August 24, 2004
The Curmudgeonly Clerk Retires
His farewell here. That's a real loss for the conservative blogosphere, since the Clerk's postings were almost always carefully written and documented. I much enjoyed many of the postings, and they will be missed.
The Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom
Thanks to reader Stephen Frug for flagging this essay for me, which touches on topics dealt with here on prior occasions.
Philosophical logician Uzquiano from Rochester to Ohio State
Gabriel Uzquiano (logic, philosophical logic, metaphysics), an assistant professor at the University of Rochester, has accepted a tenured offer from Ohio State University, to start in fall 2005.
"The Challenge of Philosophical Naturalism"
Leave it to the blogosphere--in this case, the always informative "Legal Theory Blog" by Larry Solum--to alert me to the fact that a conference in which I'm participating now has a public website. As things stand, Stich and I will be carrying the flag for naturalism, with the Williamses and Zipursky representing the forces of retrograde philosophy! I'm looking forward to it.
My Absolutely Final Post on the Kerry War Service Nonsense
John Kerry made his voluntary participation in a criminal and immoral war the centerpiece of his campaign; that invites scrutiny. But the scrutiny it is getting is a joke, typical of the pathological stupidity and dishonesty of both the Republican Party and the national media in this country. This article says all there is to say about the candidates and the Vietnam War:
"[N]ow we're having a debate about whether the man who did the honorable thing [and volunteered to serve in the army] may have embellished his record a little (although nothing in the documentary record suggests he did this), while we have two cowards who did everything they could to stay miles away from the place Kerry demanded he be sent. This is the fundamental truth. And while yes, Kerry has made his war service a centerpiece in a way that Bush and Cheney for obvious reasons did not, is it really Kerry who deserves scrutiny for how he behaved in 1968 and 1969? Why shouldn't the major media be doing comparisons of how Kerry, Bush, and Cheney passed those years? Why shouldn't The Washington Post be devoting 2,700 words to a comprehensive look at Cheney's deferments? Nichols identifies three young men from Casper who did die in Vietnam: Robert Cardenas, Walter Elmer Handy, and Douglas Tyrone Patrick. Did one of them die because Cheney had 'other priorities'?
"But The Washington Post won't do that, because there exists no Vietnam Veterans for the Truth About Deferments, financed by wealthy Democratic donors and out peddling its wares. Which is the moral of the story. Our media can sort through the facts in front of their nose and determine, at least some of the time, who's lying and who's not. But they are completely incapable of taking a step back and describing the larger reality. Doing that would require making judgments that are supposedly subjective rather than objective; but the larger reality here is clearer than clear. Just imagine if the situation were reversed: The same people now questioning Kerry's 'character' would have worked to establish Bush as a war hero long ago. They would have labeled Kerry a coward. If by chance a liberal-backed group came forward to question Bush's wartime actions, they would have been called traitors and worse. And the mainstream media would be following the agenda they set every step of the way."
The one happy thing to come out of this pathetic display is that attention has been finally called to John Kerry's role as critic of the Vietnam War, the role that was erased from the Democratic Convention. But, given the militaristic mindset of the country, his strong performance as a war critic--really his most honorable performance in public life--will no doubt prove a liability. But he deserves to be hoist by his own words on this score, since he disgracefully failed to acknowledge the dignity and moral correctness of his criticisms of the war during the Democratic Convention.
UPDATE: Turns out Paul Krugman is on a similar theme today.
August 23, 2004
What law firm partners want from new associates
This article includes some fairly sensible advice.
State Research Universities and Undergraduate Education
In commenting on the latest US News rankings of colleges, I noted that state research universities like Illinois and Texas are ranked with or below schools that have much weaker faculties. But I also noted that such schools are big, which often counts against the undergraduate experience. And then I posed the question whether their bigness really meant the undergraduate experience was inferior to schools with less distinguished faculties.
Illinois undergraduate Lucas Wiman writes in response with one perspective:
"I'm an Illinois mathematics student...I transferred from Illinois State University in fall 2003, and I've taken 10 classes here (4 of which were graduate courses). The graduate courses were wonderful and fascinating, and I learned quite a bit from them. Taking graduate courses was my goal in coming here, so the school has certainly improved my undergraduate education enormously. However, it did so by way of its excellent graduate program. The undergraduate
courses have been jokes. Enormous lecture halls, ridiculous assignments, easy tests. In an Asian literature course, I got a B without reading any of the assigned reading, and going to class 50% of the time. There have been 3 courses in which I only went to tests and got A's. I've heard that in CS courses, 60% is typically curved up to an A. That was indeed the case in one CS course that I took, and people still complained about how difficult the course was. One could even write 'I don't know' to any question and get 25% credit.
"The truth about this school is that the undergraduate program is little more than a bureaucratic requirement. The resources are certainly there--if you were to go to class regularly, do all the assigned readings, and work hard on your own, you could get a decent education. But that is true at all universities, including community colleges. Here there is nothing in grades which substantially reflects learning, and since most students don't care about anything but their grades, little learning actually takes place."
I've opened comments, and invite other perspectives, especially from undergraduate students or graduates of state research universities. (Faculty are, of course, welcome to comment as well.) Is Mr. Wiman's report typical of the undergraduate experience at places like Illinois? Please do not post anonymously and identify who you are (e.g., faculty member at Illinois, student at Wisconsin, etc.).
UPDATE: Many very interesting comments posted below--if you've read this far, do read the comments. Thanks to all who have posted as well.
The first "Philosopher's Carnival" is...
...here.
The language of "eternal fascism"
A fine essay by Henry Giroux (though the line, above, comes from Umberto Eco); an excerpt:
"One of the more significant marks of an authoritarian society is its willingness to distort the truth while simultaneously suppressing dissent. For instance, Umberto Eco argues that one element of proto-fascism is the rise of an Orwellian version of Newspeak, or what he labels as the language of 'eternal fascism,' whose purpose is to produce 'an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax [whose consequence is] to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.' Under the Bush administration, especially since the horrible events of September 11th, we have witnessed an extension of the concept of war to include not only traditional, strategic, defense-oriented objectives, but also to discipline civil society, reproduce all aspects of public life in the image of official power, and inject the ideology of militarism as the very foundation of politics. Accompanying this increasing form of discursive and material repression is an attempt to refashion the tools of language, sound, and image in an effort to diminish the capacity of the American public to think critically. As the critical power of language is reduced in official discourse to the simulacra of communication, it becomes more difficult for the American public to engage in critical debates, translate private considerations into public concerns, and recognize the distortions and lies that underlie much of the current government policies. What happens to critical language under the emergence of official Newspeak can be seen in the various ways in which the Bush administration and its official supporters both misrepresent by mis-naming government policies and simply engage in lying to cover up their own regressive politics and policies.
"Many people have pointed to Bush himself as a mangler of the English language, but this charge simply repeats the obvious while privatizing a much more important issue connecting language to power. Bush’s discursive ineptness may be fodder for late night comics, but such analyses miss the more strategic issue of how the Bush administration actually manipulates discourse. For instance, Bush describes himself as a 'reformer' while he promotes policies that expand corporate welfare, give tax benefits to the rich, and 'erode the financial capacity of the state to undertake any but the most minimal welfare functions....'
"Official Newspeak also trades in the rhetoric of fear in order to manipulate the public into state of servile political dependency and unquestioning ideological support. Fear and its attendant use of moral panics create not only a rhetorical umbrella to promote other agendas, but also a sense of helplessness and cynicism throughout the body politic. Hence, Bush’s increased dependency upon issuing terror and security alerts and panic-inducing references to 9/11 is almost always framed in Manichean language of absolute good and evil. Bush’s doublespeak also employs the discourse of evangelicalism, and its attendant suggestion that whatever wisdom Bush has results from his direct communion with God--a position not unlike that of Moses on Mount Sinai, and which, of course, cannot be challenged by mere mortals....
"While all governments sometimes resort to misrepresentations and lies, Bush’s doublespeak makes such action central to its maintenance of political power and its manipulation of the media and the public. Language is used in this context to say one thing, but to actually mean its opposite. This type of discourse mimics George Orwell’s dystopian world of 1984 where the Ministry of Truth actually produces lies and the Ministry of Love is actually used to torture people. Ruth Rosen points out that the Bush administration engages in a kind of doublespeak right out of Orwell’s novel. For instance, Bush’s Healthy Forest Initiative 'allows increased logging of protected wilderness. The ‘Clear Skies’ initiative permits greater industrial air pollution....'"
"Persons without conscience"
Kurt Vonnegut poses the question of the moment:
"What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?"
Fair and Balanced
Help me out here, readers: did Glenn "no bit of right-wing sliminess is beneath me" Reynolds devote this much space to the fact that Dick Cheney is a draft dodger and George Bush went AWOL? (At least the latter are facts!)
(Whenever I mention Professor Reynolds, I get some puzzled queries from readers in the real world: "Who is this non-entity? Why do you even mention this guy?" Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, so he is part of one of my professional universes. Among scholars, he is known for some well-regarded articles on the Second Amendment right to bear arms a decade or so ago. But his primary distinction is that he started blogging before everyone else, and so his right-wing news-and-link site Instapundit now gets about 150,000 hits per day. There are obviously lots of not-very-bright, right-wing shills working the blogosphere, including some who are also professors; but for the combination of impact, creepiness, and sometimes sheer dopiness, Professor Reynolds really is in a class by himself.)
August 22, 2004
Hugo Chavez's Crimes in Venezuela
Here's a useful catalogue, via Red Constantino:
"For many, the nature of the change that Chavez is driving has become the central reason behind the sustained attempts to undermine the Chavez government. The disparity of agendas is glaring. The opposition continues to promise, for instance, a return to free market economic policies, a platform welcomed by international financial leaders and institutions like the International Monetary Fund; Chavez is opposed to it.
"'We are building an economy at the service of human beings,' said Nora Castaneda, the president of Banca Mujer (Women's Development Bank), of the Chavez administration's goals, 'not human beings at the service of the economy.'
"For the first time in Venezuela's history, government authority has been established decisively over how the Venezuelan oil industry - the fifth largest exporter in the world - is to be run and for whose benefit. Oil money is now re-channeled towards financing immeasurable employment, health, education and literacy missions throughout the country for the destitute of Venezuela, specifically for women.
"At least 65 percent of Venezuelan households are headed by women and the Chavez government during the drafting of the 2000 constitution ensured that this fact was reflected in Venezuela's framing document. Among it's progressive provisions, the constitution recognizes women's unwaged caring work as economically productive, entitling housewives to social security.
"It was no surprise, Selma James noted, that in 2002 women of African and indigenous descent led the masses who descended from the hills to reverse the elite-sponsored and U.S.-backed putsch which briefly ousted Chavez, 'thereby saving their constitution, their president, their democracy, their revolution.'
"Over 250,000 children now have access to secondary education--children 'whose social status excluded them from this privilege during the ancien regime.' In poor districts, 11,000 neighborhood clinics have been established, the health budget has tripled and 10,000 Cuban doctors have been fielded to boost health care services in impoverished areas. There is also an ongoing campaign to provide citizenship to thousands of long-term immigrants....
"And yet, despite his belligerent attitude towards the Bush administration, despite his glaring differences with the U.S. government concerning Latin American hemispheric economic integration, despite his government's openly expressed dissenting position on geopolitical issues such as the war on Iraq, the U.S. government continues to do business with the Chavez government and import 14 percent of its oil - equivalent to 1.5 million barrels per day, which was the average even before the election of Chavez - from Venezuela....
"'Are we aiming in Venezuela today for the abolition of private property or a classless society?' Chavez continued. 'I don't think so. But if I'm told that because of that reality you can't do anything to help the poor . . . then I say "We part company". I will never accept that there can be no redistribution of wealth in society. Our upper classes don't even like paying taxes. That's one reason why they hate me. We said "You must pay your taxes". I believe it's better to die in battle, rather than hold aloft a very revolutionary and very pure banner, and do nothing . . . That position often strikes me as very convenient, a good excuse . . . Try and make your revolution, go into combat, advance a little, even if it's only a millimeter, in the right direction, instead of dreaming about utopias.'"
No wonder the U.S. Government hates him, and no wonder two-thirds of the people support him.
Your Definitive Set of Links on the Bushie Smear Campaign on John Kerry
Michael Froomkin (Law, Miami) has all the relevant links here.
UPDATE: This site wipes the floor with the "Smear Boat Veterans."
August 21, 2004
Yet more on Legal Realism...
...from the Curmudgeonly Clerk, who links to some earlier discussions as well.
"The Warlords of America"
John Pilger via Lew Rockwell; an excerpt:
"During the past 60 years, only once has Congress voted to limit the president's 'right' to terrorise other countries. This aberration, the Clark Amendment 1975, a product of the great anti-Vietnam war movement, was repealed in 1985 by Ronald Reagan.
"During Reagan's assaults on central America in the 1980s, liberal voices such as Tom Wicker of the New York Times, doyen of the 'doves,' seriously debated whether or not tiny, impoverished Nicaragua was a threat to the United States. These days, terrorism having replaced the red menace, another fake debate is under way....
"Supremacy is the essence of Americanism; only the veil changes or slips. In 1976, the Democrat Jimmy Carter announced 'a foreign policy that respects human rights.' In secret, he backed Indonesia's genocide in East Timor and established the mujahedin in Afghanistan as a terrorist organisation designed to overthrow the Soviet Union, and from which came the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It was the liberal Carter, not Reagan, who laid the ground for George W Bush. In the past year, I have interviewed Carter's principal foreign policy overlords – Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, and James Schlesinger, his defence secretary. No blueprint for the new imperialism is more respected than Brzezinski's. Invested with biblical authority by the Bush gang, his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives describes American priorities as the economic subjugation of the Soviet Union and the control of central Asia and the Middle East. His analysis says that 'local wars' are merely the beginning of a final conflict leading inexorably to world domination by the US. 'To put it in a terminology that harkens back to a more brutal age of ancient empires,' he writes, 'the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.'
"It may have been easy once to dismiss this as a message from the lunar right. But Brzezinski is mainstream....
"Cast an eye over the rest of the world. As Iraq has crowded the front pages, American moves into Africa have attracted little attention. Here, the Clinton and Bush policies are seamless. In the 1990s, Clinton's African Growth and Opportunity Act launched a new scramble for Africa. Humanitarian bombers wonder why Bush and Blair have not attacked Sudan and 'liberated' Darfur, or intervened in Zimbabwe or the Congo. The answer is that they have no interest in human distress and human rights, and are busy securing the same riches that led to the European scramble in the late 19th century by the traditional means of coercion and bribery, known as multilateralism.
"The Congo and Zambia possess 50 per cent of world cobalt reserves; 98 per cent of the world's chrome reserves are in Zimbabwe and South Africa. More importantly, there is oil and natural gas in Africa from Nigeria to Angola, and in Higleig, south-west Sudan. Under Clinton, the African Crisis Response Initiative (Acri) was set up in secret. This has allowed the US to establish 'military assistance programmes' in Senegal, Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Benin, Algeria, Niger, Mali and Chad. Acri is run by Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina, a Cuban exile who took part in the 1961 Bay of Pigs landing and went on to be a special forces officer in Vietnam and Laos, and who, under Reagan, helped lead the Contra invasion of Nicaragua. The pedigrees never change.
"None of this is discussed in a presidential campaign in which John Kerry strains to out-Bush Bush. The multilateralism or 'muscular internationalism' that Kerry offers in contrast to Bush's unilateralism is seen as hopeful by the terminally naive; in truth, it beckons even greater dangers. Having given the American elite its greatest disaster since Vietnam, writes the historian Gabriel Kolko, Bush 'is much more likely to continue the destruction of the alliance system that is so crucial to American power. One does not have to believe the worse the better, but we have to consider candidly the foreign policy consequences of a renewal of Bush's mandate . . . As dangerous as it is, Bush's re-election may be a lesser evil.' With Nato back in train under President Kerry, and the French and Germans compliant, American ambitions will proceed without the Napoleonic hindrances of the Bush gang....
"The campaign against Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is indicative [of the political and intellectual climate]. The film is not radical and makes no outlandish claims; what it does is push past those guarding the boundaries of 'respectable' dissent. That is why the public applauds it. It breaks the collusive codes of journalism, which it shames. It allows people to begin to deconstruct the nightly propaganda that passes for news: in which 'a sovereign Iraqi government pursues democracy' and those fighting in Najaf and Fallujah and Basra are always 'militants' and 'insurgents' or members of a 'private army,' never nationalists defending their homeland and whose resistance has probably forestalled attacks on Iran, Syria or North Korea.
"The real debate is neither Bush nor Kerry, but the system they exemplify; it is the decline of true democracy and the rise of the American 'national security state' in Britain and other countries claiming to be democracies, in which people are sent to prison and the key thrown away and whose leaders commit capital crimes in faraway places, unhindered, and then, like the ruthless Blair, invite the thug they install to address the Labour Party conference. The real debate is the subjugation of national economies to a system which divides humanity as never before and sustains the deaths, every day, of 24,000 hungry people. The real debate is the subversion of political language and of debate itself and perhaps, in the end, our self-respect."
Another friend of fascism takes a beating
Eric Muller (North Carolina, Law) has usefully collected a quite devastating set of critical comments on a recent book by right-wing pretty-girl pundit Michelle Malkin defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. (Professor Muller himself has written a scholarly book on the subject.) Ms. Malkin's primary qualifications, other than being a mindless right-winger and photogenic, are that (you guessed it) she's a journalist. Mr. Kraus?
UPDATE: More on Malkin and the right-wing propaganda machine here.
Iraqi Olympic Athletes Blast Bush
Details here:
"[Iraqi soccer player] Sadir had a message for U.S. president George W. Bush, who is using the Iraqi Olympic team in his latest re-election campaign advertisements.
"In those spots, the flags of Iraq and Afghanistan appear as a narrator says, 'At this Olympics there will be two more free nations -- and two fewer terrorist regimes.'
"'Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign,' Sadir told SI.com through a translator, speaking calmly and directly....
"Ahmed Manajid, who played as a midfielder on Wednesday, had an even stronger response when asked about Bush's TV advertisement. 'How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?' Manajid told me. 'He has committed so many crimes....'
"'My problems are not with the American people,' says Iraqi soccer coach Adnan Hamad. 'They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?'
"'I want the violence and the war to go away from [my native] city [of Najaf],' says Sadir, 21. 'We don't wish for the presence of Americans in our country. We want them to go away.'
"Manajid, 22, who nearly scored his own goal with a driven header on Wednesday, hails from the city of Fallujah. He says coalition forces killed Manajid's cousin, Omar Jabbar al-Aziz, who was fighting as an insurgent, and several of his friends. In fact, Manajid says, if he were not playing soccer he would 'for sure' be fighting as part of the resistance.
"'I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?' Manajid says. 'Everyone [in Fallujah] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies. Fallujah people are some of the best people in Iraq....'
"When the Games are over, though, Coach Hamad says, they will have to return home to a place where they fear walking the streets. 'The war is not secure,' says Hamad, 43. 'Many people hate America now. The Americans have lost many people around the world--and that is what is happening in America also.'"
August 20, 2004
The Smear Campaign on Kerry's War Service...
...is primarily funded by a nice Texan named Bob Perry, who according to the non-partisan Texans for Public Justice, is,
"a major Texas donor to the Republican Party, George W. Bush, Republican candidates, and conservative, pro-business political committees [and] has contributed $200,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group attacking John Kerry’s Vietnam service.
"The Houston-based Perry owns Perry Homes, one of the state’s largest homebuilders with reported revenues of $420 million in 2002. While an active political donor since the mid-1980’s, over the past three years Perry has eclipsed the giving of Texas’ elite money men and positioned himself as the largest single political donor in Texas giving candidates and committees more than $5.2 million since 2000.
"Perry worked with Karl Rove as early as 1986 when Perry served as Campaign Treasurer for Republican gubernatorial candidate William Clements and Rove served as a campaign consultant and fundraiser.
"Highlights of Perry’s political contributions:
"Perry contributed $46,000 to George W. Bush’s 1994 and 1998 campaigns for Texas Governor. He has contributed the maximum allowable $2,000 to Bush’s current reelection.
"Perry was the largest individual contributor to the Texas Republican Party during the recent 2002-election cycle (calendar 2001 & 2002) giving $905,000....
"Perry was the largest contributor to Tom DeLay’s Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC) giving $165,000 in the 2002 election cycle. TRMPAC is currently the subject of a criminal investigation by a Travis Country grand jury for allegedly misusing corporate contributions in the 2002 state elections....
"Sources: Campaign filings with the Texas Ethics Commission, IRS & FEC. Reports published by Texans for Public Justice and news accounts."
Perhaps when Senator Kerry suggests that Bush is behind these attacks, and ought to take responsibility for them, there is some truth in that?
UPDATE: Do see the detailed analysis and demolition of the attacks here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Kieran Healy (Arizona, Sociology) has a characteristically sharp and ironic take-down of the sanctimonious clown act called OxBlog commenting on the Kerry affair.
AND ANOTHER: Here's an account from a swift boat veteran who, unlike the ones rounded up by the Bushies, was actually there.
AND ONE MORE: Thanks to Keith DeRose for this link, showing those "positive" Bushies enthusiastically embracing the smear campaign.
The latest US News Fraud on the Public is Here!
The U.S. News law school rankings aren't very good, but they look like rocket science by comparison to their rankings of colleges. Here's the top 50 according to US News. We get off to a plausible enough start with the top three:
1. Harvard University
1. Princeton University
3. Yale University
and then, who is #4 according to US News, better than MIT, Stanford, Columbia, Michigan, and Berkeley?
4. University of Pennsylvania
And now we're on the other side of the looking glass. Penn is a very good research university, to be sure, one of the top 15 or so in the nation, on a par, more or less, with UCLA, Wisconsin, Texas, Cornell, etc. But how did it get ranked 4th for undergraduate education? It certainly has a better student-faculty ratio than state research universities like Wisconsin and Texas, but that's not why it's ranked 4th. It's ranked 4th because they cook the numbers, plain and simple (as a former Penn Dean said to me a few years back, "I'd hate to be around if they ever audited the books"). That started with former Penn President Judith Rodin; whether Amy Gutmann will continue that "tradition" remains to be seen. For a variety of reasons having to do with the ranking criteria, the undergraduate rankings are even more subject to manipulation through creative accounting and outright fraud than the law school rankings.
Here now the rest of the top 50 according to US News:
5. Duke University (NC)
Massachusetts Inst. of Technology
Stanford University (CA)
8. California Institute of Technology
9. Columbia University (NY)
Dartmouth College (NH)
11. Northwestern University (IL)
Washington University in St. Louis
13. Brown University (RI)
14. Cornell University (NY)
Johns Hopkins University (MD)
University of Chicago
17. Rice University (TX)
18. University of Notre Dame (IN)
Vanderbilt University (TN)
20. Emory University (GA)
21. University of California – Berkeley *
22. Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
University of Michigan – Ann Arbor *
University of Virginia *
25. Georgetown University (DC)
Univ. of California – Los Angeles *
27. Wake Forest University (NC)
28. Tufts University (MA)
29. U. of North Carolina – Chapel Hill *
30. Univ. of Southern California
31. College of William and Mary (VA)*
32. Brandeis University (MA)
New York University
Univ. of Wisconsin – Madison *
35. Case Western Reserve Univ. (OH)
Univ. of California – San Diego *
37. Boston College
Lehigh University (PA)
U. of Illinois – Urbana - Champaign *
University of Rochester (NY)
41. Georgia Institute of Technology *
42. University of California – Davis *
43. Tulane University (LA)
University of California – Irvine *
45. Univ. of California – Santa Barbara *
46. Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst. (NY)
University of Texas – Austin *
University of Washington *
Yeshiva University (NY)
50. Pennsylvania State U. – University Park *
University of Florida
One does wonder what planet one is on when a "news" magazine informs its readers that Texas and Washington are on a par with Rensselaer Polytechnic and Yeshiva; or that Illinois is on a par with BC; or William & Mary is better than NYU. To be sure, the demeaned research universities on this list are big, which counts against the undergraduate experience they provide. Yet they are so dramatically better in terms of faculty quality and research that one really must ask: does their bigness really "drag them down" that far for purposes of undergraduate education? (And how to explain preposterous results like ranking Duke and Penn on a par with, or ahead of, Stanford and MIT and Columbia? Cooking the books and fraud, I fear.)
To be sure, I would send my children to Wash U/St. Louis over Texas and Washington, even though the latter two are significantly stronger research universities overall. But Wash U is very good, and, by all accounts and evidence, offers a much better undergraduate experience (most importantly, smaller classes, and more of them taught by regular faculty). But I'd never send my kids to UVA, Georgetown, Tulane, let alone Yeshiva, over Texas, and not just because of the tuition. The simple fact is that any reader who was influenced by apparently "significant" differences in rankings--like Texas being 46th and UVA being 22nd--would simply end up being defrauded, to the detriment of their children. (As a research university, UVA ranks well below Berkeley and Michigan, as well as every state research university ranked behind it in the US News top 50, except for Penn State, Florida, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Irvine. But it is unusually small for a state university, which is a huge advantage in these rankings because of all the "per capita" measures employed.)
But do not despair, good reader, since as Karl Kraus has told us before: "No ideas and the ability to express them: that's a journalist." And when journalists rank academic institutions, that's exactly what you get.
August 19, 2004
Non-Sequitur Alert
Senator Harkin, correctly, calls war monger and draft dodger Dick Cheney a self-serving coward because he attacks those who actually served in the military and because he sends other people's kids to war.
How, then, could it be relevant that Senator Harkin himself in the past misrepresented the nature of his own military service?
(Hint: it isn't.)
My esteemed, but oh-so-very-conservative, friends at the Far Far Far Right Coast can do better!
Another ACLS Award:
In addition to the ACLS Fellowships noted below, one philosopher has won a new ACLS award, the Burkhardt Fellowship for those recently tenured: Robin Jeshion (philosophy of language, philosophy of math), who recently moved from Yale to the University of California at Riverside. This is a rather new ACLS award--and a potentially quite attractive one--so worth investigating by those soon-to-be or recently tenured.
John Kerry, War Monger?
What is this guy thinking? Details, via Helen Thomas:
"Last week at the Grand Canyon, Kerry said he would have 'voted to give the president the authority to go to war' even if he had known there were no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction -- Bush's original justification for war on Iraq.
"Kerry explained that he believes a president should have the 'authority' to go to war, and he voted accordingly. But he insisted that Bush subsequently misused the authority by rushing headlong into combat based on faulty intelligence about Saddam's weapons arsenal....
"Kerry has passed up several chances to distance himself from the Iraqi debacle. But instead he has left himself wide open to Bush's ridicule. What's he got left -- stem-cell research?
"Bush had a field day smirking and mocking his political rival and telling the nation that he was "right" to attack Iraq, absence of weapons notwithstanding.
"Bush has sarcastically told cheering Republican rallies, 'After months of questioning my motives and even my credibility, Sen. Kerry now agrees with me....'
"The senator should have called Bush's hand months ago and laid it on the line after so much official deception. How could he say he would have voted for the 2002 war resolution after he and the whole world learned the rationale for the war was based on falsehoods?
"Does Kerry realize that the U.S. invasion of Iraq without provocation violates the U.N. Charter and the Nuremberg Tribunal principles?...
"So Kerry has blown it big time, rising to Bush's bait and throwing away his ace in the hole -- Bush's shaky credibility on the profound question of war and peace.
"Bush has yet to apologize for misleading the nation or to explain why he needed a war when Saddam's regime was tightly contained with sanctions, weapons inspections and U.S. patrolling of the 'no-fly' zone....
"In 1964, a Los Angeles Times cartoon by famed Paul Conrad showed a pollster knocking on a door. A woman sticks her head out of a window and the pollster asks her voting preference: 'President Johnson or Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz.?' She replies: 'Who else have you got?'
"That may be the fix some Americans are in again."
Law Professor Families?
The distinguished legal historian Laura Kalman is seeking information on families of law professors; she is interested in "a list of families since 1870 in which parent and child/child's partner; grandparent, parent, and child/child's partner; parent's sibling) and child/child's partner; or just plain-old siblings are all law professors."
An example would be Richard Posner, longtime Chicago professor and now judge, and his son, Eric Posner, now a Chicago professor. Another example: Frederic Kirgis at Washington & Lee, and Paul Kirgis at St. John's.
I've opened comments for others to post examples. Professor Kalman will check the comments periodically to see what folks come up with.
"Help Mom! There are Liberals Under my Bed"
This children's book does not appear to be intended as a joke. Read the description. What must the intellectual and emotional condition of parents be like who would buy this for their kids?
And here's an amusing commentary on the same.
(Thanks to Ann Bartow for the pointers.)
Congratulations to...
Jessica Berry and Matt Evans, two outstanding recent graduates of the PhD program here who have assumed tenure-track posts starting this academic year. It is one of the two or three best things about my job to have the chance to work with such exceptionally talented young philosophers and scholars. Anyone working in their fields will soon be hearing much about them.
They will be missed in Austin!
August 18, 2004
Final Opportunity to Review Faculty Lists for Upcoming PGR Survey!
Here's the final chance for departments to review the draft faculty lists that we will use next month when the new surveys begin. Many thanks to all who have provided feedback so far. You may download the current draft here.
Philosopher Carter from Colorado to Glasgow
Alan Carter (political philosophy, ethics, environmental philosophy) at the University of Colorado at Boulder has accepted the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow (he had also been offered a post at La Trobe in Australia recently).
Tough times in Boulder.
Jimmy Breslin: Still Whooping the Fascists in NYC
Breslin is still having fun with these villains:
"'Stay Off the Grass [NYC Mayor] Bloomberg,' looks sillier by the half-hour.
"There is going to be a demonstration of people against Bush and the war on the day before the Republican National Convention opens in Madison Square Garden. They are liable to draw any number, 250,000 and up....
"Bloomberg doesn't want it. He wants the demonstration to make a turn on 34th Street and go over to the West Side Highway, then go all the way down to the Sunday bleakness of Chambers Street. I am giving this step-by-step not to bore you; rather it is certification of government insanity. On Chambers Street, they can have a rally with the kind of speeches you always hear at rallies like this.
"Speakers are the worst group of beggars and bindle stiffs and cheap stutterers. Their words die in the air in front of them. Never in all modern demonstrations have speeches been listened to by the crowds or noted in the news accounts. The only thing that matters is the size of the crowd. Please do not bring up the Martin Luther King speech in Washington. It cannot be classified with anything heard in our time.
"A rally in Central Park without speakers or microphones is the way to hold the day without the slightest chance of turmoil.
"The demonstration leaders have changed their minds about the West Side Highway and now want to go into Central Park. The Parks Commissioner just turned them down again with one paragraph. The guy comes out of a known liberal family and he battles against freedom of speech. Why did he turn them down?
"He was told by the police commissioner and mayor, both of whom are acting as errand boys for the Republican National Committee. The Republicans want demonstrators to rally on Chambers Street, near the former World Trade Center site, in order to say, 'Look! At the place where people died, they demonstrate against our troops....'
"While practically everybody is guarding Republicans, in the rest of the city store windows are at least vulnerable. This is not to point at our populace. In peaceful, lovely Iowa, you had bank robbers rush in where police just left to guard the candidates.
See how it can be with New York common sense. In the City of New York in the year 1982, there was a large nuclear disarmament demonstration. The crowd was going to be huge, everybody knew that. The Parks Commissioner, Gordon Davis, said they would ruin the park. He denied the permit. Then Ed Koch, the mayor, grew nervous when his people told him the crowd could be anything, a million. 'Put them in Central Park,' Koch ordered. 'They'll be safe there.'
"He was right. The crowd was a million and more. There were a couple of arrests, four or five, no more, for cheap misdemeanors. The day after the rally, the parks commissioner looked at Central Park and said it was neater than his son's bedroom at home.
"The director of that rally was Leslie Cagan, who is running the demonstration this time with undiminished skill.
"The mayor and police commissioner have ruled that at any gathering in the park, no amplifiers can be used by speakers.
"So you can't have a permit for a rally because you can't have speeches over loudspeakers. Rather than stop a rally, it is the point that allows it. Of course there shouldn't be amplifiers at any rally, for there should be no speeches. As noted, they are dreadful and delivered by vile people. A straight-line march past Madison Square Garden and on to Central Park, where people can congratulate themselves and smile and sing, would be a lovely afternoon, made so meaningful by the size of a crowd whose orderliness, and love, would make the Republicans coming in, these mean whites from low-IQ states, look ill."
Boy, I wish I'd gotten to that last line first!
Michael-Moore Haters
I understand why they're pissed: he's made their boy in the White House look like the ne'er-do-well buffoon that all the real evidence suggests he is. Don't get me wrong: lots of folks here in Austin know George Bush, personally. They attest to him as jolly dinner company. But ne'er-do-well buffoons often are, and that is neither here nor there. The worry is that he is not equipped to be President, that he has neither judgment, nor experience, nor knowledge adequate for the job. (It's actually not clear that he's equipped to hold any job, but that's a different matter. Texas Monthly recently ran a profile of another Bush brother, Neil, who like George W. has been a chronic screw-up, despite having every opportunity and benefit of the doubt. George Sr. and Barbara must, at some level, be deeply embarrassed by all this.)
But surely right-wing conmen can do better than this rebuttal to Michael Moore:
"In one of the best-known scenes from Fahrenheit 9/11, President George W. Bush is captured on film appearing more concerned about his skill at golf than his leadership in the war for civilization. Speaking to a throng of reporters, President Bush remarks, 'I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now, watch this drive.' These three phrases alone seem to many incontrovertible evidence that Bush, insincere about the threat of al Qaeda, merely mouths boilerplate that looks robust in the morning papers. It makes for great sneering. Now, as it turns out, President Bush was talking not about al Qaeda, but Hamas, which had suicide-bombed in Israel hours before. But don’t expect the movie to mention such a detail, for here Bush looks silly, and this is the great purpose of Fahrenheit 9/11."
Yes, indeed, knowing that it was merely Hamas, not al Qaeda, that had distracted Bush from his golf game does change my entire view of the man.
And so it goes in right-wing conman land.
(Even more amusing is that I found this link via Francis Beckwith, creationist apologist extraordinaire, who on the basis of the link discussed above denounces Moore as a "pathological liar." Now I wonder where he picked up that turn of phrase?)
UT Emerging Scholars Program
UT has a new program aimed at the creme-de-la-creme of aspiring young legal scholars. Details here.
"Civility is overrated."
So says Judge Easterbrook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Who could disagree?
Reagan's Case Against George Bush--and a fine catalogue of the deceptions on Iraq
Full article here; this is well-done. An excerpt:
"Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken 'normal' mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.
"None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency. The far-right wing of the country—nearly one third of us by some estimates—continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid (liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan....Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a 'hater,' and therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It's one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe wackos.
"Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that's not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's critique of George W. Bush.
"THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and misdirection—which the administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiate—involve our putative 'War on Terror' and our subsequent foray into Iraq....
"As Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, and his onetime 'terror czar,'Richard A. Clarke, have made clear, the president, with the enthusiastic encouragement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq from day one. 'From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out,' O'Neill said. All they needed was an excuse. Clarke got the same impression from within the White House. Afghanistan had to be dealt with first; that's where the actual perpetrators were, after all. But the Taliban was a mere appetizer; Saddam was the entrée. (Or who knows? The soup course?) It was simply a matter of convincing the American public (and our representatives) that war was justified.
"The real—but elusive—prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, was quickly relegated to a back burner (a staff member at Fox News—the cable-TV outlet of the Bush White House—told me a year ago that mere mention of bin Laden's name was forbidden within the company, lest we be reminded that the actual bad guy remained at large) while Saddam's Iraq became International Enemy Number One. Just like that, a country whose economy had been reduced to shambles by international sanctions, whose military was less than half the size it had been when the U. S. Army rolled over it during the first Gulf war, that had extensive no-flight zones imposed on it in the north and south as well as constant aerial and satellite surveillance, and whose lethal weapons and capacity to produce such weapons had been destroyed or seriously degraded by UN inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush's words, 'a threat of unique urgency' to the most powerful nation on earth.
"Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced: Unmanned aircraft, drones, had been built for missions targeting the U. S., Bush told the nation. 'We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,' National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And, Bush maintained, 'Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.' We 'know' Iraq possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney assured us. We even 'know' where they are hidden. After several months of this mumbo jumbo, 70 percent of Americans had embraced the fantasy that Saddam destroyed the World Trade Center.
"ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless and, we've since discovered, were regarded with skepticism by experts at the time they were made....
"The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and occupying Iraq. They've simply chosen not to share them with the American public. They sought justification for ignoring the Geneva Convention and other statutes prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners but were loath to acknowledge as much. They may have ideas worth discussing, but they don't welcome the rest of us in the conversation. They don't trust us because they don't dare expose their true agendas to the light of day. There is a surreal quality to all this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we're in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we've got him; we'll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we'll be there for years to come....
"While the big lies are more damning and of immeasurably greater import to the nation, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be diagnostic. Who lies when they don't have to? When the simple truth, though perhaps embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in one's long-term self-interest? Why would a president whose calling card is his alleged rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or an inability to admit even small mistakes.
"Mr. Bush's tendency to meander beyond the bounds of truth was evident during the 2000 campaign but was largely ignored by the mainstream media. His untruths simply didn't fit the agreed-upon narrative. While generally acknowledged to be lacking in experience, depth, and other qualifications typically considered useful in a leader of the free world, Bush was portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless, one whose straightforwardness was a given....
"Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While debating Al Gore, Bush tells two obvious—if not exactly earth-shattering—lies and is not challenged. First, he claims to have supported a patient's bill of rights while governor of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact, vigorously resisted such a measure, only reluctantly bowing to political reality and allowing it to become law without his signature. Second, he announces that Gore has outspent him during the campaign. The opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These misstatements are briefly acknowledged in major press outlets, which then quickly return to the more germane issues of Gore's pancake makeup and whether a certain feminist author has counseled him to be more of an 'alpha male.'
"Having gotten away with such witless falsities, perhaps Mr. Bush and his team felt somehow above day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in the White House, they picked up where they left off.
"IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11, Bush, who on that day was in Sarasota, Florida, conducting an emergency reading of "The Pet Goat," was whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While this may have been entirely sensible under the chaotic circumstances—for all anyone knew at the time, Washington might still have been under attack—the appearance was, shall we say, less than gallant. So a story was concocted: There had been a threat to Air Force One that necessitated the evasive maneuver. Bush's chief political advisor, Karl Rove, cited 'specific' and 'credible' evidence to that effect. The story quickly unraveled. In truth, there was no such threat....
"GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to 'change the tone in Washington' and ran for office as a moderate, a 'compassionate conservative,' in the focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed from the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously tending a 'base' that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat cats, fiscal evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with Social Security and Medicare, of shrinking government to the size where they can, in tax radical Grover Norquist's phrase, 'drown it in the bathtub.' That base also encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots, and assorted purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones to all of them—'partial birth' abortion legislation, the promise of a constitutional amendment banning marriage between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting presidential doubts about Darwinian evolution. It's not that Mr. Bush necessarily shares their worldview; indeed, it's unclear whether he embraces any coherent philosophy. But this president, who vowed to eschew politics in favor of sound policy, panders nonetheless in the interest of political gain. As John DiIulio, Bush's former head of the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, once told this magazine, 'What you've got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm.'
"This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a slim but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose . . . the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate broad public dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities. How many people would have voted for Mr. Bush in the first place had they understood his eagerness to pass on crushing debt to our children or seen his true colors regarding global warming and the environment? Even after 9/11, were people really looking to be dragged into an optional war under false pretenses?"
August 17, 2004
Calling Chicken Hawk Cheney by his Proper Name
This is beautiful and long overdue--Iowa Senator Harkin on Vice-President Cheney's attacks on John Kerry's war record:
"'It just outrages me that someone who got five deferments during Vietnam and said he had "other priorities" at that time would say that,' said the Iowa Democrat, a former Navy fighter pilot....
"'They're running scared because John Kerry has a war record and they don't,' said Harkin. 'What he (Cheney) is doing and what he is saying is cowardly. The actions are cowardly....'
"He said Cheney has little standing to question the war record of Kerry, who was repeatedly wounded and decorated while serving as a swift boat commander in Vietnam....
"Harkin said that it angered him to hear tough talk from Cheney.
"'When I hear this coming from Dick Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil,' said Harkin.
"'He'll be tough, but he'll be tough with someone else's kid's blood,' said Harkin."
This does bear emphasizing, doesn't it? Chicken hawks Cheney and Bush fled from danger, period. They didn't not go to Vietnam because it was the last major criminal and immoral war, based on lies. They didn't not go because they were principled pacifists. They avoided the war because they were self-serving cowards, as they are today.
That needs to be said as often as possible. And loudly. Rudely. Offend someone with it. "The truth is terrible" said my favorite German philosopher. Indeed.
A New Philosophy Meta-Blog, as it were
The Philosophers' Carnival aims to collect and call attention to good postings on the existing philosophy blogs. Check it out, and contribute!
ACLS Fellowships for 2003-04
The American Council of Learned Societies has announced its Fellowship awards to scholars in the humanities and social sciences for 2003-04; three philosophers are among the 79 winners this year: Jennifer Church (Vassar College); Hannah Ginsborg (University of California, Berkeley); and Robert McCauley (Emory University).
The ACLS is unusual among the major supporters of scholarly research in the humanities and social science--the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation are the two other major sources--in awarding monies to scholars from a truly disparate range of institutions. While the major research universities still have a slight edge in the list of recipients (4 this year were from Berkeley, three from NYU, and two each from Harvard, Brown, Ohio State, Texas, Michigan, and Rice, for example), there were also two each from Dartmouth, Smith, and George Washington, as well as winners from Framingham State College, Appalachian State, Montclair State, U Mass-Boston, Saint Louis University, the University of New Orleans, Western Washington, Richmond, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, among many others. Given the distribution of philosophical talent remarked on previously , it is nice to see financial support for research distributed this way for a change.
Michael Moore on the Failure of the Journalists
From a recent speech, this is spot on (and it also helps explain why the film is driving right-wingers nuts):
"I know a lot of people have seen my film and the obvious bad guy in the movie is George W. Bush. But there's the unstated villain in the film. And that's our national media.
"You've seen the film. Right? A lot of them are mad at me right now because I can't go on a show without them, you know. But I would be mad if I were them too, because the film outs them. It outs them as being for the Bush administration. It outs them as people who were cheerleaders for this war. It outs them as, to be kind to those who are actually good journalists, journalists who fell asleep on the job. Journalists who didn't ask the hard questions. The one thing I hear when people come out of the theater over and over again is I never saw that on the news. Right? I never saw those Black congressmen being shut down one after another. Did anyone see that?
"I didn't know there was a riot at the inauguration parade. I never saw the egg hit the limo. I never saw that! I don't hear from the amputees who sit in our hospitals, 5,000 or 6,000 of them. How come I don't hear from them on the nightly news? I don't hear from the mothers. I don't see them on the evening news, the mothers of children who have been killed in Iraq and who state their opposition to this war. I haven't seen them on the news.
"Why haven't I seen this? I live in a free and open country that has a free and open press where you can show us anything. That's the great thing about America. You can show us anything! You can ask any question you want to ask. And this is my humble plea to those of you from the press here. And don't any of you take this personally. I don't mean it this way, but I – we, the people, we need you. We need you to do your jobs! We need you! To ask the questions, demand the evidence! Demand the evidence! Don't ever send us to war without asking the questions!
"You do us no service by hopping on a band wagon, by becoming cheerleaders, by looking the other way, because you know that's the safest way to play it if you want to keep your job....
"And if you expressed any opposition to the war, you had to immediately say, but I support the troops! Right? But I support the troops. You didn't need to say that. Of course you support the troops. You've always supported the troops. Who are the troops? The troops are those who come from the other side of the tracks. The troops are the people who come from families who have been abused by the Bush administration. You've always supported them. You've always been on their side! This no one should question that!
"The way that you don't support the troops is to send them into harm's way when it isn't necessary. The way that you hate the troops is when you send them off, some of them, to their death, so that your rich benefactors can line their pockets even more. The Halliburtons, the oil companies. That is anti-American. That is unpatriotic. You do not support the troops when you do that. The thing here is, and again, and I am not picking on the press who are here, but it is true. We are talking about our mainstream national media. A media, for instance, NBC, owned by General Electric. You know, I understand General Electric now has over $600 million worth of contracts in Iraq. They are war-profiteers. It doesn't surprise me that their news arm has failed to do the job that it needs to do to tell the truth to the American people about this war. There's nothing surprising about that. I understand that.
"I understand the Matt Lauers and the Lisa Myers and the people that have to work for this entity. You have cameras and microphones and the ability to get into places of power that the people in this room can't get in. To ask these questions. And the great thing about this country is you can ask any question you want. You can ask any question you want and not be arrested. Right? You would not be sent to prison if you ask a question. So what has prevented you from asking the question? But you've got the little lapel flag pin. Right? And the TV. Screen filled up with American flags flying. See, we are patriotic. We are patriotic. But you've thrown down with the wrong people. You haven't just been embedded. You've been in bed with the wrong people. You've listened to those in power and just report their lies as truths...."
International Team to Monitor Presidential Election in a Banana Republic...
...called the United States. Details here.
Philadelphia--the Worst Legal Market in America?
So suggests this article, but it is, shall we say, a bit hyperbolic. For what they really mean is that the partners at major law firms there are less filthy rich than partners at other major law firms--though I will say this resonates with something my wife and I noticed back in 2001, when I was thinking about moving to the University of Pennsylvania, which was that law firms in Philly were paying less than law firms in Austin.
Is this how totalitarian societies are born?
Two stories, the same day, in the same Establishment paper: here and here.
UPDATE: I see that even The New York Times has noticed the ominous character of these events:
"The knock on the door from government investigators asking about political activities is the stuff of totalitarian regimes. It is intimidating to be visited by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly by investigators who warn that withholding information about anyone with plans to create a disruption is a crime.
"And few people would want the F.B.I. to cross-examine their friends and family about them. If engaging in constitutionally protected speech means subjecting yourself to this kind of government monitoring, many Americans may decide - as the men from Missouri did - that the cost is too high.
"Meanwhile, history suggests that the way to find out what potentially violent protesters are planning is not to send F.B.I. officers bearing questionnaires to the doorsteps of potential demonstrators. As became clear in the 1960's, F.B.I. monitoring of youthful dissenters is notoriously unreliable. The files that were created in the past often proved to be laughably inaccurate.
"The F.B.I.'s questioning of protesters is part of a larger campaign against political dissent that has increased sharply since the start of the war on terror.
"At the Democratic convention, protesters were sent to a depressing barbed-wire camp under the subway tracks. And at a recent Bush-Cheney campaign event, audience members were required to sign a pledge to support President Bush before they were admitted.
"F.B.I. officials insist that the people they interview are free to 'close the door in our faces,' but by then the damage may already have been done. The government must not be allowed to turn a war against foreign enemies into a campaign against critics at home."
Please take note of the FBI's advice: close the door in their faces. Don't hit their noses, though, that could be an assault on a federal officer.
August 16, 2004
Booting PhD Students for Lack of "Talent"
A PhD student in philosophy at Harvard writes:
"I wonder if you could tell me anything about whether it is a common or accepted practice at philosophy departments in this country to 'kick out' students who are deemed insufficiently talented. I ask because it does seem to be a common practice in my department and I'm concerned because it creates an extremely uncomfortable working environment. Everyone is worried that they might be next and that, of course, makes it very hard to concentrate on an already difficult subject.
"I should emphasize that the students who were recently asked to leave my program were not so asked because they weren't taking their work seriously or otherwise 'slacking off.' In at least two of those cases I know personally that the students involved were highly dedicated students. Their dedication notwithstanding, someone on the faculty decided that they were not sufficiently talented in philosophy and they were asked to leave the program. So again, my question is simply whether this is common practice or whether these 'untalented' students are generally allowed to finish their programs and then just not supported on the job market."
My impression is that this is not common--it was not true at Michigan, and it is not true at Texas, but perhaps these schools have "standards" not as high as Harvard's--but I'm opening comments on this one. I will permit anonymous comments from students, given the delicate nature of this topic, but I may of course edit comments for reasons of propriety (not to mention defamation). If you are going to post anonymously, please be sure to do so from a university computer that corresponds to the university you are reporting on!
Moral Philosopher Velleman from Michigan to NYU
David Velleman (ethics, philosophy of action) at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has accepted the senior offer from New York University, to start in fall 2005.
Venezuela Reality Check
If the fascist theocrats and criminal war mongers in Washington are reelected, expect an ever-more intensified propaganda campaign aimed at oil-rich Venezuela. In anticipation, here's a useful reality check on that country:
"77% of Venezuela's farmland is owned by 3% of the population, the 'hacendados.'
"I met one of these farmlords in Caracas at an anti-Chavez protest march. Oddest demonstration I've ever seen: frosted blondes in high heels clutching designer bags, screeching, 'Chavez - dic-ta-dor!' The plantation owner griped about the 'socialismo' of Chavez, then jumped into his Jaguar convertible.
"That week, Chavez himself handed me a copy of the 'socialist' manifesto that so rattled the man in the Jag. It was a new law passed by Venezuela's Congress which gave land to the landless. The Chavez law transferred only fields from the giant haciendas which had been left unused and abandoned....
"For the first time in Venezuela's history, the 80% Black-Indian population elected a man with skin darker than the man in the Jaguar.
"So why, with a huge majority of the electorate behind him, twice in elections and today with a nearly two-to-one landslide victory in a recall referendum, is Hugo Chavez in hot water with our democracy-promoting White House?
"Maybe it's the oil. Lots of it. Chavez sits atop a reserve of crude that rivals Iraq's....
"Chavez had his Congress pass another oil law, the 'Law of Hydrocarbons,' which changes the split [on oil revenue]. Right now, the oil majors - like PhillipsConoco - keep 84% of the proceeds of the sale of Venezuela oil; the nation gets only 16%.
"Chavez wanted to double his Treasury's take to 30%. And for good reason. Landless, hungry peasants have, over decades, drifted into Caracas and other cities, building million-person ghettos of cardboard shacks and open sewers. Chavez promised to do something about that.
"And he did. 'Chavez gives them bread and bricks,' one Venezuelan TV reporter told me. The blonde TV newscaster, in the middle of a publicity shoot, said the words 'pan y ladrillos' with disdain, making it clear that she never touched bricks and certainly never waited in a bread line.
"But to feed and house the darker folk in those bread and brick lines, Chavez would need funds, and the 16% slice of the oil pie wouldn't do it. So the President of Venezuela demanded 30%, leaving Big Oil only 70%....
"So began the Bush-Cheney campaign to 'Floridate' the will of the Venezuela electorate. It didn't matter that Chavez had twice won election. Winning most of the votes, said a White House spokesman, did not make Chavez' government 'legitimate.' Hmmm. Secret contracts were awarded by our Homeland Security spooks to steal official Venezuela voter lists. Cash passed discreetly from the US taxpayer, via the so-called 'Endowment for Democracy,' to the Chavez-haters running today's 'recall' election.
"A brilliant campaign of placing stories about Chavez' supposed unpopularity and 'dictatorial' manner seized US news and op-ed pages, ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times...."
==========
By the way, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times are part of the "liberal" media, for those keeping track.
The Religious Right and Secular Liberals
This posting in late July on an article by one Dave Belden contesting the depth of a divide between the religious right and the secular left produced an interesting comment from reader Tyler Whitmer that I wanted to highlight; Mr. Whitmer wrote:
"First...as a young agnostic liberal raised Southern Baptist in Texas, I find that this comment, though perhaps generally true, does not represent the reilgion that scares me (or the one I grew up in):
'After all, the popular churches all now stress love over doctrine, sin, or blame.'
"Show me how the religion of Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft, et. al. is about love rather than doctrine, sin or blame.
"Second...to casually reference the 'Left Behind' [book] series as some popular fantasy pulp series is to fundamentally misunderstand the method through which fundamentalism operates in this country. The narrative of the end times is a cultural centerpiece, but it is also a call to arms. The series is billed as fiction, but can be read as a socio-political manifesto. If you want to read good fiction about fundamentalism, may I suggest Tom Robbins' 'Skinny Legs and All.' Robbins lambasts from the outside what the 'Left Behind' books are to the core...religious fanaticism alive and well, working tirelessly to bring about the end of the world. I have a problem with that not as a liberal, but as a breathing person.
"That may sound like I'm just buying into the liberal nightmare to the Nth degree, but when my AG and my President both believe that if the world ends they will live eternally in paradise and I will burn forever in misery, I can't help but feel they don't have my best interests at heart.
"I can only hope the leaders are frauds, using the faith of the masses as a leash to lead them against their financial best interest. That is a sad thing for a young man to hope for from his leaders.
"Third...our author acts as though it is 'christians generally' who hold political power in the modern American right wing. He is wrong. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, John Ashcroft, and gang are not 'christians generally' who are cool with switching churches and the female orgasm. They are modern fundamentalists who have a distinct ideology that embraces none of what Belden sees as moderating forces in modern American Christianity.
"My verdict? Our author here hasn't had much contact with real, American fundamentalism. Sounds to me like he's an Englishman living in the north who is a moderate Christian. Let's see:
"'Dave Belden, an Englishman living in New York State, is a corporate business writer. He has worked as a religious volunteer in India and Ethiopia, as a carpenter in England and America and is an active member, and past President, of a small congregation in Catskills, New York.'
"Hmmmm...."
Comments are open. No anonymous postings, as always.
New Vault "Prestige" Ranking of Law Firms for 2004...
...is here.
"The Pathology of George Bush"
This is long, but the information adduced midway in on Bush's mental illnesses and pathologies is very striking.
Medievalist Pasnau Staying at Colorado
Robert Pasnau at the University of Colorado at Boulder has turned down the offer from the University of California at San Diego--a good break for Colorado, after a difficult year of losses.
New Philosophy of Art Blog...
...here.