Now we see the violence inherent in the system: the Supreme Court appears ready to overturn a law banning depictions of animal cruelty. Because the right of the people to sell videos of people stomping squirrels to death shall never be infringed.

The federal law makes it illegal to make and sell commercially “any visual or auditory depiction” of the killing or serious abuse of a living animal so long as that conduct is illegal.

Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal, appealing to the Court to reinstate the law, which was struck down by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, explained that Congress intended to shut down “a robust market” for “crush videos” — images of small animals being stomped to death. The law, said Katyal, was a “narrowly targeted restriction.”

According to SCOTUSblog, only Alito, of all people, supports the law as written.

Alito suggested that the law may have accomplished, over its decade on the books, just what Congress had in mind: it had dried up the market for “crush videos,” while not causing a decrease in videos or TV shows about hunting. He told Millett she should be addressing “what’s going on in the real world,” and not focus on hypotheticals like producing foie gras with geese. She replied that, if Congress were to write laws in the First Amendment area, it had to “write with a scalpel and not with a buzz saw.”

But she seemed less sure of her argument when Alito moved on to questions about Congress’ authority, hypothetically, to try to stop human sacrifice by banning its depiction on videos and in other media. She at first said that such a law might be valid if it were “properly drawn” and “narrowly tailored.” As other members of the Court showed some interest in the human sacrifice hypothetical, Millett made further concessions even while not answering directly. First Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and then Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., insisted on a direct response to Alito’s hypothetical. She answered that Congress could legislate in this area, unless it sought to ban the content of such depictions “just because it did not like it.”

(via Washington Independent)

Thursday night links.

* Artists and the recession.

* Tough day for celebrity: Farrah Fawcett has died, and Michael Jackson has been rushed to the hospital with cardiac arrest.

* Superhero roast from 1979, starring Adam West and Ed McMahon. Surreal. Via @filmjunk. (No Superman?)

* Towards the personhood of whales: 'Whales Might Be as Much Like People as Apes.'

* 'Twitter Creator On Iran: "I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful." '

* In Tehran, state television's Channel Two is putting on a "Lord of the Rings" marathon, part of a bigger push to keep us busy. Movie mad and immunized from international copyright laws, Iranians are normally treated to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. Now it's two or three films a day. The message is "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Let's watch, forget about what's happened, never mind. Stop dwelling in the past. Look ahead.

Slate has a five-part series on the history of animal experimentation and the animal rights movement. Via MeFi.

Excerpted moments from the Tim Morton / Kathy Rudy / Polygraph "Ecology, Ideology, Politics" Roundtable are now up on YouTube. You'll note the clever product placement of our secret sponsor, Dasani.

The poor camera angle, somewhat poor audio quality, and incomplete coverage are all functions of the device used to capture the video, but still, I think these excerpts came out pretty well.

Introductions (YouTube messed with this one. Up in two bits soon.)
Question #1 (on rhetoric)
Question #2 (on ontology and "ground") (YouTube messed with this one. Up soon.)
An Excerpt Concerning WALL-E, Sentiment, and Irony
Dark Ecology and "Bambification"
On Science
On Marx and Anti-Capitalism (YouTube messed with this one. Up soon.)

Wednesday links.

* Scandal at UConn! The Plank says the story is peanuts; this sort of corruption is endemic to the NCAA.

* Cover Stories From the Most-Requested Back Issues of The American Prognosticator (1853–1987).

* Duke University professor and civil rights icon John Hope Franklin has died.

* Upright Citizens Brigade parodies Wes Anderson. Bastards!

* A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of the Second World War.

* The first unambiguous case of electronic voting machine fraud in the U.S.?

* Solitary confinement as torture.

* Roman engineers chipped an aqueduct through more than 100 kilometers of stone to connect water to cities in the ancient province of Syria. The monumental effort took more than a century, says the German researcher who discovered it. How could the Romans think in terms of centuries but we can't think past a single business cycle?

* Lots of people are linking to this letter from an AIG bonus recipient. The merits of the contracts aside—I've said before they should be enforced unless fraudulent or predicated on fraud—but I don't think he helps his case much when he puts a number on it. His one-time after-tax "bonus" is more than I would have made in thirty years of adjuncting.

* David Brin wants to "uplift" animals, i.e., make them sentient. This is exactly why people don't take science fiction seriously; it's totally crazy, pointless, and cruel and it wouldn't even work...

Before you throw this letter into the proverbial round file, let’s be clear: this is the first time I have ever asked for a bailout from the Federal Reserve. I know what you’re thinking. Why do I deserve your largesse, and I do mean largesse, since I’m asking for five million big ones? The answer is simple. Like many of our nation’s financial institutions, I am simply too big to fail. If investors were allowed to witness the collapse of Freddie, Fannie, and then Andy, I can’t begin to describe what havoc it would wreak on their already frayed nerves. Actually, I can describe it: global financial calamity. I think we can both agree that, to dodge this bullet, ten million dollars is a small price to pay. (I know that I originally asked for five, but since I started writing this letter my financial situation has deteriorated in grave and unexpected ways.)

Andy Borowitz is too big to fail. In the New Yorker, alongside John Cassiday's claim that the Lehman Brothers collapse gave the election to Obama (see also Krugman last night) and a fascinating article on the legal intricacies of trust funds for dogs.

Is it right to give so much money to a dog—or to dogs generally? And what is the limit of such dispensations to pets? Will there come a time when dogs can sue for a new guardian—or to avoid being put to sleep? One philosopher draws a distinction between the needs of Trouble and those of dogs as a whole. Helmsley “did a disservice to the people in the dog world and to dogs generally by leaving such an enormous amount of money for her own dog,” Jeff McMahan, who teaches philosophy at Rutgers University, said. “To give even two million dollars to a single little dog is like setting the money on fire in front of a group of poor people. To bestow that amount of money is contemptuous of the poor, and that may be one reason she did it.

...

Throughout her life, Leona Helmsley demonstrated not just a lack of affection for her fellow-humans but an absence of understanding as well. The irony is that, for all that her will purports to show her love for Trouble, Leona didn’t seem to understand dogs very well, either. “What is funny about giving all this money to one dog is that it doesn’t deal with the fact that the dog is going to be sad that Leona died,” Elizabeth Harman, who teaches philosophy at Princeton, said. “What would make this dog happy is for a loving family to take it in. The dog doesn’t want the money. The money will just make everyone who deals with the dog strange.”

Apes, legal personhood and the plight of Nim Chimpsky.

Eberhart Theuer: A legal person would be something like a company or a certain society that in itself, or a fund that has certain rights without being a natural person.

Anita Barraud: This is similar to the US in common law notion of a juristic person that can apply to corporations and organisations that they're artificial persons created by the law.

Eberhart Theuer: Exactly.

Paula Stibbe: It's not talking about the rights for non-human animals to go and vote or be able to go to university, that would clearly be inappropriate and ridiculous. This is about recognising that non-human animals share with us sentience, which means that they have the ability to suffer, and that they have interests which can be damaged.

In sci-fi-philosophic terms, this is the distinction between sapience and sentience; while apes likely cannot "think" in the human sense, they and other animals can certainly feel pain, and that capacity is something we are morally obliged to respect.

I say likely because I am by nature extremely wary of the anthropomorphistic tendency to project human emotions and consciousness into animal behavior that is actually instinctual or learned—in general I'm impressed with Daniel Dennett's theory in Kinds of Minds that our dogs appear to "love" us precisely because we've selected for just that impression over millenia of canine domestication. But as an anecdotal matter I must admit this is really evocative:

Paula Stibbe: I've learned what he likes to do most, what food he likes to eat most, though that would include some games. He likes to use charcoal with paper sometimes to draw, or chalk.

Anita Barraud: What does he draw?

Paula Stibbe: They are kind of abstract angular kind of works and he takes the paper and the chalk and he leans against the wall, he bites his bottom lip and concentrates really hard on what he's doing. He won't let himself be distracted while he's drawing.

(cross-posted at culturemonkey)

Hot on the heels of a successful bid to secure the dirty hippie vote, Barack Obama seals the deal today with an endorsement from Vermont warhorse Senator Patrick Leahy.

UPDATE: Text from the endorsement here.

"We need a president who can reintroduce America to the world, and reintroduce America to ourselves," Leahy said, later adding, "Barack Obama represents the America we once were and want to be again."

Leahy likened his support of Obama to the 1968 presidential campaign, when as a young prosecutor he endorsed Robert Kennedy over Hubert Humphrey. "He was bringing us a sense of hope, bringing us together," Leahy said. "I know those are intangibles, but it encouraged me to go against the establishment in my own state, and go with Bobby Kennedy."