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Diary
By lm (Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 10:59:24 AM EST) (all tags)
I put a new piece up on doxos covering two of everybody's favorite discussion topics, paying for sex and justice:
How the Classical Idea of Justice Ought to Underly the Debate Over Victimless Crimes Such as Prostitution

Odds and ends on the weekend follow.



All in all, the weekend was mostly uneventful.

Friday night I helped a friend track down a bug in project with C#. The problem turned out to be the call to a database library returning a 64 bit integer as the result of a select count statement. A 64 bit integer seems a little excessive to me for that purpose. Regardless of my opinion on the matter, C# doesn't know how to explicitly cast that to a string or a 32 bit integer. Which I also think is kind of dumb, but YMMV.

Saturday, I wrote a good deal of my piece on justice and prostitution. I'd written an outline earlier in the week but ended up using none of it. I really ought to go back and re-read Aristotle's chapter in the Ethics on justice. It's good stuff and covers almost everything present in present debates on the subject.

I also went running Saturday. My progress is kind of negative on that front. I'm down to running less than 3 miles. On the other hand, I'm actually running the distance. I can cover over a mile at a pace more akin to a lope than a trudge which is how I worked my way up to 6 miles, trudging along.

I also spoke on the phone with a good friend who moved away relatively recently (for certain definitions of recently). Turns out that he may have a girl friend. He related bits and pieces to me but didn't really have time to talk for long. He promised to call later in the evening or the next day but didn't get around to it. This is quite understandable given the circumstances he's currently in.

Sunday was a very long day. It began with washing dishes and toasting walnuts. These tasks were followed by attending the divine liturgy, chilling out at coffee hour for a bit, and then collecting my wife and kids to head out to my wife's brother's house in the exclusive northern suburbs for an easter dinner with her family. We brought chips with a black bean dipping sauce, a bottle of sparkling grape juice, green beans with toasted walnuts and a six pack of Christian Moerlein  's Emancipator doppelbock. I'd tried to find their Barbarosa but failed. Emancipator was so-so. It was decent, but not to my liking all that much. My wife, however, quite liked it as did my brother-in-law. My father-in-law sided with me on the question. The menfolk had a pleasant time hanging out on the driveway while playing with fire deep frying a turkey while the womenfolk ventured forth to the newly opened Ikea. Conversations tended to be deeper than normal. The largest downside is that I didn't get as much done as I would like to do, including finishing my essay. That would have to wait for Monday morning.

Which brings us to Monday morning. This, indeed, is Monday morning.

< Oh Mother. | Now I get it >
Let's cut straight to the point, shall we? | 19 comments (19 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback
Given your orthodox calendar by sasquatchan (2.00 / 0) #1 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 11:06:30 AM EST
If the in-laws called Sunday's meal easter, what did you call it ?



slim pickins by lm (2.00 / 0) #3 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 11:33:36 AM EST
Out of politeness, I ate some of the fixings (stuffing, sweet potato casserole, etc.) even though I knew they contained dairy but I avoided eating any of the turkey as we Orthodox are still in Lent and eating meat, meat by-products and dairy are on the proscribed list until after Pascha. But garciously accepting hospitality is also important in the eastern tradition.

Aside from that, I tend to be `when in Rome' kind of guy. I've got no problem wishing people a happy easter when they're celebrating easter just like I have no problem wishing my mother, who doesn't celebrate easter at all, a happy equinox.


There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

Umm by MartiniPhilosopher (2.00 / 0) #2 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 11:20:00 AM EST
All friend needs to do, if it is indeed a simple built in type is to call the .ToString() method on the long. Otherwise, you can do an explicit cast by putting "(int)" in front of the long that's trying to be cast.

Whenever I hear one of those aforementioned douche bags pontificate about how dangerous [...] videogames are I get a little stabby. --Wil Wheaton.


He didn't actually want a string by lm (2.00 / 0) #4 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 11:38:19 AM EST
He made a bad assumption. Since the query returns string data in a sql interpreter (psql), he assumed that it would also return a string when that same query was called from npgsql's execute_scalar function. Execute scalar returns different objects depending on the query that's run and casting to (int) doesn't work (at least not on mono) without a run time exception because the 64 bit number being returned by execute_scalar won't fit into a normal int.

But that is neither here nor there. Now he understands why what he was doing wasn't working.


There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

we had a major sev 1 issue here by Dr H0ffm4n (2.00 / 0) #18 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 05:02:07 AM EST
One of teh developers went on holiday on the day that his .Net webby business critical app was launched. Turned out that it'd never been tested by more than one person at the same time. I thought these modern web frameworks made it virtually impossible to code without coping with concurrency. Turns out that it isn't impossible at all. When you have 300 users all log in and start trading, hilarity ensues.

[ Parent ]

From what I've played with so far by MartiniPhilosopher (2.00 / 0) #19 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 10:22:55 AM EST
.Net is pretty damn stupid when it comes to concurrency unless you beat it to within an inch of its life. There are all sorts of notes that I keep coming across when researching the various interfaces that say "Note: This should not be used if you are doing asynchronous operations". In other words, "We didn't make this code multi-thread or multi-user safe. Good luck with that."

Whenever I hear one of those aforementioned douche bags pontificate about how dangerous [...] videogames are I get a little stabby. --Wil Wheaton.
[ Parent ]

paying for sex and justice by wiredog (2.00 / 0) #5 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 12:30:37 PM EST
Is that "(paying for sex) and justice" or "paying for (sex and justice)"?

Earth First!
(We can strip mine the rest later.)



Read your article by anonimouse (4.00 / 1) #6 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 01:47:16 PM EST
Your argument seems to be that prostitution in itself causes harm. I would reply that the real harm lies in the fact that the activity is unregulated and unprotected by the law, meaning that women (and men) are not protected by the law when they really need it.

Any activity that is outlawed carries with it the risk of violence and the fact that people without ethics will attempt to ruthlessly profit from the situation. The 1920s/30s Prohibition is a classic example of this, as is todays drugs trade.


Girls come and go but a mortgage is for 25 years -- JtL


I must have wrote that article very badly by lm (4.00 / 1) #7 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 02:00:30 PM EST
``Your argument seems to be that prostitution in itself causes harm''

I could have sworn that I was explicitly arguing against that very point.


There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

Quote..Unquote by anonimouse (4.00 / 1) #8 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 02:11:00 PM EST
One could object at this point that the two things are equivalent. Let us stipulate for a moment that prostitution does indeed cause some harm to prostitutes. (While I certainly agree with this proposition, I would be surprised if everyone who reads would also agree. There are those who object to this idea for a number of different reasons, some more well thought out than others.)

Girls come and go but a mortgage is for 25 years -- JtL
[ Parent ]

`` Let us stipulate for a moment'' by lm (2.00 / 0) #10 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 02:22:35 PM EST
In other words, let's assume that the point under discussion is true so that we can see where it gets us if we do.

The point I was trying to make is that if prostitution is inherently unjust it is no because it's inherently harmful. It may very well be inherently harmful, but I didn't even attempt to demonstrate that. And, in fact, I didn't even do a very good job of demonstrating what was my point. Some anonymous poster just put a very good comment up that points out the largest failings.


There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

Actually, I take that last bit back by lm (2.00 / 0) #11 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 02:54:25 PM EST
I'd read the anonymous comment too quickly. It's most likely a troll but it could be a misogynist of insufficiently advanced intellect. Not having read it with sufficient attention, I'd thought that it made a far more profound criticism than it actually made.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

maybe he's just pointing out by alprazolam (2.00 / 0) #12 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 03:22:33 PM EST
that you don't seem (to me) to make a real argument for or against the idea of prostitution causing harm. but anyways i certainly get anonimouse's point that it does more harm when unregulated than it would otherwise.

[ Parent ]

I would agree with that criticism by lm (2.00 / 0) #15 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 03:49:50 PM EST
I did not actually make a case that prostitution is inherently unjust. In part because it was a secondary point but mostly because I ran out of time in the week. I'm probably going to put this on my list of things to revisit.

The prohibition argument is one that I would probably agree with in the end. Perhaps not, but it is a very strong argument. In the case of drugs and alcohol, I think there is a much more compelling case. There is also something to be said for the idea that not everything that is unjust should be made illegal. The condemnation of prostitution as an injustice is not necessarily incompatible with the idea that it might be made legal.


There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

No by yicky yacky (2.00 / 0) #9 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 02:18:09 PM EST

He was arguing against a certain (quasi-Platonic) conception of Justice that leads to a necessarily circular argument by which the sought-for conclusions are implicit within the set-up.

He didn't address whether prostitution causes harm or not; his point was that our simplistic [media] discourse was based around a view of Justice which wasn't necessarily correct or relevant to start with with; and was therefore disputing the conclusion easily reached by many commentators by pointing out there was already a problem even higher (earlier) in the logic chain than at the point at which most debates start to occur.


----
15 days left ...
[ Parent ]

Prostitution by Alan Crowe (4.00 / 4) #13 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 03:37:52 PM EST
I think that your essay misses the opportunity to ground moral theorising in particulars. Here are some of the issues that should bring a theorist down to earth with a bump.

I prefer an older terminology in which a crime has an outraged victim who complains and a vice is what some have taken to calling a victimless crime. An important practical distinction between crimes and vices is that the enforcement of laws against vices has a tendency towards corruption. To spell it out, if the vice squad take a bribe to look the other way, both the prostitute and her John will play along, but a burglar cannot hope for the co-operation of the householder when he tries to pay off the police.

Imagine that a dodgy bank finds out about Spitzer's whoring. If it is illegal they have something on him. This encourages them to engage in crooked financial schemes, hoping, if caught, to blackmail their way out of prosecution.

Meditating on the nature of justice says little directly. Indirectly though, it seems like a powerful force for naïvety, distracting us from important practical considerations.

We are encouraged to disapprove of prostitution because of the hardships suffered by the women. Lacking legitimate opportunities they are forced to sell themselves. Once we are convinced of the opprobrium, we forget our empathy and move on to punitive sanctions. We do not trouble ourselves with the provision of legitimate opportunities but levy fines, and end up pimps or jailers. If you would meditate on justice, meditate on why we punish the victims of evils we refuse to remedy.



On the practical level, you've got good points by lm (2.00 / 0) #14 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 03:43:10 PM EST
But I think the allegation that asserting that speaking of philosophical theory is ``distracting us from important practical considerations'' isn't a very good argument in a day and age when theory is seldom discussed.


There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

What does it mean to discuss theory? by Alan Crowe (4.00 / 1) #16 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 05:18:05 PM EST

Let me sharpen my criticism and say that you are not discussing theory. The grounding in particulars is essential.

Consider my suggestion that laws against vice lead to corruption and crime and that this forces us to prioritise. How do different moral frameworks guide us? A consequentialist framework will emphasise the importance of fighting the crimes with the worst consequences. A framework that emphasises the acts themselves will compare securities fraud against prostitution by, err, well, there seems to be a problem.

Prostitution, aside from religious arguments against it, violates the Aristotelian ideal of virtue being the golden mean between two vices, in this case chastity being the mean between prudery on the one side and profligacy on the other.

It is notorious that the enforcement of laws against prostitution by fining the women often results in them further prostituting themselves to earn money to pay their fines. Against this background fancy talk about virtue being the golden mean between prudery and profligacy is so revolting that I find it too sickening to discuss.



[ Parent ]

`enforcement of laws against prostitution' by lm (2.00 / 0) #17 Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 06:10:58 PM EST
Except perhaps in passing, I never mentioned the enforcement of laws against prostitution.

I get your point, you're not particularly interesting in discussing that matter at an abstract rather than concrete level. That's a fair point, but one with which I disagree. I think it important to discuss the issue at the abstract level, and then see where applying those conclusions to the particulars will lead. But if you're not particularly interested in that, that's fine.


There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

Let's cut straight to the point, shall we? | 19 comments (19 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback