Legal Ramblings (and Other Musings)

A Fresh Start

I've finally cleaned out my archives, a task that I probably should have completed before I clerked for a federal judge. I've left untouched a somewhat random collection of posts, mostly for sentimental reasons, but I may even prune that selection further in the near future.

I'm not entirely sure what to do with this space now. I know I won't talk too much about my personal life; I won't talk about work; and I will probably not opine on legal or even policy issues. Maybe I'll just write about random topics I find interesting, but who knows.

Swiss-German

According to somebody I spoke to this weekend, you cannot learn Swiss-German simply by learning the vocabulary and grammar of the language. That's because Swiss-German invests non- or extra-denotative meanings in highly ritualistic phrases, sentences, and even multi-party exchanges. Of course, every language does this (metaphor and allusion are the two most obvious examples), but supposedly this phenomenon is unusually strong in Swiss-German.

We chanced upon this discussion when some people asked the Swiss-German speaker what the Swiss-German analogues were to various four-letter words. (What, did you think we were just casually discussing morphemes?) According to him, there weren't any; at least, none with the same sort of punch as a real Swiss-German insult. And those insults took the form of ritualistic phrases and elaborate exchanges (e.g., "Your mother is of low birth," "Your father milks cows in the evening" (I made up the latter one)) that are hard to translate into English.

Actually, the whole discussion reminded me of the hilarious insult "duels" in Monkey Island (see here, here, and here), but I did not share this particular connection to the highly educated group.

UPDATE: Here's why my friends are awesome. Steve P. writes in to say:

This reminds me of what I learned was the worst insult you could say to a Frenchman. In English, it's "You f--- like a Spanish Cow." I forget the French.

The interesting part is that it's the "like a Spanish Cow" bit that makes it really insulting, and telling a Frenchman that he, for example, "files his taxes like a Spanish Cow" would be almost as bad.

On a more academic note, James points to this paper by Harvard's Stuart Schieber, which presents a formal proof about "the weak context-freeness of natural language." The paper is ostensibly about Swiss-German but, in reality, is about how unbelievably weird linguistics is. Take, for instance, the following quotation:

Swiss German, like Dutch, allows cross-serial order for the structure of subordinate clauses. Of critical importance is the fact that Swiss German requires appropriate case-marking to hold even within the cross-serial construction.

I have no idea what he's talking about, although I wouldn't be surprised if James did.

Iraq

Another interesting pair of articles. The New York Times today has an article about the growth of radical Islam in the Middle East. Saith the article:

[The horrible Egyptian ferry disaster] speaks directly to the slow burn that consumes many Egyptians — and many other Arabs — who live under governments that rule with virtual impunity no matter how bumbling, incompetent or abusive they are. Similar frustrations, if over other issues, play out around the region, in places like Syria, Jordan, Yemen, and among the Palestinians. . . .

There is widespread feeling that the region's governments deny their people justice, and this feeling has been instrumental in the increased support for Islamists throughout the Middle East, whether the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or Hamas among the Palestinians. . . .

Islamists promise not just piety, but an end to corruption and misrule.

In other words, at least radical Islam makes the trains run on time. (But see.)

Then, from an article in Foreign Affairs from last year, we get this related piece of advice:

If Washington insists on promoting democracy in the Arab world, it should learn from the various electoral experiences in the region. Where there are strongly rooted non-Islamist parties, as in Morocco, the Islamists have a harder time dominating the field. . . . Conversely, where non-Islamist political forces have been suppressed, as in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Islamist parties and candidates can command the political field. . . .

The United States must focus on pushing Arab governments to make political space for liberal, secular, leftist, nationalist, and other non-Islamist parties to set down roots and mobilize voters. Washington should support those groups that are more likely to accept U.S. foreign policy and emulate U.S. political values. The most effective way to demonstrate that support is to openly pressure Arab regimes when they obstruct the political activity of more liberal groups . . . . But Washington will also need to drop its focus on prompt elections in Arab countries where no strong, organized alternative to Islamist parties exists -- even at the risk of disappointing Arab liberals by being more cautious about their electoral prospects than they are.

In other words, create efficient, noncorrupt alternatives other than radical Islam.

Radical multiculturalism

Here's another odd collision of two very different articles.

In Does Liberalism Need Multiculturalism?, Anke Schuster criticizes liberal multiculturalism in fairly strong terms. Here's how she describes the theory:

For liberalism, the central assumption about human beings is that they differ in their aims and values, or, more generally, in their conceptions of the good. This kind of difference is first and foremost an individual one because it is related to human autonomy and the capacity to form conceptions of the good. Because all individuals share this human potential, they all deserve to be equally respected as persons. The norm of equal respect for persons is the rationale in liberalism of the normative imperative of adjudicating differing interests so as to achieve equality between individuals. Individual equality and individual difference are thus inextricably intertwined.

Most liberal multiculturalists subscribe to everything of the above. Yet while they accept liberal notions of justice as a minimum standard, they also phrase additional requirements for social justice and equality that go beyond liberal principles. These additional requirements are derived from a specific notion of difference that is distinct from the liberal one on two accounts. First, the politics of recognition focuses on groups (as collectives or groups of individuals) as bearers of differential features. Second, it emphasises the fundamental difference of human beings along the lines of cultural belonging rather than some commonality of humanity. There are different ways of justifying this redefinition of difference, yet all of them imply that cultural difference is more fundamental than individual differences of interest and in some way transcends them. Justice is, then, primarily a matter of recognising cultural differences.

Then, in The Great Divide (which puzzles about why Eastern and Western philosophy don't seem to relate), Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad has this to say about certain strands of East Asian and Indian thought:

This particularity of the individual contrasts with that great modern western idea, "generic" individualism. Under this notion, individuals are interchangeable; it does not matter who one is in biographical and psychologically specific terms. It is the general idea of the individual that is important, not the particularities of specific people. The rule of law, the formality of political institutions and the claim to universal rights have flown from this paradoxical idea of generic individualism, in which each person is equally like every other. In both classical Chinese and Indian thought, there is a contrasting "microindividualism": each individual in a sociopolitical collective has specific burdens and freedoms. . . . The implication in Indian and Chinese thought is of an infinite diversity of individualisms, a situation which generates many problems of equality and universality, but also suggests possibilities for political theories on how to live with fundamental difference.

The last line of Ram-Prasad's paragraph is what reminded me of Schuster's article. Liberal multiculturalism demands respect for idiosyncratic cultures and imagines a political community whose structure recognizes--and perhaps incorporates--these cultures. But Ram-Prasad suggests that Asian philosophy has an even more radical notion of the politics of difference premised on individual, not just group-based, idiosyncracies.

The most beautiful equation ever

e ^ (π * i) = -1

Explanations: short, long. Knowledge of trigonometry and calculus required, but well worth it.