Signal or noise?

Like many people in WV and elsewhere, I've been eagerly following the federal investigation of Massey Energy's 2010 Upper Big Branch disaster which killed 29 coal miners. The latest development is a delay in sentencing for a former company official, David Hughart, who pleaded guilty to two charges of conspiring to violate safety standards and to covering up for them.Part of it may be due to summer scheduling, but it looks like ongoing cooperation between Hughart and federal prosecutors, who have signaled that charges may move up the corporate chain.

Would that it were so.

BAKER'S DUO. Economist Dean Baker takes another whack at austerity here and comments on the Affordable Care Act here.

URGENT WOOLLY MAMMOTH UPDATE here.

SOON TO BE A TWEET. On a road trip to WV's eastern panhandle, I had a WV town insight: Milton is the Anti-Shepherdstown.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Cultures of honor

Stewpot Rooster was always ready to defend his honor.

Lately Goat Rope is looking at how cultural factors can shape people's attitudes towards violence. As noted previously, in societies where the good things of life are scarce and easily stolen, people often develop attitudes that support the use or threat of violence to defend goods, status and respect.

Social scientists refer to such societies as "cultures of honor," but that term may require a little unpacking. The term honor, after all, has many meanings. In this case, we are not referring to honor in terms of moral rectitude or virtue such as Samuel Johnson did in his dictionary. Johnson defined honor as "nobility of soul, magnanimity, and a scorn of meanness."

Instead, as Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen argue in Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, the term refers to societies in which

The individual is prepared to protect his reputation--for probity or strength or both--by resort to violence. Such cultures seem to be particularly likely to develop where (1) the individual is at economic risk from his fellows and (2) the state is weak or nonexistent and thus cannot prevent or punish theft of property.

Think Wild West, prisons, rough city neighborhoods or schools, isolated but dangerous rural areas, herding societies, etc. Cultures (and subcultures) of honor have developed in many parts of the world where similar conditions prevail. And once a culture acquires certain traits, they can often endure long after the conditions that engendered them have changed.

ON A RELATED NOTE, here's a article about the influence of war on human evolution.

WHAT HE SAID. Here's Gazette columnist and economics professor John David writing in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.

HUNGRY PLANET. From the New Yorker, this is an interesting take on the global food crisis that takes a swipe or two at market fundamentalism.

SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE don't watch a whole lot of television.

FAILED CHARM OFFENSIVE. Here's what Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship had to say about the recent settlement of a lawsuit by the widows of the Aracoma mine fire.

WOOLY MAMMOTHS, ANYONE? Scientists are talking seriously about cooking one up.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: MAMMOTH

KANT STAND IT

Caption: Lily is completely Kantian

This is official Immanuel Kant Week on Goat Rope. El Cabrero has long been a fan of this somewhat obscure Prussian philosopher who lived between 1724 and 1804. He was famous for his contributions to moral philosophy, enlightened political theory, and epistemology or the theory of knowledge.

He didn't get out much, being pretty much a fixture of Konigsberg, where he lived a life of such regularity that it was said you could set your watch by the time of his daily walks.

Although I can't claim to have made it all the way through his major work, The Critique of Pure Reason, I'm pretty convinced by its main argument. Basically, it's this: we don't see the world as it is but as we are. The mind is not a passive blank slate or tabula rasa on which sensory experience makes its mark.

Instead, it actively organizes our perceptions into mental categories like space, time or causality. Although our knowledge can be fairly secure within that sphere, we can really only know the world of phenomena or appearances, not the numina or things in themselves.

He also believed that we couldn't know metaphysical things like whether God or immortality exist through pure reason alone, since we could make equally convincing arguments on both sides of any issue. He postulated that such beliefs could be inferred instead through practical reason such as the moral sense.

The part of Kant that I'm going to brood about this week is his philosophy of history and human destiny, which he lays out in a pretty clear (for him) essay called "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View."

About which more next time.

LABOR RALLY IN HUNTINGTON, WV. I didn't make it to this one, but it sounds like fun. Hundreds of union members rallied in Huntington Saturday against so-called "right to work" (for less) legislation. The rally was called when state Republicans announced that a speaker from the National Right to Work Committee would speak there July 14. The speaking engagement was cancelled but the rally proceeded.

Labor organizers stressed that the target was right to work (for less) rather than the party itself.

Recently the issue, long dormant here, was raised again with the favorable publicity in the right wing press given to the book Unleashing Capitalism, which among other things supports right to work (for less), opposes minimum wage, and is opposed on principle to government regulation of things like worker and coal mine safety.

If the right wing wants to stir up a hornet's nest trying to make this happen, an event that seems unlikely now, this could be fun.

ANYTIME. This is old news by now (from Saturday), but for what it's worth, the Prime Minister of Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said U.S. troops could leave that country "anytime they want."

LAST WEEK I WANTED A GIANT SLOTH BUT THIS WEEK, it's a wooly mammoth. They found one in Siberia that's pretty fresh and we're getting close to being able to do that stuff now...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED