The Working-Class Mystic

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Cat Links Eclectica, Politics & The Economy

Kavanaugh Fails Critical Thinking

Posted on The WCM

Justice Kavanaugh, who said ‘Roe’ was “settled” law and defended the legal doctrine of ‘stare decisis’ (upholding precedent) at his 2018 confirmation hearing, Wednesday changed his view. And apparently did so using fallacious reasoning during oral arguments before the Supreme Court.

Kavanaugh recited a list of Supreme Court cases that had been overturned in the past, implying that ‘Roe’ should therefore be overturned as well. His list included emotionally charged cases overturning racial segregation and giving same-sex couples the right to marry.

Having taught critical thinking at the university level, I can tell you that appeals to emotion and citing false analogies would earn an F for any student doing so in my classes. By highlighting cases arousing strong passions in the populace, Kavanaugh tried to clothe his fallacious reasoning in a cloak of social justice, ignoring the reality that those cases expanded civil rights while striking ‘Roe’ would diminish women’s rights.

His second logical fallacy is implying an analogy between the overturned cases and the present case. The fact that cases have been overturned in the past has no relevance to whether ‘Roe’ should be overturned now. Because old men have been able to run marathons in the past says nothing about whether I can.

Justice Kavanaugh attended some of the best schools in the country. Critical thinking certainly must have been taught in some of them. Apparently, you can lead a dunce to knowledge, but you can’t make him think!

Cat Links Culture & The Arts, Eclectica

Art Fakes?

Posted on The WCM

I’ve come to somewhat of a radical position on art fakes. I don’t see what difference it makes from a purely objective point of view who painted a picture. If what the physical painting depicts is fine art when painted by Rubens, and the fake is visually identical, then the fake must be fine art as well. What does it matter who did the painting? If the unaided human eye can’t tell the difference between A and B versions, how is one’s experience of viewing the paintings any different? What’s different is something external to the paintings: the painter. If it’s important to know who the painter was, it’s important not because of what’s in the painting, but because of some incidental fact about its creation. 

Apparently, the million-dollar price tags on certain highly sought-after paintings are not entirely, or even primarily, due to the aesthetic value of the image, but due to who painted them. It’s sort of like collecting baseball cards. The cards are not valuable in themselves, but because of whom they represent. Of course, the relative rarity of a given card also contributes to its value. But it’s not the rarity of a Van Gogh that determines its value. Every Van Gogh is unique; that is to say, equally rare.

For those of you with high-quality printed reproductions of famous paintings, take heart! Your aesthetic experience viewing them is not appreciably different than viewing the original. Unless you are primarily interested in simply collecting objects created by a certain painter. Actually, that very phenomenon seems to be what’s at play in the recent auctions of “digital objects,” or “non-fungible tokens.” Millions of copies can be made of a digital object, all of them precisely identical down to the zeroes and ones in the computer code that created them. What sets the digital object or NFT apart is the record of its ownership on the blockchain, a kind of cyberworld ledger that can’t be hacked.

Reminds me of the artist who was paid $84,000 dollars to create art for a Danish museum. In the fall of 2021 he delivered a blank canvas entitled “Take the Money and Run.”