authenticity and responsibility

"You've always gotta do things your way, don't you. No wonder Briggs stays on your tail."

"Do things someone else's way and you take your life into your own hands."

~Harry responding to his partner in Magnum Force

Harry seems to be making a counterintuitive remark here. To take one's life into one's own hands is to take responsibility for one's actions in the most extreme way. Yet Harry here implies that it is precisely when you are following the suggestions (in this case explicit orders) of another that you are most responsible for your actions.

Conversely, the claim seems to be that responsibility of the take your life into your own hands sort is avoided precisely by doing things one's own way.

Of course, this goes against common sense attributions of blame and agency, and is a direct converse of the "deep self concordance" model of blame attribution. That model claims that attributions of agency and blame occur when there is an agreement (concordance) between the agent's actions and his deeper commitments and value judgments (i.e. his "deep self").

Here, Harry expounds the opposite - when you act in a way that disagrees with your deeper ideological commitments, then you are the one to blame for the consequences of those actions.

I think the positive suggestion behind Harry's claim is that there is something blameless about acting in accordance with one's deep seated beliefs. If we act against our instincts / values / ideology, then we are violating a fundamental principle of authenticity - we have voluntarily given over control of our actions to another source, one which we, at a deep level, disagree with. This knowing abandonment of authenticity does not free one from blame, but rather that act itself places the weight of responsibility more heavily upon one.

As a corollary, acting authentically, i.e. in accordance with one's deep seated beliefs, frees one from blame—or, at the very least, constitutes itself an explanation and justification for one's actions: "I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do."

bathtubs

Anecdotal evidence, but...

Supposedly, the bathtub is the safest place in the house. If some kind of destructive event occurs (a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, whatever) the single safest place to be is the bathtub. This is because it is the most heavily shielded nook in the house.

Supposedly, the bathtub is the most dangerous place in the house. Statistically speaking, the most household deaths occur in the bathtub. Perhaps this is because it if a nook filled with water to which people go to relax—if that relaxation becomes too serious, whether because of overindulgence in some kind of relaxation enhancer or other

the physics of posters?

A week ago, I put two posters (both from the same source) on my wall with thumbtacks. I was very careful to smooth the posters along the wall so that they would lie flat.

Then, a couple days later, I was very dismayed to notice that posters hanging somewhat slack. I even considered moving the thumbtacks in order to stretch and smooth them more so that they would lie flat.

Luckily, laziness prevailed. Today, the posters are lying flat again, just as I hung them.

So, what's the cause here? When the posters hung slack, I assumed that either a) my recollections of hanging them were inaccurate, or b) the posters were heavy enough to widen the tack holes, and thus hang more loosely.

Now that the posters are lying flat again, the natural assumption is that some kind of expansion and contraction occurred. And, the posters are hung in a small room with a small window that is frequently open, so environment inside changes with that outside.

Here's the puzzle, though: In general, temperature change causes bodies to expand w/ increased warmth and contract with cooling. But, if anything, the intermediary period between the first hanging of the posters and today was cooler than either their hanging or today. What to make of this? Perhaps not temperature, but moisture is to blame? How exactly would this cause such contraction and expansion in a wall poster?

metasexism

In the first Dirty Harry movie, one suggestion for Harry's nickname is his hatred for minorities. Ironically, of course, Harry's partner in that film is hispanic, and in the sequel (Magnum Force), his partner is african american.

In the third film in the series, some attempt at emphasizing the essential decency of Harry's character (and its consistency with his hardline conservativism about law enforcement) is made by giving him a female partner. As might be expected, Harry at first spurns her, but gradually grows to accept and respect her. For her part, his partner proves her worth at police work, ultimately saving Harry's life.
Tyne Daly as Harry's partner shooting the bad guys in the climatic scene of The Enforcer.

The message is clearly that women can be just as badass and hard on crime as men and that sexism is not a necessary correlate of conservativism about law enforcement.

How ironic is it, then, that on a documentary about the politics of the Dirty Harry movies (on the Magnum Force DVD), when Tyne Daly is interviewed, she is referred to as "actor"?
I suppose this may be one of those cases where the PC thing to do is not immediately clear. Using "actor" for an actress seems to me to follow the pattern of using a male-marked word for all members of a group (e.g. "mankind" for men and women), so I would have thought it showed disrespect to use it.

Conversely, of course, the "-or" or "-er" marking strictly speaking just denotes agency. The seeming markedness of "actor" or "mister" comes from the existence of a corresponding "-ress" form. "-or" words like prosecutor or perpetrator which do not also seem non-marked.

According to wikipedia, using "actor" for actresses is considered by some the PC thing to do: "As actress is a specifically feminine word, some groups assert that the word is sexist. Gender-neutral usage of actor has re-emerged in modern English, especially when referring to male and female performers collectively, but actress remains the common term used in major acting awards given to female recipients and is common in general usage."

But if we buy this reasoning, should we also call women "mister"? Etymologically speaking, mister derives from Indo-European megh, or "great", via Latin magister ("teacher"), from which also "master". So, historically, the "-er" of mister is also an "-er" of agency, implying we can use it in a gender neutral fashion to refer to women respectfully as well.

cordoba initiative ii

Pat Condell on the proposed mosque at Ground zero again.

"People keep framing this as a religious freedom issue, but there's a difference between practicing your religion which everyone has the right to do and rubbing your religion in people's faces as a triumphalist religious statement, which is what's happening here. . . .

". . . [T]he mosque part of this building will occupy the top two floors, which means it will overlook the scene of conquest, which is why the site was chosen. When the governor of New York offered to help them find an alternative site, they wouldn't even discuss it. Moving it somewhere else would negate the very purpose of building it, which is to rub 9/11 in America's face. If they can't build it there, there's no point in building it anywhere else. . . .

". . . [T]he people behind it clearly don't have the intelligence or the good grace to withdraw the plans even though they know as well as everyone else that if the positions were reversed, and this level of calculated insult were being directed at Islam, there is no way on earth that this project would be allowed to proceed, constitution or no constitution."

Tru dat.

[For references, follow the link to the original video.]

life and death

9 / 11

. . . Islam had evolved a response to the challenge of a world populated with strangers, though one that has proved fragile under the stresses of more recent centuries. That fragility is not accidental, though. The fact that Islam rapidly acquired impressive military and political strength within a few years of its foundation meant that—unlike Christianity—it never needed to develop a philosophy of compromise with secular authorities and could indulge the ambition of a comprehensive regulation of social life. Its periods of tolerance were, therefore, the product of vast self-confidence and the absence of any real internal challenge rather than an ideology that had adapted to the permanent presence of strangers.

~ Paul Seabright (2010) The Company of Strangers