounds you gained at Christmas. You are no more qualified to lecture the obese on how to lose weight than I am qualified to lecture my short friends on how to become tall. You just have a different environmental and genetic legacy than they do. You’re not superior. You’re just somewhat thinner.
Rahul K. Parikh has an absolutely fantastic article about the Huffington’s Post insane catering to “alternative” medicine and pseudoscience.
The Huffington Post is one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on the Internet these days. It operates mostly as a news aggregation site (it has featured Salon stories) and throws open its doors to a wide range of bloggers, who cover everything from politics to entertainment. “When it comes to health and wellness issues, our goal is to provide a diverse forum for a reasoned discussion of issues of interest and importance to our readers,” Arianna Huffington, the site’s namesake founder, author, socialite and pundit, told me.
I would like to believe her. But when it comes to health and wellness, that diverse forum seems defined mostly by bloggers who are friends of Huffington or those who mirror her own advocacy of alternative medicine, described in her books and in many magazine profiles of her. Among others, the site has given a forum to Oprah Winfrey’s women’s health guru, Christiane Northrup, who believes women develop thyroid disease due to an inability to assert themselves; Deepak Chopra, who mashes up medicine and religion into self-help books and PBS infomercials; and countless others pitching cures that range from herbs to blood electrification to ozonated water to energy scans.
As a physician, I am not necessarily opposed to alternative health treatments. But I do want to be responsible and certain that what I prescribe to patients is safe and effective and not a waste of their time and money. A recent Associated Press investigation stated the federal government has spent $2.5 billion of our tax dollars to determine whether alternative health remedies — including ones promoted on the Huffington Post — work. It found next to none of them do. The site also regularly grants space to proponents of the thoroughly disproven conspiracy that childhood vaccines have caused autism. In short, the Huffington Post is hardly a site that promotes “a reasoned discussion,” in its founder’s words, of health and medicine.
Read the whole thing, which is just a terrific takedown. The number of people who believe in crazy heath theories never ceases to amaze me.
In an encore performance from his brilliant rendition of Sarah Palin’s farewell speech, William Shatner was on the tonight show last night doing a re-interpretation of Sarah Palin’s twitter feed.
William Bradford makes what is, in my opinion, an important point about natural rights theory.
I’m going to take a messy first stab at expressing why I’m suspicious of natural rights.
It seems that there’s a huge number of ways to formulate theories of natural rights, and it could be that one or more of them would satisfy me. But I’m thinking here of the versions of natural-rights theory that follow Locke’s “life, liberty, and property” rights to a libertarian conclusion. I’m averse to a theory that leaves the individual as resident of a rights-bubble, within which she may anything she pleases, and outside of which she may act only with the consent of the others whose rights-bubbles she’s dealing with.
So far, so good. I’m with Brafford that natural rights do sound pretty silly in concept, when you get right down to the point of thinking about them. My problem is that he goes off the rails here:
This is not how I see the world. I’m more an obligation-web kind of guy, and I tend to see the individual as a node of a web of obligations of various strengths. The strands that tie me to my family and close friends are stronger and more complicated than those that tie me to my acquaintances, which are in turn stronger than the strands that bind me (quite loosely) to strangers.
To me, this is just as metaphysically silly as the rights-bubble concept. Personally, one of the problems that I have with the “first things” approach to political philosophy–and moral/ethical thinking in general–is that it’s generally not rigorous at all.
I utterly fail to grasp why people who are perfectly demanding of standards of reason and experience when it comes to day to day life are willing to chuck those things out the door when it comes time to ethics talk. Why can’t we approach ethics and rights as rigorously as we approach everything else? Why do we retreat to metaphysical metaphors like the “state of nature” or the “veil of ignorance” instead of empirical understanding grounded in testable knowledge?
As you are probably not at all surprised to learn, I was an avid debater when I was in high school. So it’s with no small amount of nostalgia that I enjoyed this “debate card” that was prepared for me by fellow debater Danny Alexander for my Obama citizen article:
Knapp ‘09,
“Those who claim that Obama is a citizen rely too heavily on the metaphysical premise that reality is perceivable and knowable.”
“No question, that is, if you accept the dominant paradigm of metaphysical realism. That is, the idea that things exist independent of the mind and that those things are perceivable and knowable. Moreover, those who insist that Barack Obama is an American citizen also rely on philosophic naturalism–the idea that reality is subject to objective, knowable natural laws that can’t be tampered with.
However, if one rejects these two philosophic concepts, it’s quite easy to demonstrate that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the (U.S.) United States and is therefore constitutionally ineligible to be President of the United States.”
If that makes no sense to you at all, I’m sorry. But it made my day. Thanks, Danny.
