Syllogistic Argument

In Yahoo!Answers I encountered the following question, which has me thinking.

Someone calling himself XO Manowar said that his instructor has given him a passage from the writings of Martin Luther King and asked that it be presented formally. The passage is this:

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. […] Any law which degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes and “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. […] Thus it is that I can urge men to […] disobey segregation ordinances.

XO Manowar says that his instructor stipulated the passage "has two sub arguments that are the premises of the overall argument. I need help identifying which ones are which...."

My own initial reaction, and my answer to XO, was as follows:

The overall argument seems to be this:

MAJOR PREMISE: (P1) One has a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws.
MINOR PREMISE: (P2) Segregation laws are unjust.
CONCLUSION: One has a moral obligation to disobey segregation laws.

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King doesn't seem, in this passage, to have addressed the question of why people should believe P1. But he did address the question of why we should believe P2. And that is what your instructor was talking about. The sub-arguments can be put formally in this way.

SUBARG. 1

MAJOR PREMISE: (P3) It is unjust to relegate persons to the status of things
MINOR PREMISE: (P4) Segregation laws do relegate persons to the status of things.
CONCLUSION: P2 as stated above.

Another way of getting to P2 is at least hinted at here as well.

SUBARG. 2

MAJOR PREMISE: (P5) It is unjust to distort souls and damage personality (apparently those two phrases essentially are synonymous in this context).
MINOR PREMISE: (P6) Segregation distorts souls and damages personality.
CONCLUSION: P2 as stated above.

I'm reading King here as a Ph.D. in theology (which of course he was -- hence his comfort with quoting Buber), not as an activist and political leader (which of course he also was, though the Venn diagram overlap of those two circles is fairly small).

But now, thinking about it some more, I may have gotten King wrong. I don't think that subarg 1 and subarg 2 are on the same level, each directly supporting the minor premise of the main argument. This is, rather, a three-link chain. There is an argument about what distorts personality. That leads to the CONCLUSION that segregation distorts personality. That conclusion then serves as the minor premise of a second argument, about what kind of laws are unjust. THAT syllogism then establishes the conclusion that segregation is unjust. This then serves as the minor premise of the main argument.

P.S. here is the original source for the passage under discussion.

Gold Standard Links

There is talk -- not fever-swamp debate but serious discussion stimulated by the president of the World Bank --of bringing back the gold standard in some capacity.

Zoellick had a lot of sensible things to say as you can read here for yourself.

Robert Harding, writing for the FT, noted that gold "prices have risen from close to $200 a decade ago to almost $1,400 today. The rapid rise in recent years reflects fears that unconventional central bank policies – such as last week’s move by the US Federal Reserve to expand its balance sheet by another $600bn – could lead to inflation."

For some historical background, you might go here or here.

For the Austrian school's take on the significance of gold, go here.

For informed speculation on where the price of gold is headed, you might look to a Bloomberg story yesterday by Nicholas Larkin.

But back to Zoellick. Who the heck is he? Who was he before he was put in charge of the World Bank? Here'a the official bio.

Or you could listen to this fellow talking about the history of the institution.

And here are some final thoughts specifically on how a return to a gold standard might be accomplished.

Funny Stuff

I would like to thank Anderson Brown, the philosopher behind several blogs and some wonderful Facebook entries, for introducing me to this.

I've never taught in my life, yet I can sufficiently sympathize to find this fantasy funny.

Also, that led me to this one, another YouTube gem using the same generic animation software, and for that matter the same professor character in the same virtual office. Enjoy.

"Can you see where I am teaching? We're in Nowhere, Nebraska."

Nice dis of Harold Bloom, too.

From 1824

"The question of character has always been a staple of presidential elections, but it became an especially prominent issue in 1824 as Jackson's people questioned Clay's and lauded Old Hickory's. The tactic succeeded in planting seeds of doubt about Clay....Clay had earned repute as an effective political broker, but that made it easy to paint him as a backroom dealer. Clay made no secret that he drank spirits, but that made it easy to whisper that he was a drunkard. He was famous for gambling, and that made it easy to depict him as reckless."

David S. Heidler & Jeanne T. Heidler, HENRY CLAY: THE ESSENTIAL AMERICAN (2010) p. 169.

The Blundering Herd

Two fine finance reporters, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, collaborated on a Merrill Lynch-centric re-working of the story of the financial crisis of 2008, and the result appears in the November issue of Vanity Fair.

McLean has previously distinguished herself by getting the Enron story right before anyone else. She wrote "Is Enron Overpriced," which ran in FORTUNE on March 2001.

That story began with a meditation on the term "it," as in the It Girl in Hollywood talk, or "the It Stock" for Enron at the turn of the millennium. The story proceeded to this:

And the numbers that Enron does present are often extremely complicated. Even quantitatively minded Wall Streeters who scrutinize the company for a living think so. "If you figure it out, let me know," laughs credit analyst Todd Shipman at S&P. "Do you have a year?" asks Ralph Pellecchia, Fitch's credit analyst, in response to the same question.

Nocera? Well, I wrote of him in this very space quite recently and before I knew anything of his collaboration with McLean.

Anyway, you can use the first link above to click on their Vanity Fair article. Please do.

Failing to Feed the Monster

Overstock held its conference call on Wednesday to discuss third quarter earnings.

You can see the transcript here.

I've also attached their one-year stock chart. As you can see, there was a strong upward move in the early spring of this year. At the vernal equinox, the price was under $15, through May it was repeatedly close to or above $24.

It lost all of that gain over the course of the spring and summer, and was back at $14 in August. Yesterday, November 4, it closed at $13.39.

The stock has also been underperforming the indexes markedly since August, when it reported a second quarter loss of $1.4 million.

On this week's call, OSTK officials discussed another loss, for the 3d quarter, this time of more than $3.3 million, or 15 cents per share.

I maintain some skepticism over the value of Overstock's numbers, a skepticism I explained in posts on my other (now-suspended) blog in February, and before that.

In my humble opinion (and in the opinion of observers who have looked into the matter quite keenly), Overstock created a cookie-jar reserve for itself in 2008. It inflated its 2009 results with the help of that reserve. The problem, though, is that once you start doing that, you'll find it tough to maintain. The cookie jar runs empty, and you have to get ever-more creative.

I suspect that Overstock's creativity has failed, and so it is now reporting the kinds of losses it would have been reporting for some time had it not engaged in trickery. Thus, the hit it has taken on its stock price.

I have no personal position, long or short, on OSTK, by the way. Furthermore, I am not giving financial advice, except to say that if you are going to invest in the stock market in any capacity, you would be an idiot to rely on anything you saw in a blog, including this one. Also, picking stocks for most people is a fool's errand anyway.

Still: there is an empty cookie jar from OSTK's kitchen and a rather bad odor wafting thence.

So I don't have to read the book

I don't plan to read Rattner's recent book on the auto industry bailout and restructuring.

I feel a bit guilty about not reading it. On the basis of its topic and the author's point of view thereof, it surely seems like the sort of thing I should read, to help preserve my own econoblogger cred.

Rattner, you'll all remember, was chosen in the opening days of the Obama administration to superintend the federal restructuring of both General Motors and Chrysler, and this book is his account of his work at that task.

Rattner also got himself into some hot water in a pay-to-play scheme involving New York State's pension funds, but I don't imagine that scandal figures prominently in the book, OVERHAUL.

Anyway, to ease the aforesaid pangs of guilt, I've read Malcolm Gladwell's detailed review of OVERHAUL in The New Yorker, as well as Felix Salmon's reply to Gladwell in Salmon's Reuters-sponsored blog.

Okay, those pangs were never very sharp....