Just cartoons

As promised...

Trudy in a paper bag

I don't normally work with chalk - that is, draw with chalk... at least outside of class. Anyway, I should have put this up last night, because this morning it appears that one of the kitties (I'm guessing Trudy) walked all over it last night, and little kitty pawprints do not improve the overall effect.

Tomorrow: cartooons!

Just pictures today

No real commentary today, except to note that for those of us who are looking for jobs, everything happening in Washington lately is very depressing. What was that Kent Conrad was saying about improving confidence?

Bah.

Link, and reed pens

I like this story... and I think it goes along with what I've posted recently. Not that everyone who reads Ayn Rand is a murderous psychopath, but it certainly reinforces any tendencies that you might have in that direction in a way that reading, let's say, Paul Krugman, doesn't.

In other news, I've recently purchased a reed pen - how did I live without it! I will now be the eccentric fellow who takes his bottle of ink and sketchpad everywhere!

Two things about Ayn Rand

I would probably get tired of bashing Ayn Rand if I didn't think that an increasing number of people take her writings seriously; but neither of these things are new.

First, I mentioned before that she set out to create a "political philosophy that was the opposite of Communism as she understood it... in doing so she came up with a dogmatic position unconnected to reality." But there's one piece that wasn't the opposite of the Communism that she fled: she was an atheist. That's not remarkable in itself, but insofar as the Tea Party harbors elements of the Religious Right - and insofar as Rand Paul identifies as a Presbyterian - there's a fundamental problem. That is, she isn't incidentally an atheist: it's an essential part of her position, in the same way that it's an essential part of Richard Dawkins' or Daniel Dennett's approach to the world.

Second, she was a bit of sociopath. Or rather, she admired a brutal killer for his casual disregard for other people, his flouting of societal conventions (like, "Thou shalt not kill."). Hickman was clearly a sociopath, and Ayn Rand saw this as a heroic quality that set him apart from the herd (and speaking of herds, let me just mention that there's a deep tension in Nietzsche's writings in his rejection of herd morality, the positive things he sees that herd morality has contributed to modern humanity, and the ineluctable interconnection of all things - and Ayn Rand criticized him for it).

Two further thoughts on this second point: first, as with her atheism, this isn't very different from her understanding of the Communist regime she fled. Second, it seems to me that her atheism and her admiration of this sociopath aren't disconnected; in contrast, both Dawkins and Dennett promote a humanistic vision that rejects such brutality.

As I said, neither of these points are revelations, I would just like to see some recognition that her views are antithetical to Christian principles.

The Tea Party can go one way or the other, but there's no splitting the difference on this.

Prints, and a painting

I was going to - and may yet - write a bit about what "liberty" might mean, and what security we might have... and why this guy is an idiot. But today I've just been job searching, reading the news, and working on prints and pictures. So, a bit about what's posted here.

The Plum Blossom painting is on a wooden panel, 24 inches square (you may recognize the dimension and material from here, here and here, among other paintings: my favorite!).



You may also recognize the coffee cup - another favorite, working its way through various incarnations (eventually, a linocut!) - but I did this a year or so ago, one of my first successful DIY screenprints.


"Orbits" was an experiment that didn't work out quite as I had intended, but came out adequately well. This is actually printed on nice paper (Johannot), whereas the other things are printed either on cardstock or copy paper.







The first bicycle print is on copy paper, but as I type this prints on the Johannot paper, in turquoise, are drying; I'll post those later in the week. The black was just to get a sense of the block, to see if it was finished (almost, but not quite). But I think it came out fairly well.
Finally, the bicycle print with rider (and you should recognize the rider from my previous post). The rider should stand out a bit better on the turquoise ink than he does on the black, but the idea comes across.

As usual, I think the weak link is the photography, but that's getting better, too. What I really need is a tripod of some sort.

What shall I do?

I'm once again looking for a job, but it's not entirely clear what I ought to even apply for.
When I was in high school, we were given a large standardized test relating to future employment, determining both strengths and interests. I scored as having strengths in everything they tested (which I believe demonstrates the limitations of such tests - I'm a good test taker, but probably wouldn't have done well in many of the occupations!) - but when it came to interests, the test results indicated that I was only interested in things they couldn't test (I believe it was art and writing, but it may have been music and writing).
In college, I took a psychology class on personality, and read (related to, but not for, the class) Carl Jung's book Psychological Types. This led me to the Myers-Briggs personality types (I have probably mentioned this before, but I am an INFP).
There is a book which relates the Myers-Briggs to careers: Do What You Are, and I have the second edition. So, what does it say?
For the INFP, the first category is "Creative/Arts"; the second is "Education/Counseling"; the third is "Religion." (For each of the sixteen types, there is a different list of categories; e.g., the ESTJ's top three categories are "Sales and Service," "Technical/Physical" and "Managerial") If you know me (and other INFPs), these categories make sense. I don't find them helpful at the moment, though. Moving to careers under the categories isn't helpful either: for Creative/Arts, the first two careers are "Artist" and "Writer," for Education/Counselor, "College professor: humanities/arts," and for Religion, "Minister/priest."
As an unprogrammed Quaker, I'm not particularly interested in becoming a minister (despite having an MDiv); I would certainly like to be a professor in the humanities, but so would lots of other people with similar credentials. And then we're back to the results of my high school aptitude test.
I've also been making prints.

Friday afternoon

I said I would return to previous themes, and I've been painting (house) this week, which has given me time to ruminate. (There's a relevant Nietzsche quote that belongs there, but I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment, and far enough out from my book to be able to pull it up from memory.)
Last time I wrote, "I neither expect nor really want my students to ponder epistemological questions, but there's something important about flexing those muscles." There are two pieces there that probably need clarification.
First, I do want my students to ponder epistemological questions. However, I usually tell them that the great skeptic Hume liked to drink beer and shoot pool (more or less true) and didn't spend his life paralyzed by questions of causation. Being aware that there are various ways of approaching questions, different ways of gathering and analyzing evidence, is very important; and to a certain extent, understanding the difference between foundationalism (Stanford and IEP) and coherentism (IEP and Stanford) is also useful - but practical matters take precedence, and getting bogged down isn't useful, and even serious philosophers don't wrestle with Descartes' dream argument in their everyday lives.
I say this partly because I received an essay (9 pages long, when the assignment was 3-5 pages - a bad start) that included the following:

Let A=K*E1 with K being the fundamental constant that converts the experience, E, to knowledge.

[If this is your essay and you want me to identify you as the author, let me know. But I'm pointing out your idiocy here, and still wondering if you were stoned when you wrote it.]

For those of you who are unfamiliar with epistemology - a group which includes the author of this quote - the "fundamental constant, K" is basically what philosophers have been arguing about for millennia. To think that it can be captured in a constant and dropped into an essay is merely to demonstrate that you haven't been to class or read the text. So, I really do want my students to think about problems in epistemology, but do so seriously when they do, and not to become paralyzed or go to graduate school to study epistemology further.

The second part is about flexing mental muscles. I may have mentioned that my students at an unnamed Syracuse-area college (which was not Syracuse University) seemed unfamiliar with the idea of thinking. That is, I would point to a sentence in the text, and asked what the author might have meant, and they would repeat the sentence back almost verbatim. I would read their essay drafts, and say, "this needs further clarification," and they would be unable to add anything at all. (This was multiple students, over the course of the semester.) I don't particularly care if they understand the ins and outs of Kant's epistemology or Nietzsche's critique of it - it would be nice, and probably helpful for them, but they're not philosophers - but I wonder how they process the news, or if they can even tell the difference between content and advertisement, information and opinion, or informed opinion and dogma. Epistemology matters; but as I said last time, it's not precisely Kant that I want you to learn.

Two for Tuesday

Two (rambling) thoughts, which I may expand on later.

First, thinking about the purpose of teaching philosophy to undergraduates. I was readings a dialogue by another philosophy adjunct, and I was reminded of the Karate Kid. Not a great movie, and I haven't seen it since it first came out, but one scene has stayed with me: Mr. Miyagi telling the boy to wax his car. The boy is dismayed, but there is a purpose unrelated to the waxing of cars. Similarly, I neither expect nor really want my students to ponder epistemological questions, but there's something important about flexing those muscles. What does it mean to understand someone else's position? Can we be simultaneously critical and charitable when hearing ideas different from our own? (I will probably elaborate on this at length in a future post.)

Second, prodded both by my friend Terry (who doesn't seem to have posted lately) and by Fareed Zakaria, a bit of Ayn Rand bashing. Ayn Rand was a refugee from Communist Russia, and one of her goals was to develop a political philosophy that was the opposite of Communism as she understood it. Fair enough; but in doing so she came up with a dogmatic (as opposed to properly philosophical* position unconnected to reality - which would be fine if members of Congress weren't quoting her in public. (I should have a link for that, but it eludes me at the moment).

*Something I rarely include in my "go read Nozick instead" is that he eventually renounced libertarianism. That's what I mean by "truly philosophical" = willing to follow your premised to their conclusion, and being willing to revise those conclusions.

Saturday Afternoon

Yet another post that mostly features pictures rather than text, although there is a bit of text in the story. And a cheery story it is!

More cartoons

..because you probably don't just want to hear me bash Ayn Rand. (Although if you do, please leave a comment and I will oblige.)

Cartoons!

So, today is the day that I post some cartoons.

I may have mentioned that I'm not drawing as many these days, mostly because I'm not barraged by the constant stream of nonsense as when I started this blog.

Also, I've been reading Paul Krugman, whom I find edifying but not particularly amusing.

Informal fallacies

In a recent post on a blog I don’t usually read, a libertarian accused people who invoke Somalia against libertarians of making a false dichotomy. Well, no.

If I were to say, "if you don’t support President Obama, you hate poor people" – that’s a false dichotomy; perhaps you voted for Kucinich and don't think the President has gone nearly far enough. If someone were to say, "if you don’t support this bill that gives the government far-reaching power to encroach on our freedoms, then you hate freedom" – that’s also a false dichotomy. The Patriot Act has never seemed particularly patriotic to me.

On the other hand, if I say, "if you want to see where libertarian philosophy will get you, just look at Somalia," I’m doing something else entirely. It’s called a Slippery Slope. And the funny thing about slippery slopes is that they’re not always fallacies.

If you look at Ronald Reagan’s attack on Medicare, you can see a slippery slope as a fallacy. But big changes rarely happen overnight: there’s usually an incremental process involved. To identify a small change which opens the way for future (implied, bad) change is to point to a slippery slope, but sometimes it’s true. Martin Luther wasn’t really interested in having everyone reading the Bible for themselves, and I think his concerns about what that would lead to have been borne out: a massively fragmented Christendom.

I will continue to refer to Somalia, with two caveats. First, I don’t tend to listen too much to, say, Ron Paul or other contemporary American politicians who identify as libertarian; but I have read some of what they read, including but not limited to Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and Tara Smith. As an political theory, it’s not so much about the size or proper role of government so much as it is about dismantling the social contract. (If you disagree with this, you should say that I'm committing a Straw Man fallacy, and I will counter that you need to go back and reread Anarchy State and Utopia)

The second caveat is that the Somalis aren't really living out the consequences of libertarian political philosophy: things have fallen apart there for many reasons, and none of them can be blamed on Ayn Rand.

On the other hand, the quality of life in the US depends on a number of factors, some of which do have a direct link to libertarians. Freedom is important, but in what kind of society do you want to live?

The Mercatus Institute’s freedom score was significantly linked to (by state)- lower educational attainment (measured by percent of Bachelor degrees or higher), lower population density, lower per capita GDP, increased infant mortality, increased accident mortality, increased incidence of suicide, increased firearm mortality, decreased industrial R&D, and increased income inequality.

I'm sure there are a host of factors, and these statistics can't be reduced to a larger vision of society and the role of government. And yet.... it’s a slippery slope, do you really want to go down it?

So, these aren't exactly cartoons, either...

but I have some, somewhere. I promise. And I'll post them at some point.

These do feature Mr. Miro; they're studies for part of a much larger series that I've been thinking about since I spent four months in Vancouver several years ago.

I've been thinking about Sarah Palin, and an episode of the Simpsons (3F04) where the giant advertisements came alive and terrorized the town

"Are you suffering from the heartbreak of...Monster-itis? Then take a tip from Mr. Paul Anka!
To stop those monsters, one-two-three, Here's a fresh new way that's trouble-free.
It's got Paul Anka's guarantee; guarantee void in Tennessee
Just don't look, just don't look..."

I know, it's like a car wreck (involving Paul Revere and gotcha questions by the lame-stream media!), but as the man from the advertising agency said, "if you stop paying attention to the monsters, they'll lose their powers."

I've also been thinking about unemployment, mine in particular but the national figures in general - as I have been since I first drove out to Vancouver, as a matter of fact - and continue to be horrified by the lack of any coherent response from any politicians that I've seen. Where was the Socialist-in-Chief that we were threatened with promised?

Along those lines, during my recent trips to various bookstores I've noticed an uptick in books on Marx and Marxism... perhaps I'm not the only one that's been thinking about this lately. Or maybe it's just an example of confirmation bias - I see what I want to see. Of course, I also see books by Ayn Rand; my recent thoughts (linking Annie Dillard, Martin Buber, and Immanuel Kant - also Hegel and Marx, Simone de Beauvoir and Elizabeth Spelman) are fairly explicitly anti-Rand (as well as, perhaps predictably, anti-Nozick). I'm still chewing on a straightforward way to present a long and complex line of thinking on the subject, but to summarize: we are human only through our connection to others. (I.e., John Galt can suck it.)

Sketchy

So, I promise a more substantive analysis of... something or other... at some point in the relatively near future. And I also promise more cartoons. But today I wanted to follow up on a recent post regarding figure drawing, and show you what I've been up to (when I'm not drawing cartoons and reading various non-required matter): actual people (and a couple animals) rather than a still life!

Not finished drawings, of course, but a way of gathering ideas.

Squares!

I promised squares a while back, fiddled with these and then forgot about them.

Various other things bouncing through my head lately - connecting Annie Dillard to Martin Buber, connecting Martin Buber to Immanuel Kant... there will be more on this at some point, perhaps with illustrations. For today, you just get squares.

Final Exam

Q: Why are empiricists more likely to be Utilitarian in ethics? How does this carry over to their approach to justice?

A: "Empiricists are more likely to be Utilitarian in ethics because of how they see things. Empiricists debate about where knowledge comes from, reason or senses and since this is the same constant debate that is had it keeps them the same. This carries over to their approach on justice because they debate about the justice system and whether or not it is right and fair."

This is the kind of thing that makes me glad to be done.

NT, right?

This is a rough-ish sketch, perhaps a study, and not intended as a finished product, but it stands in contrast to the cartoons you have come to know and love, as well as the more abstract nonsense I post here occasionally - to serve as a brief break from politics, economics, philosophy and complaining about students (I promise more of that in the coming days).

A friend (who teaches art at the college level) suggested I attend a figure drawing thing here in town (she was also excited, so I did not take this as a direct criticism of my doodling abilities), and it turns out I can't go: I will be grading final exams (did I mention that I'd be complaining about students again in the coming days?).

However, I have bought a book on figure drawing, and I've been doing exercises in the evenings; however, this is the one drawing I've done that was relatively complete, and of course it isn't a figure drawing at all, but a sketch of my room. My choice reminded me of my friend Paul, who enjoys personality typing, such as the Myers-Briggs Personality test as well as the Enneagram: he might point out the relative lack of people in this drawing, more of an NT thing than NF (at least some of you were expecting a theology joke related to that, sorry).

So, hi Paul! I hope you and yours are doing well - I have a package I need to mail to you.

The Social Contract

I have a stock response with regard to Ayn Rand: if you haven't read her by the time you're 19, don't bother. (Admittedly, the specific age sometimes changes by a year, plus or minus, depending on my mood - never past twenty, though.) Sometimes I add a second part: if you want to read serious libertarian political philosophy, read Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

As it so happens, I was just teaching a bit on Nozick for my intro class. (A bit of background here: this particular intro class has a broader scope than the average one I've taught, so in addition to epistemology and metaphysics, I also deal with ethics and justice - quite a bit to cram into a single course, but I try to make some of the connections between the topics explicit in a way that I don't remember them being explicit when I was an undergraduate.) The "justice" part of my intro class is framed as, "ethics is how we act individually, justice is how we act corporately" (in a direct parallel to, epistemology is how we gain knowledge individually, philosophy of science is how we gain knowledge corporately). (And for anyone out there who misses this: "corporately" does not necessarily refer to business, it here refers to people acting together - this is the kind of thing my students tend to misunderstand.)

We start with Thrasymachus: might makes right. Socrates dissects the argument (I can go over that in the comments if anyone is really interested, and doesn't already know it). We move then onto Hobbes: life in the state of nature, and the social contract. For me, this is an important transition, because, as with most philosophers who don't specialize in political philosophy (and perhaps some who do, I don't really know, or care), there is a direct connection between Thrasymachus' assumptions and those of Hobbes. We then move from Hobbes to Mill - both empiricists - and then on to John Rawls. What I try to make clear in that transition is that Rawls is fundamentally Kantian in his approach, and I go into some detail about what I mean there (again, I can explain that in the comments, or another post, if readers are interested but unfamiliar).

Then we get to Nozick, and the thing to remember in context is that Nozick is also fundamentally Kantian: that is, he shares some basic assumptions with Rawls, but disagrees on point particular point. He calls this the principle of fairness, but it's a variation on the social contract. Let me say that again: Nozick doesn't like the social contract. I think this is absurd, personally, but at least the connection between Nozick and Ayn Rand is there for all to see. (I then move from Nozick to Adam Smith, to Marx and onto Peter Singer and Amartya Sen, an admittedly biased place to end not only the section on justice, but the course.)

So, last week a student came up and asked me the name of Nozick's book (which he should have known, since it was named in our textbook!), since I had repeated my "don't read Ayn Rand" line while talking about Nozick - and it just so happened that he had started reading Atlas Shrugged the night before (no link, and I suppose I should be glad that he was reading anything, since he obviously hadn't read the assignment for class). I asked him how old he was and he replied, "Nineteen," so I shrugged.

But the more I think about it, the more I just want to say, "If you're not happy with the Social Contract, go visit Somalia."

Two Thoughts...

...before I teach my final class at RIT. And for that matter, perhaps ever: I am tired of teaching part-time, and although I've been offered contracts for the fall at all three of the institutions at which I've been teaching, none of them can offer any assistance over the summer, and none of them can offer me anything other than part-time work. I don't mean to sound bitter (which is always a bad thing to preface a blog post with), but I'm tired of this, and two particular reasons come to mind. (If you're not interested, please just read the cartoons and ignore the text: you're not my students!)

First, there's this thing about supply and demand. There is a consistent demand for philosophy courses, either generated by the college itself (making one or more courses mandatory for the general ed or core curriculum) or else just by students wanting to take courses outside their majors (that they perceive to be easy, but more on that in a second). So, the demand is there. Unfortunately, the supply is also there: too many people such as myself, running around with PhDs, willing to teach at McDonald's wages (no offense to McDonald's). So the administrators squeeze where they have some leverage, and rather than hiring someone such as myself to teach full time - and please remember, there is sufficient demand! - they continue to hire adjuncts.

Second, it seems to me that fewer and fewer students are bothering with the reading, or coming to class, than when I was teaching twelve years ago; perhaps I was simply naive then, but I don't think so. That seems to be true across all three of the schools at which I've been teaching (and I may have previous linked an article that talked about a lack of preparedness among NY high school graduates - empirical evidence that I'm probably not imagining it). But it makes teaching less fun, less rewarding: I enjoy digging into a topic, having a good debate, getting a response from students. I still get this, to a certain extent, but from surprisingly few students, and it seems, fewer each quarter (here at RIT).

So, this may be the last class I ever teach, and I have some pretty mixed feelings about it. Probably more to follow in the next few weeks.

Misrepresentation, but without taxation

I've seen an odd thing several times recently: people asserting or assuming that socialists want to give unlimited power to the state. (I can come back and find links if anyone cares about the particulars.) That's just a non-sequitur: as a quick perusal of Wikipedia will show (and I will not provide a link), it has nothing to do with the power of the state, only with the relative distribution of wealth and power relations.

(I've railed against Wikipedia in the past, and don't need to include another rant here; however, there are much better sources available, if you care to pursue the topic. I've read Ayn Rand, why don't you go read some

Fredric Jameson?)

It seems that often, when conservatives accuse liberals of wanting something or other, they reveal their own unconscious desires - their shadow, in Jungian terms. (It's become a cliche that guys who spend too much time complaining about/worrying about homosexuals are likely to be gay themselves; mutatis mutandis, concerns about, say, President Obama rounding people up in camps is a projection of people's unconscious desire to round people up.)

In any case, I am not particularly interested in giving omnipotent power to the state (not that I could of course, but I've seen it phrased that way), or signing away my rights in favor of cheap cars and gruel. And I don't even deny that people who work hard, or who are innovative, or perform some vital service, should be rewarded for that; the question is, how much more? Should house painters be eligible for food stamps while investment bankers commute from the Hamptons in helicopters? (That of course doesn't address the question of whether investment bankers produce anything of worth, and it's arguable that they don't.)

The middle is being hollowed out, and I think that's the source of much of the paranoia and extremism that's poking through, e.g. as the Tea Party; but I continue to be shocked at how poor the response is in meeting the actual problems.
There is of course an argument for supporting this: make things worse, make them so bad that the people will finally rise up! I'm not that kind of socialist, though.

Just Cartoons today

I have been, and will continue to be, busy; but I still have some unposted cartoons, even if I'm not drawing many new ones these days.

Squares!

These are preliminary sketches that I've been working on.
There are a number of things on my mind - frustration with students in particular - but I'll save those for another time.

So that explains it…

I just read an article which, taken together with a couple other recent articles, helps me understand what I’ve been seeing in students lately.

The most recent story indicates that New York students are not meeting standards for college preparedness: “just 5 percent in Rochester” meet these standards, to take a non-random example. I look at my students (two different schools, neither of which I need to name here), and say to myself, yes. Most of my students don’t come from Rochester, and of course I have good students in all of my classes. But there does seem to be a lack of preparation for college: do they know what they’re getting into?

The next story is something I read a few weeks back, but was on NPR this morning, regarding student performance. There are two factors here. The first is that teachers seem to be demanding less of their students; this makes sense, given that student evaluation is largely correlated with perceived grade, and there is a large segment of the population (such as myself) who more or less depend on those numbers for continued employment (I’ve never been explicitly turned down for a job based on them, but I worry about it). I suspect the second factor is correlated to the first, because students will complain regardless of what you ask: the second factor being that studying is down by half from a couple of decades ago. (That means the average amount my students are studying really is less than what I was doing at their age: I’m not just being cranky, I have statistics.) And another “correlation-does-not-imply-causation-but…” piece: they aren’t learning as much. Is this because they’re not being challenged, or because they’re not studying, or both? And they’re not measuring general knowledge: they’re looking at critical thinking skills (you know, the reason you not only don’t listen to Glenn Beck, but don’t understand why anyone does). Although a friend of a friend chided me a few months back for lacking “critical thinking” with regard to certain economic policies, this is one of the main things I teach, regardless of the course title. I don’t care if you know what Empiricism is, but I don’t want you to get your information about it from Swami Krishnananda, or a website built by high school students over a decade ago. Which is to say, be able to find out who is putting out the information, then evaluate whether it’s reliable or not. You know, critical thinking. It's a good thing.

What do we have so far? Students are unprepared for college, studying fewer hours and learning less. Where could we possibly go from here? The Chronicle of Higher Education, of course. Students today “give themselves high marks for ambition,” higher than in the past, but also – and they do say these things are linked – report record low emotional health. Well, duh. Perhaps it's the cognitive dissonance catching up, compounded by the realization that they don't really know what to do about it. (That's my job of course, but a surprising number of the students don't seem to recognize it.)

Now you have a snapshot of my classes: they are ambitious, they want to achieve. But they enter college unprepared to actually do the work, don’t do the relatively short reading assignments that I give them, and then are anxious and depressed.

And yet, somehow I still enjoy teaching.