Month: January 2021

I’ve spent much of the last couple of days populating a database of PDFs of and links to public domain theological sources. St Stephen’s House is looking to modulate toward more thoroughly distance-based teaching, and we can’t assume that our students will have ready access to research materials at their homes; by compiling a library of sources that we’ve vetted and to which we want to guide our students’ attention, we hope to alleviate some of the loss of access that distance (and COVID) necessitate. So far, the interface (on our closed Moodle site) is ugly, and that will tkae some work, but this brings closer to realisation one of the features of the original Disseminary vision (and presentation). That’s satisfying (even if that satisfaction arrives about twenty-plus years after I originally suggested it).

Streak ends at twenty days, unless I go for a run this afternoon. This morning, it was raining heavily in cold weather.

I am certain that there are many users of online marking systems who interact with those systems contentedly and effectively. Thqt certainty, though, is an inference from the size of the sample (millions of users) and general probability (lots of people like user experiences that I detest, so presumably some of them are working with online marking systems). I am even more certain, though, if we admit of degrees of certainty, that a great many users of online marking abominate them as intensely as do I.

Sadly, many of us detest online marking in ways different from one another, so it can be difficult to resist the phenomenon with a united front. Moreover, in our noble if futile efforts to resist, to evaluate and comment on student work within the kludgey framework online marking provides, we respond to elegances and errors, typos and terrible misapprehensions in ways that differ from one another as well — with the result that if one has to look over a section of marking (here in the UK we double-mark most student work) part of the job involves figuring out how another person has marked the exercise, and sometimes even where to find the comments and mark. I’m sympathetic to my peers in this; I have a way of doing things that I’ve arrived at after protracted frustration and discomfort with the online system, and I object to doing things in a way that’s much slower and more counterintuitive to me so as to accommodate someone else. I’m someone else’s someone else, so I understand how frustrating the whole experience is.

Some clever developer should devise an efficient, appealing alternative that works from the assessor’s point of view, not necessarily from a programmer’s point of view and certainly not from an administrator’s point of view. It would be rapturous if the experience of online marking were oriented toward helping me, as opposed to shoehorning me into a conveyor belt processing line designed to satisfy… I don’t know, probably someone who doesn’t spend much time marking.

Oh, and running streak now at twenty.

Glad to hear that the UK’s vaccination drive is proceeding satisfactorily, heartsick that the rate of deaths from COVID is still at higher levels than last April. As Margaret and I keep our heads down, wear masks, stay at home, we’re very eager to get our vaccine. If you know an injectionist with a dose or two going begging. you know where to find us.

Streak to nineteen, though a short run (’cause it was raining).

Strek to eighteen.

I woke up this morning to discover that David Weinberger has been blogging about ethics and technology. It was almost as though I’d been projected backward in time nineteen years!

David sketches two main approaches to ethical deliberation, consequentialism and deontology, and invokes the contemporary ‘ethics of care’ in passing. He doesn’t say anything about virtue ethics, the sort that Margaret and I ingested at one of the sources of virtue ethics’ resurgence in the 1980s and ’90s, when we studied at Duke. We’re still strongly inclined in the virtue-ethics direction; at least, I am (I didn’t ask Margaret before I wrote this).

He then observes that neither deontology nor consequentialism seems to clarify the ethical status of the recent shutdown of Parler, the online hate-speech haven. Now, I would disagreee with David on a number of points in the preceding parts of his exposition — but here I think he takes a very wrong step indeed, treating the value of ‘moral frameworks’ as though they were defined by their capacity to provide a satisfying answer to the question ‘Should a society that places paramount value on free speech permit corporate interests to encourage or stifle particular sorts of expression (i. e. hate speech)?’

I don’t think it’s a moral framework’s job to decide ethical questions for you; there’s always, inescapably, going to be moral discernment going on at some stage of the deliberation. Deontological ethics tend to treat actions as if they belonged to natural kinds, easily sorted into ‘murder’, ‘armed robbery’, ‘littering’, and so on. (I know there are more sophisticated analyses of this, but I’m writing a blog post, not an ethical treatise.) Consequentialism begins from the premise that ‘happiness’ or ‘well-being’ can be identified and agreed upon easily enough that its founding premise (‘maximising happiness/well-being’) can occupy a pivotal role in the discourse (but ask a comfortably bourgeois person and an impoverished person how to define general well-being and the problems with that premise emerge fairly rapidly). These frameworks function poorly at articulating ‘what everybody should think’, but do better at providing a system for locating various ethical concerns relative to one another, for somebody who adheres to this or that schema.

So rather than asking ‘which moral framework can define the right thing to do about a medium overflowing with bilious conspiracists?’, I would pose the question ‘granted what you believe about the world and the Good, how does Parler fit in to the moral cosmos that defines your actions?’ In answering that question as a Christian theologian, I reply that although it is indeed a very good thing to permit people to speak as their conscience dictates, that good cannot outweigh the harm caused when people whose leading characteristic is self-interested deceitfulness have means to propagate disinformation and to plan violence against the public. Not everyone is a Christian theologian (and not all Christian theologians see the world as I do)(more’s the pity), so other people will reach other conclusions, but that was always going to be the case anyway.

If we want to argue the matter out in public debate, I wouldn’t lead with ‘Be a Christian and it’ll solve all your moral conundrums’, a claim that is as false as it is unconvincing to… people who are’t already Christians. I’d talk about the ways that making room for Parler advances the cause of people who are in the aggregate already more privileged, and endangers people who are (in the aggregate) already imperilled in the course of daily life. Black Lives Matter. But I would have arrived at my convictions about the importance of standing up for people at the short end of the oppression stick from theology, not from Kant or Mill.

That doesn’t solve David’s frustration, I don’t think, but it may give him something to push back against productively.

It doesn’t feel like it, in part because of the lockdown and the concomitant absence of students, but today is the first working day of Hilary Term. I shifted fairly smoothly into administrative productivity despite working in a heat-deprived environment today and yesterday. The heater person came in to replace the fan in our heater today, so we should be back to our usual toastiness tomorrow.

Streak up to sixteen.

No, it had to be the coldest day (so far) of the winter that the exhaust fan on our heater went out. That means the pilot light won’t go on, because there’s no exhaust fan to blow the fumes to the outdoors. No pilot light means no heat. No heat means very cold house. We are very thankful that Maciej came out, twice, to help us (once to ascertain that Yes, our heater was well and truly out, and the second time to bring some portable heaters so that we can make islands of warmth in our dining room and bedroom.

The gas heater company will source a replacement fan, probably Monday.

Streak running at fifteen.

Day Four of the US Fascist Crisis dawns (in the UK) on the note that various social media providers have cut off the Presidunce and his enablers. This is probably a good thing, but there is plenty of time for DJT and company, and the various Proud Children and Q-cumbers, to strike again — four full days in my Seven Days In… conceit, and another week until Joe Biden is (presumably) inaugurated. I have no prediction of coups or terrorist actions, but neither will I be surprised if the something materialises.

Extended my running streak to fourteen days. Are you sure that ‘streak running’ is a thing?

Today I extended my streak running streak to thirteen days (running in the snow, which is no big deal for my friends in the northern US or Canada, but which borders on madness, madness I tell you, in England). Later in the day I finished off an editing project (with invaluable feedback from my generous friend Tristan Franklinos), which I have uploaded to the Internet Archive. It’s a Loeb-like study text of Lucian’s On Sacrifices, which may be of some interest to anybody who enjoys ancient literature, and may be of use if you study or teach in the area of Religious Studies. Have one on me!

Late last year I tweeted a comparison of US politics to the novel Seven Days in May. If we start with the Georgia election, I make this the end of Seven Days in January, Day Two (USA time). We’ll see how the next five days go.

On an unrelated note, my streak running streak is at twelve.

Job well done, Georgia, if by an uncomfortably narrow margin. I know it would have been a wider margin without the voter-suppression activities that the stte government has pursued for the past few years.

Now that Mitch McConnell is no longer absolute monarch of the Senate, here are some developments I’d like to see:

• National legislation to inhibit gerrymandering and encourage coherent, contiguous, compact voting districts, as part of a renewed Voting Rights Act;
• Gradual expansion of Medicare toward an eventual Medicare for All programme;
• Whatever it takes — Constitutional amendment, Enlarging the Supreme Court — to reverse Citizens United;
• Rapid demilitarisation of police forces;
• Monumental investment in education, beginning from elementary level, prioritising high-poverty districts;
• Abolition of private prisons, as part of a thorough-going decarceralisation initiative, examining first of all the racial inequity in sentencing patterns;
• Annual gradual adjustment pf progressive income tax rates until they approximate Nixon-Ford era tax rates;
• Reinstate nuclear weapons bans, demilitarisation of space, and slash defence spending;
• Figure out some way to fix the Supreme Court and the nomination/confirmation process. Ask Larry Lessig.

Last of all, let us in the rest of the world not hear about insane US politics so that we can go about fixing our own problems without the stress of knowing that the nation with a massive military and a history of interventionist reactivity isn’t being run by tantrum-prone narcissists.

I just caught myself letting a day slip past without having blogged. That will not do!

Over the weekend I saw an article on ‘streak running’, which I first thought referred to nakedness. It develops, if your frame of reference matches mine, that it has become a thing to run on consecutive days. This revelation set me back a pace or two, since (as M. Jourdain might have said if he took up aerobic exercise) I have been streak running for almost a year, without knowing it! I have to admit that my streaks have been interrupted often enough, by weather or holidays; but as a default, I wake up between 5:00 and 6:00, go out and run for a mile and a half, then cool off, say my morning prayers, and have a cup of coffee before showering and going to Mass, when Mass is available.

I do not run naked.