The Leiter Reports: Editorials, News, Updates

In Memoriam

Sidney Morgenbesser (1921-2004)

Professor Morgenbesser died yesterday; I have not seen memorial notices yet, but when they appear they are likely to be linked from the Columbia Philosophy Department page.

Political Philosopher Blake from Harvard's Kennedy School to Washington/Seattle

Michael Blake (political philosophy), currently an Assistant Professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (and, before that, on tenure-track in the Philosophy Department at Harvard), has accepted a tenured joint appointment in Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Washington at Seattle, to start in fall 2005.

I must confess to always having been surprised that Washington does not come out higher in the PGR surveys: the Department has two philosophers who are very major figures in their fields (Laurence BonJour in epistemology and Arthur Fine in philosophy of science and physics)--both clearly appointable at numerous top departments--as well as a strong contingent in ancient philosophy, and solid coverage of most other areas, augmented by several recent additions (Michael Rosenthal, Lynn Hankinson Nelson, etc.), and now Blake. I have always thought of UW-Seattle as a top 25 department; perhaps, finally, this year's surveys will confirm that this is more than my idiosyncratic assessment. Or perhaps not. We'll see.

Europe Reacts to Kerry and the Democratic Convention

Details here; an excerpt:

"[W]hile Europeans might like Senator Kerry more than President Bush, the speech contained little concrete indication of how his policies would be different from those followed in the past four years.

"Noting the line in Mr. Kerry's speech about not needing a green light from abroad before taking actions to defend its interests, Mr. Vaďsse said: 'In France, they don't have overblown expectations. Kerry would be like the second Clinton administration, not as arrogant and unilateral as Bush, but it would be no multilateral paradise either.'

"Berliner Zeitung took a stronger view, saying in an editorial on Saturday that there was little in Mr. Kerry's speech to please Europeans.

"'Europeans are surprised to hear that John Kerry is talking about America the same way as George W. Bush does,' the paper said. 'They are amazed that at the Democratic Convention in Boston, he saluted like a soldier, one hand up at his temple. They would prefer not to hear it when Kerry promises that he would never hesitate to use force in case America is under threat. They are disappointed.'"

Blogging Hiatus

The new term is in sight, deadlines are looming, and there will even be a bit of travel. Don't expect much, if anything, new between now and mid-August at the earliest. Some coming attractions for later in August, besides the usual faculty news and updates:

Germany in the 1930s and America Today
The Myth of Left-Wing Harvard
Freud Bashing under the Guise of "High Standards"
How to be a Left Nietzschean
Weber, Foucault and the "Iron Cage of Modernity"

Some of these postings are in response to reader queries; my thanks for your patience, and hopefully the responses, when they get here, will have been worth waiting for.

More thoughts on the Kerry speech and the Democratic convention

These from a young philosopher:

"I'm watching the DNC on television. It's a good show. Good production values. I just don't recognize the Democratic party anymore.

"American political culture has become an intellectual race to the bottom. This isn't populism. It's the only destructive form of intellectualism I know of. Everyone's second-guessing themselves hoping David Brooks won't snark at them.

"I'm tired of watching the Democrats fetishize Vietnam. Sure, it's a useful stick to beat George Bush without saying anything 'negative.' Kerry distinguished himself as a soldier, but he also distinguished himself as a antiwar activist. His Vietnam buddies earned their place on the stage, but so did his fellow antiwar activists."

Countries with Highest Per Capita "Highly Cited Researchers"

More data on highly cited researchers, courtesy of the Institute for Scientific Information. Remember: this data does not include the humanities, and is tilted towards research in the hard sciences and medicine. The data also favors scholarship published in English. With those caveats in mind, here are the nations with the ten highest per capita representation of "highly cited ISI researchers"; the number in parentheses is the number of people in the country for which there is one ISI highly cited researcher.

1. United States (93,880)
2. Switzerland (96,103)
3. United Kingdom (170,454)
4. Israel (186,486)
5. Sweden (200,000)
6. Canada (219,310)
7. Denmark (234,782)
8. Netherlands (250,769)
9. Australia (256,962)
10. New Zealand (273,333)

Some other countries (not rank ordered):

Austria: 1 per 800,000
Belgium: 1 per 433,333
France: 1 per 530,973
Germany: 1 per 430,208
Italy: 1 per 1,260,869
Japan: 1 per 669,633
Finland: 1 per 742,857
Norway: 1 per 657,142
Singapore: 1 per 875,000
Spain: 1 per 3,500,000

The Sensibilities of which Totalitarianism is Made

Herewith a third year law student at the University of Houston reacting to these pictures of the "free speech" cages and this posting of mine:

"Brian Leiter can't understand how a federal judge could uphold keeping loony protestors waving various protest paraphenalia and working themselves into a frenzy a safe distance from the Democratic convention."

UPDATE: More on the "free speech" cages here:

"There was absolutely no justification for the Democrats of the DNC and the Democratic mayor of Boston to adopt the shameful strategy of the Bush Presidency for dealing with protest--fencing it in behind razor wire.

"The protests planned for the DNC, mostly by A.N.S.W.E.R., have been and were going to be peaceful.

"The alleged threats of terror, emanating from the Bush Department of Homeland Security and the Bush Department of Justice were absurd--a warning that the media would be attacked! Warnings of attacks on public transit! Look out! It was all calculated to embarrass the Democrats and, incredibly, it worked.

"The fact that the Democrats fell for this kind of paranoia-inducing hokum shows how far into madness the American public has descended.

"But the price for such lack of principle and of such cowardice and idiocy is high. A new low has been set for a Democratic Convention violating the right of free speech when even a silent protest in the hall led to a demonstrator's being dragged out in handcuffs....

"[W]e will all pay for this next step down the road of repression of dissent.

"With Bush, Cheney and the Republicans, we've come to expect the jackbooted response to protest, the shunting of demonstrators off into fenced in detention facilities out of sight of the media, the arrest of those who refuse to be so muzzled. If Kerry and the Democrats now adopt the same approach to dissent, the only response will have to be massive civil disobedience."

Early Modern Philosophy texts...

...on-line, courtesy of the distinguished philosopher Jonathan Bennett. Very nice.

UPDATE: Philosopher Matt Davidson points out something I should have noted more clearly initially: "One thing you might want to note is that he has 'cleaned up' the English in Locke, Hume, and Berkeley to try to make the texts more readable by beginning undergraduates. I make no evaluative claims here as to the merits of this particular project (though few are better candidates to do this sort of thing than JB). But it might be worth pointing out in case a reader sees your link and thinks, 'These texts already are all over the web. Why do I need to see another website with them?' The answer is that Bennett is doing something very different with his attempts to make Modern texts 'accessible.'"

Philosopher Sawyer from Kansas to Nebraska

Sarah Sawyer (philosophy of language and mind, epistemology), currently an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, has accepted a tenured offer from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Anyone but Bush for President!

The Democratic convention is over, and John Kerry is now, officially, the only person who has any chance of beating George W. Bush, the worst President in the history of the United States, and the most reviled internationally in the last hundred years. What can we say about this convening of the major opposition party and the acceptance speech of its nominee?

Let us put aside the chauvinistic masturbation that travels under the heading "patriotism"; the cheesey "feel-good" pop psychology about America's "can do" spirit; the implicit, and sometimes explicit, condescension to all other nations and all other peoples of the world; the romanticization of the last great immoral and criminal war by the United States--one also based on lies--in Vietnam; and the pandering to the lie that only the godly are righteous, and the erasure of the 40 million or more in America who are not "people of faith". Let us put aside, in other words, the simple fact that the entire display was an offense to truth, reason, and decency. How could it be otherwise? After all, we are only human, all-too-human.

Put that all aside, and we have this: John Kerry gave a better speech than one might have expected: less dreary, more animated than this citizen, at least, had thought possible. He pressed all the right "buttons" of the "undecided" voters, individuals who must be so ignorant as to almost defy comprehension to those of us who inhabit the realm of facts and reasons.

If, with their performance these past several days, the Democrats can not defeat the current fascist theocrats and criminal war-mongers in Washington, then America is doomed, and every nation of the world ought to arm itself in self-defense accordingly.

As one simple but plainspoken American observed::

"Kerry is sometimes described as Bush-lite, which is not inaccurate, and in general the political spectrum is pretty narrow in the United States, and elections are mostly bought, as the population knows. But despite the limited differences both domestically and internationally, there are differences. And in this system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."

If you live in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Missouri, or Michigan--the states likely to decide the next election (assuming votes are counted)--please vote for John Kerry. Do it for my kids. Do it for yours. Do it for the Enlightenment. Do it for humanity.

UPDATE: "How They Could Steal the Election This Time." Read it.

In Memoriam

Francis Crick (1916-2004)

The memorial notice from the Salk Institute is here.

In Memoriam

Corwin Johnson (1917-2004)

Professor Johnson joined the UT Law faculty in 1947 (before air-conditioning, which, he said, made those April and May classes in jacket-and-tie a bit uncomfortable!), and although he officially retired in 1988, he continued to teach one or two courses every year since. A distinguished expert in the law of property and water law, he may have been best-known for the leading property treatise he wrote with John Cribbet of the University of Illinois. He was also an exceptionally warm and gentle man, who will be dearly missed.

I shall share one of my favorite stories Corwin told me several years ago. His first teaching job was at the University of Iowa, right after WWII. The town was swamped with returning vets, and housing was scarce. So for his first few months on the job, Corwin actually had to live in his office, and bathe in the restrooms before the crack of dawn, before the faculty and students arrived! Only once during that time did he encounter a colleague as he emerged with towel in hand from the restroom, at which point his "secret" became known.

And to think today's new faculty hires are worried about the size of their budget for research assistants! Things change...

UPDATE: Here is an obituary of Professor Johnson: Download file. My colleague Douglas Laycock notes:

"When I first arrived as a young professor, Corwin Johnson was many years my senior, but he was one of the very first to greet me, take me to lunch, and invite my wife and me to his house. He was a leading expert on Texas water law, and co-author of a leading property casebook. He was part of the first generation of faculty who came to the Law School from other parts of the country, with no prior connection to Texas -- the generation that made this a national law school instead of a very good regional law school. He was also part of the transition from racially segregated to racially integrated legal education at Texas, a change he enthusiastically supported. He served this law school well for nearly sixty years."

UPDATE: The Law School's memorial notice is here. It includes a lovely picture, which evokes the man's warmth and kind nature.

Just War Theory

Philosopher Mark Rigstad runs a useful site on "Just War Theory," with material of interest to both philosophers and lawyers.

The Religious Right/Secular Liberal Split: Is it an Illusion?

This article suggests as much. Here is the conclusion (but do read the whole thing if you want to comment):

"But as liberal practices like divorce, congregation-switching, rock music, sex toys, Medicare and therapy worm their way into the religious heartland, it becomes less easy to pick out distinctively liberal horrors from which to save the people. The gay bogeyman still half works. Evolution and atheism still work.

"It will be intriguing to watch the evolution issue over the next twenty-five years. Medicine is starting to revolve around genetics. Middle America wants its health quite as much as it wants its makeovers, sex, malls, and certainty of heaven. How can one accept gene-based medicine and reject evolution? So believe this: evolution will follow rock music and female orgasms deep into the hearts of the faithful. New reasons will have to be found to hate the liberal elite.

"Meanwhile, liberals will thrash around in their nightmare of religious takeover, for lack of actually knowing enough conservative religious people, who are all rather slowly becoming like the rest of us."

What do you think? I'd be interested to hear what readers make of this. No anonymous posts please.

Why the "Free [sic] Speech Zones" at the Democratic Convention are so Worrisome

Look again at the pictures. We're all used to seeing protesters kept behind those old police saw-horses with a line of cops in front. But political speech here is literally being caged in a demeaning, intimidating environment, designed to minimize its impact and discourage its presence.

Here's why I find this so alarming:

(1) There's no reason to think that the Democrats authorized these "security" arrangements. But the fact is they are being silent on them. The party that many of us are hoping will stand for the rule of law, civil liberties, and the rights of minorities, political and otherwise, is saying nothing about these grotesque arrangements. (Am I wrong? Has any reader seen prominent Democrats or party officials object to the treatment of political speech outside the convention?)

(2) The mere existence of these arrangements says something quite frightening about the mindset of law enforcement, and also of the judiciary, since the judiciary, in the end, approved this set up. That law enforcement professionals and judges OK these "free speech zones" means they are running scared, that they have only one concern: security at any cost. "Security at any cost" is the recipe for totalitarianism, the recipe that Hitler exploited in 1933.

If this is already the mindset of law enforcement and members of the judiciary, what happens if there is another terrorist incident? What happens when, after another incident, Congress actually suspends the right of habeas corpus as a "security" measure? With law enforcement running scared now, with law enforcement already having forgotten any countervailing values or rights, what will they do when there is no longer judicial oversight of their detentions, their intimidations, their investigations?

That is why the existence of these demeaning "free [sic] speech" cages at the convention of the Democratic Party is absolutely chilling.

Free Speech at the Democratic Convention

I think I won't vote for Kerry/Edwards after all; I think I'll leave the country (any Canadian universities hiring?). Take a look at the "free speech zones" at the Democratic convention. Now we can understand why the federal judge who heard the challenge to these cages--but nonetheless upheld them--remarked that ,

'I, at first, thought before taking the view [of the site] that the characterizations of the space as being like an internment camp were litigation hyperbole. I now believe that it's an understatement. One cannot conceive of what other elements you would put in place to make a space more of an affront to the idea of free expression...."

If every libertarian-minded blogger isn't on top of this story by morning--that means you, Eugene, and you, David, and you, Stuart--then they ought to just resign from the human race (or at least the libertarian party!).

Unbelievable. Except believe it: it's real.

(Thanks to Lindsay Beyerstein for the pointer.)

"The Future for Philosophy" is now...

...here, or at least actual copies have now arrived in Austin. OUP has produced a very handsome volume, which is gratifying to see after so many years of intellectual labor. I understand that the book will be released for purchase in Europe in the next week, and in the U.S. shortly thereafter--by September at the latest, but probably during August.

"Doctors Without Borders" is...

...leaving Afghanistan, another country we "liberated," because the violence is so out of control--so National Public Radio reported this morning. This humanitarian organization serves and has served in many of the most dangerous and desperate places on earth, but is now forced to leave Afghanistan. (Here is DWB's statement on the departure.)

Meanwhile, in never-never land, a right-wing pundit tells us everything is dandy there, and is busy congratulating his masters for it. Puke.

UPDATE: More bad news from Afghanistan.

Why Marx Would Have Despised "Critical Legal Studies"

It has long amused me that many inside and outside law think of "Critical Legal Studies" as a Marxist movement. Plainly, within the parochial context of American life, any ideas on the "left" are viewed as Marxist, but in this case the association is particularly wrongheaded. Herewith what I wrote on the subject in my review essay of Neil Duxbury's philosophically feeble Patterns of American Jurisprudence in the summer 1997 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies:

CLS writers...locate the source of "indeterminacy" in law in one of two sources: either in general features of language itself (drawing here--not always accurately--on the semantic skepticism associated with Wittgenstein and Derrida ); or in the existence of "contradictory" moral and political principles that they claim underlie the substantive law, understood at a suitable level of abstraction. Duxbury himself recognizes this strand of CLS, which he aptly describes as claiming,

"...that liberal consciousness is somehow a false or corrupted consciousness, that there exists within liberal thought--liberal legal thought included--a tension so fundamental, so irresolvable, that it must ultimately implode and make way for radical social transformation." (455)

This strategy of argument signals the rather curious intellectual pedigree of CLS, a pedigree that Duxbury does not appear to recognize. [Ed.-Most CLS writers don't appear to recognize it either, though I'm sure Unger knows!] For what CLS has done in American legal thought is to revive a certain strategy of left-wing critique that dates back to the Left Young Hegelians of the 1830's in Germany. Seizing upon the Hegelian notion that ideas are the engine of historical change, the Left Hegelians sought to effect change by demonstrating that the prevailing conservative ideas were inherently contradictory and thus unstable. To resolve these contradictions, it would be necessary to change our ideas, and thus change the world.

This strand of Hegelianism was a dead issue by the 1850's--in part because of Schopenhauer's devastating anti-Hegelian polemics, in part because of Marx's criticisms (about which more below), and in part because of the more general "materialistic" and "positivistic" turn in German intellectual life associated with Feuerbach and the so-called "German Materialists." It was not revived until 1922 when Georg Lukács re-introduced Left Hegelian themes into the Marxist tradition of social critique in History and Class Consciousness, especially in the central chapter on "The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought." CLS, however, acquires the style of argument less from Lukács--though he is a favorite figure in the footnotes of CLS articles--than from Harvard Law School professor and CLS "founding father" Roberto Unger, whose 1975 book Knowledge and Politics is quite obviously a replay of the central arguments and themes of History and Class Consciousness.

What is slightly ironic in this intellectual genealogy--one that most CLS writers seem only vaguely aware of--is that CLS should have revived precisely the tradition in left-wing thought that Marx had so viciously lampooned 150 years earlier! Indeed, with certain obvious emendations, we find Marx and Engels articulating (in The German Ideology ) a critique one often hears, with some cause, of CLS:

"Since [the Crits] consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness...as the real chains of men...it is evident that [the Crits] have to fight only against these illusions of the consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, [the Crits] logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognize it by means of another interpretation....They forget, however, that to these phrases [constituting the old interpretation] they are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world."

Showing the right-wing professors that their ideas are incoherent and demanding that they change their ideas is politically irrelevant for Marx: it is, of course, "contradictions" in the material circumstances of life that are the real engine of historical change. What CLS has done is to revive precisely this discredited strand of critical theory--the critique of ideas or "consciousness"--in the legal domain. It is not obvious that these critiques are any more plausible or relevant now than they were in 1840.

UT Law & Philosophy Program information for 2004-05...

...is now on-line here.

Metaethics Workshop at Wisconsin

I mentioned this months ago, but now the October metaethics workshop at Wisconsin has a full program here. An exceptional line-up, between the keynote speakers (Peter Railton and Michael Smith, two of the best philosophers in the world) and the conference presenters. I very much wish I could be there.

Andrew Sullivan, again

I now realize that I've been too nice about Andrew "I'm a despicable neanderthal, except when my own interests are at stake" Sullivan. Here is what he said comparing filmmaker Michael Moore and Fox TV pundit Bill O'Reilly: "O'Reilly, at least, has some grip on the truth and on morality."

For my non-US readers who may not be familiar with Mr. O'Reilly, think Goebbels without the anti-semitism.

I occasionally hear from readers who like to think of Mr. Sullivan as a "thoughtful" conservative. What say you wise folks now?

In Memoriam

John Passmore (1914-2004)

A memorial notice is here.

(Thanks to Matthew Mullins for the pointer.)

Top Research Universities by Number of "Highly Cited Researchers"

The Institute for Scientific Information compiles detailed data on citations to faculty research in the natural and social sciences, including medicine and law, but not in any of the humanistic fields. Citation counts are always problematic proxies for quality, but across whole universities their limitations presumably even out (presumably, e.g., each major university has its share of highly cited productive drudges, and the like). The primary limitation of this data is that it does not include humanistic fields, so universities with strong research profiles in the humanities will underperform in this study. The data also gives a slight preference to larger schools, though it is doubtful that there are any large major research universities that consist of, e.g., two dozen highly cited researchers superimposed on thousands of non-researching mediocrities.

In addition, because medicine turns out to be a high-citation field, any university with a good medical school will often have a quarter to half its highly cited researchers located there. I've marked below with an * schools that do not have a medical school, noting how many researchers would be added to their count if the nearest medical school in that university system were included.

1. Harvard University (131)
2. Stanford University (119)
3. *University of California, Berkeley (72) (46 more at UC San Francisco, the medical school campus, for a total of 118, so basically tied with Stanford)
4. *Massachussetts Institute of Technology (69)
5. *Princeton University (56)
6. *California Institute of Technology (55)
6. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (55)
8. Yale University (54)
9. University of California, San Diego (53)
10. University of Pennsylvania (49)
11. University of California, Los Angeles (48)
12. *Cornell University (43) (2 more at the medical school in NYC, for a total of 45, so no change in overall rank)
12. University of Washington, Seattle (43)
14. University of Chicago (40)
14. University of Wisconsin, Madison (40)
16. Columbia University (37)
17. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (36)
18. *University of Texas, Austin (34) (15 more at UT Southwestern in Dallas, the medical school campus, for a total of 49, so basically tied with Penn and UCLA)
19. Pennsylvania State University (33)
20. University of California, Davis (31)
21. Duke University (30)
21. Northwestern University (30)
23. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (28)
24. *University of California, Santa Barbara (27)
25. University of Colorado, Boulder (26)
26. New York University (25)
26. University of Maryland, College Park (25)
28. Johns Hopkins University (24)
28. University of Pittsburgh (24)
30. University of Southern California (23)
30. Washington University, St. Louis (23)

Yale, with both a Medical and Law School in the mix, still trails Princeton, which has neither! (The same is true for Penn, Duke, Columbia, NYU, Northwestern, Michigan, and Chicago, among others.) On the other hand, Yale's strengths in the humanities (especially history and literature) go unrecognized in this study. Other schools whose rank would improve if strength in the humanities were credited would include Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Chicago, and--maybe--Penn, UCLA, Duke, NYU, and Johns Hopkins (though Hopkins seems to be in a general state of decline, in the humanities and elsewhere--same may be true of Chicago, though not as dramatic).

It is striking, of course, how badly most of this list correlates with "popular" perceptions of university quality outside roughly the top five; but popular perceptions, of course, are little-informed by research output, and, in particular, by research output in the sciences. If anything, perception of university quality seems to track (imagine this!) quality of the English Department!

Some results for other well-known schools (not rank-ordered, since it's possible we missed some):

Boston University (14)
Brown University (12)
*Carnegie-Mellon University (14)
Emory University (11)
Georgetown University (1)
Michigan State University (20)
Ohio State University (22)
*Purdue University (13)
*Rice University (9)
Rockefeller University (13)
*Rutgers University, New Brunswick (18)
*Texas A&M; University (15)
University of Arizona (13)
*University of California, Irvine (15)
*University of California, Riverside (13)
University of Iowa (13)
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (19)
*University of Notre Dame (2)
University of Virginia (14)
Vanderbilt University (18)

And herewith Canadian universities (since I know less about which ones have medical schools, and which don't, I've omitted the * here):

1. University of Toronto (20)
2. University of British Columbia (17)
3. McGill University (13)
4. McMaster University (7)
4. University of Waterloo (7)

The numbers get small rather quickly here, so the differences are less meaningful. A random sample of some other Canadian universities (don't think we've missed any close to McMaster and Waterloo):

Queen's University (6)
University of Manitoba (5)
University of Saskatchewan (5)
Dalhousie University (4)
University of Alberta (4)
University of Guelph (3)
Simon Fraser University (2)
University of Calgary (2)
University of Victoria (2)
University of Western Ontario (1)

A clear indication of the skew towards the natural sciences in this data is that York University, Toronto--a major research center in the humanities and social sciences in Canada (but with a weaker presence in the hard sciences, and no medical school)--has no "highly cited researchers" according to the ISI measures! Other Canadian schools shortchanged by this tilt would include Alberta and Victoria.

[UPDATE, JULY 29: Stan Jones (Dalhousie) informs me that the only schools noted above without medical schools are Waterloo, Guelph, Simon Fraser, and Victoria. Waterloo, however, has a "very large mathematics and computing faculty" and Guelph a "very large agricultural and environmental faculty." Simon Fraser and Victoria, he also notes, are not "particularly well-known for science and/or engineering."]

Meanwhile, here's how the universities in Britain and Ireland rate:

1. Cambridge University (40)
2. Oxford University (37)
3. Imperial College London (25)
4. University College London (20)
5. University of Bristol (14)
6. University of Edinburgh (10)
7. University of Manchester (9)
8. University of Birmingham (8)
9. University of Nottingham (7)
9. University of Sheffield (7)

Others on the cusp of the "top ten": Sussex (6), King's College, London (6), Glasgow (5), Leicester (6). LSE, for reasons similar to York/Toronto (see above), had only 3 "highly cited" researchers. So, too, Birkbeck College, University of London had only 1. Schools shortchanged because of the natural sciences tilt of this data would also include York, Warwick, and St. Andrews.

Journalism in the UK and the US

Here's an astute post by Pharyngula on the difference between here and there, with some fine examples of what pathetic cowards most of our journalists are by comparison to their British counterparts.

More Suppression and Intimidation of Political Speech

A propos the recent posting on the attack on political speech under the guise of "security," these stories come via the National Lawyers Guild, from different parts of the nation:

7/23/04
The NYC Chapter notified the National Office today of multiple FBI questioning of activists in relation to the DNC. Agents questioned twenty activists in Lawrence, Kansas and people in Kansas City, Missouri were also questioned.
The FBI is asking questions such as :

"Do you know of any violence at the DNC?
"If you found anything out would you tell us?"
"Do you know of anyone planning on being involved in violence at the DNC?"

Many of the activists indicated that they prefer to answer only with counsel
present and the FBI instructed them to get one and come back. Agents located
the cell phone of one person and called him four times in one half-hour period. FBI agents called the parents of another activist.

> 'Warnings precede party conventions
> FBI, police visits to young people rile ACLU official'
>
> By Karen Abbott, Rocky Mountain News
> July 24, 2004
>
> Law enforcement officers visited several Denver young people Thursday to warn them against committing violence at the Democratic and Republican national conventions.
>
> "This is part of an ongoing FBI investigation with the Joint Terrorism Task Force," Colorado FBI spokeswoman Monique Kelson said Friday. "That's all that we can comment right now."

> The Joint Terrorism Task Force includes officers from local law enforcement agencies.
>
> Mark Silverstein, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Colorado, said young people living at two locations in Denver reported the visits to the ACLU and that similar visits have occurred elsewhere in the United States in recent days.
>
> He said officers told the Denver young people that they were visiting "protesters and anarchists."
>
> "It's an abuse of power, designed to intimidate these kids from exercising their constitutional right to protest government policies and associate with others
> who want to protest government policies," Silverstein said.
>
> Denver police public information officers referred inquiries to the FBI on Friday night.
>
> Sarah Bardwell, 21, said six officers arrived about 4:30 p.m. Thursday at the Denver home she shares with four other young people. Two houseguests also were there, she said.
>
> The six officers identified themselves as four FBI agents and two Denver police officers, but declined to give their names after the young people declined to give theirs, Bardwell said.
>
> One officer said he took the young people's refusal to give their names as "noncooperation" and said he would have to use "more intrusive efforts to get his job done," Bardwell said.
>
> "We had really no idea what was going on," she said.
>
> "They told us in a joking way that they were doing community outreach and getting to know the neighbors," she said.
>
> Then the officers said they were "doing some preventative measures and investigating," she said.
>
> She said the officers asked three questions: Are you planning to be involved in any criminal acts at the national conventions? Do you know anybody who is? Are you aware that if you assist or know anybody planning any criminal acts and do not report them, it's a crime?
>
> "We declined to answer," Bardwell said.
>
> She said she refused to answer on principle, not because she's hiding anything. She said she doesn't plan to attend either party's national convention.
>
> "I would normally be completely open," Bardwell said.
>
> Silverstein said law enforcement officers made a similar visit to another Denver home, occupied by four or five young people.
>
> Bardwell said she and her housemates believe they were visited because they have participated in protests in the past - including one the day before against the recent shooting death of a 63-year-old disabled man by a Denver police officer who was looking for someone else and mistook a soda can the man was holding for a gun.
>
> Other causes in which she has been active include protests against Columbus Day as a celebration of oppression of native people, work with an organization
> that collects food donated by grocery stores for homeless people and anti-war protests, Bardwell said.
>
> She is an intern with the American Friends Service Committee, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1940s for its work against violence. AFSC also
> advocates for prisoners' rights.
>
> "I think it was an intimidation tactic and it was designed to threaten people who are analyzing our current government and its policies and the system in
> the United States - an intimidation tactic that is used to crush any form of resistance or dissent or public expression of disapproval," Bardwell said.
>
> She said the visit from law enforcement officers motivated her to learn more about her rights and to be "even more active in my community."
>

Right now, there is no reason to believe votes will be fairly counted in the fall election

Details here. Bush is President now because Blacks were illegally disenfranchised in Florida. Next time, the vote theft may be even more brazen...and we won't even know.

It's good to forget...

...especially if you're a neocon war-monger (or a believer in "humanitarian" wars), as Red Constantino reminds us (footnotes omitted):

"We are not supposed to remember that the American Chamber of Commerce described the imposition of martial rule in the Philippines in 1972 as a 'heaven-sent relief' and we are expected to forget that, after martial law was declared, the same august Chamber wished Marcos 'every success in your endeavor to restore peace and order, business confidence, economic growth and the well-being of the Filipino people.'

"We are not supposed to remember that, two years before Marcos inflicted martial law on Filipinos, US investments in the Philippines stood at $16.3 million; and that by 1981, the year of the Bush toast to the Filipino tyrant, US investments stood at $920 million.

"We are expected to forget the 1965 -1966 Indonesian bloodbath - the slaughter of a million Indonesians perpetrated by a vile gang of Indonesian generals backed by America. A culling that overthrew a government that the US government disliked. A slaughter that midwifed the three-decade dictatorship of the Indonesian despot Suharto.

"We are not supposed to remember that during the carnage, the US government had supplied Suharto and his generals lists containing the names of those America wanted slaughtered....

"'The US is generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the [Indonesian] army is doing,' said the American Ambassador in Jakarta, Marshall Green, of the killings. But we are not supposed to remember these things.

"We are expected to forget about the Iraqi coup of 1963. A coup that took place four years after a massive public demonstration attended by half a million Iraqis had demanded working class leadership in Iraq. A coup that took place two years after the government of Abdul Karim-Qasim attempted to implement socio-economic reforms that included increasing taxes on the rich, the introduction of inheritance taxes, rent controls, price controls, the regulation of working hours and the provision of compulsory systems of social insurance.

"We are not supposed to remember the 1963 coup. A US-engineered coup that eventually catapulted a certain Saddam Hussein to the highest echelons of leadership in Iraq. We are not supposed to remember that the Ba'ath Party came to power, in the words of a Ba'athist president, 'using an American locomotive....'

"We are expected to forget all these things lest we ask some interesting questions. Without America's support, would the Marcos regime have lasted as long as it did? Without America's instigation, would Suharto have been able to slaughter so many and rule Indonesia for so long and with such barbarity? Without the American locomotive of 1963, where would Iraq be today?"

Soldiers React to Farenheit 9/11

These right-wing conmen are busy pushing a story about "soldier Joe Roche" reporting the pained reaction of soldiers to Michael Moore's movie. (Like the Black conservatives, soldier Joe appears to be bought and paid for, and by the same folks even! His story is being pushed by the "National Center for Public Policy Research," precisely one of the groups that has Black conservatives on its payroll, and the group that was "formed in the 1980s to support Reagan's military interventions in Central America.") The story has gained prominence since Andrew "I'm a despicable neanderthal, except when my own interests are at stake" Sullivan gave it prominent billing.

But if you cut through the right-wing overlay, and "soldier Joe's" laughable commentary ("Moore has abused the First Amendment and is hurting us worse than the enemy has"), it's clear that the soliders who have seen the movie got exactly the right message, the kind of message that real people connected to the military, like Military Families Speak Out, have been promoting for more than a year. I would imagine it is gratifying to Moore to learn that,

*"Specialist Janecek...is devastated. 'I feel shitty, ashamed, like this was all a lie.' It was all a lie, but you should not be ashamed, you should be angry. Talk to Specialist Everett:

*"Specialist Everett [said] after seeing the film: 'You'll be mad as shit for ever having come here.'" You should be. Make sure to vote.

*"Mostly the comments are absolute shock at the close connections Moore makes between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia. 'Bush looks really really REALLY corrupt in this film. I just don't know what to think anymore,' is a common comment to hear." Excellent: Bush is really, really, really corrupt, and for reasons Moore didn't even touch on!

Obviously, the country could benefit from more "abuses" of the First Amendment like this. Maybe if we had had a few sooner the war-mongering criminals in Washington would have been stopped dead in their tracks?

The Democratic Convention

It is some indication, I suppose, of the desperate political situation in America that a staunch opponent of Republocrats and Demublicans like myself actually watched significant portions of the convention last night. Why? Because I am desperately worried about what will happen if we do not defeat the current criminal war-mongers and theocrats in Washington, DC. And so I watched hoping for some reassurance that the Democrats won't screw it all up for me and my children, not to mention world history. From the first night, I have only two observations:

(1) Hilary Clinton is a dreadful speaker; she needs to be retired from public life ASAP, for the sake of humane values. She comes across as exactly the irrelevant, stiff rich girl, trying to affect human emotion, that she is--the female counterpart to John Kerry, who at least has the redeeming virtue, for political purposes, of having gone to war in Vietnam and been shot at.

(2) Bill Clinton--who, let us remember, had a domestic economic policy far to the right of Richard Nixon's--is such a good rhetorician that it embarrasses the entire field, except of course John Edwards. I never voted for Clinton, but I would vote for him this year, since for all his reactionary domestic policies, he was not a fascist theocrat, and his values at least stand in some relation to the values of the Enlightenment. One could have some confidence in Clinton as a candidate against the beady-eyed, tongue-tied Bush. Like Edwards, Clinton would wipe the floor with Bush in a public debate. Alas...

UPDATE: There is a decent, short account of why the Clinton speech was effective here: "He performed a brilliant rhetorical trick: he deployed the usual canards used against him to buttress Kerry. Rather than attack the wealthy as recipients of tax cuts, he attacked himself as a now-wealthy man. And then the coup de grace: he put himself and Bush in the same camp as draft-dodgers, in stark comparison to the patriotic Kerry!...[I]t was mighty effective. And the way in which he described the cost of the tax cut in terms of squandered attempts to improve homeland defense was another smart move. Use the Republican tax cut issue against the Republican security issue. Wedge against them for once. If the constitution didn't prevent it, the man would still be president. After last night's speech, you can see why."

UPDATE: I actually missed former President Jimmy Carter's speech last night, but the text is here, and it's not bad, pleasingly direct in many ways, given the usual dishonest pleasantries that ordinarily prevail on such occasions.