A couple of unrelated thoughts as we wait for the Superbowl parties to start…
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Brian
It’s around the time of year when undergraduates start thinking about graduate school, so naturally it’s the time of year for overheated blog posts on why going to grad school is meant to be a Very Bad Idea. The latest of these is from Dean Dad, who wants to Stop the Cycle of Abuse, i.e. stop people going to grad school. The reasons given are all fairly standard factoids – it’s a huge opportunity cost, it takes forever, and the job market is awful. None of these are good reasons, and it would be an awful decision to not apply to graduate schools because of posts like these.
Now it is true that going to grad school does block you off from doing many other things with your 20s, such as being a professional athelete. But for many people grad school days are some of the most enjoyable of their lives, so the fact they last a while is hardly a major cost. And the job market is, at least for a lot of grad students, much better than the horror stories you’ll find on blogs suggest. Here, for instance, are the placement records for recent years of the philosophy departments at Princeton, Rutgers, NYU and MIT, four of the best East Coast philosophy programs. Note that these are the complete records – they include everyone who graduated, not just those who got headline jobs.
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Next Friday, Singapore plans to hang Van Tuong Nguyen, a 25 year old man from Glen Waverley, the Melbourne suburb where I grew up. Nguyen’s crime against the state of Singapore was to change planes in Singapore while en route from Cambodia to Australia carrying 396 grams of heroin. I can see, dimly, how doing this kind of thing could be a crime against Cambodia, and a crime against Australia, but I can’t see how this kind of action could justifiably be punished by Singapore, when he hadn’t even passed through passport control into Singapore and clearly had no intention of doing so.
And of course even if we do think Singapore is justified in punishing Nguyen for his crimes, the idea that hanging is the appropriate punishment for attempting to sell heroin would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high. Either Singapore should hang people for putting together plans to commit murder, or they are implying that drug trading is worse than murder. Either option is nonsensical.
Anyway, at this stage the important thing isn’t to debate just how absurd Singapore’s position is, but to do something. Amnesty International Australia has a number of links for writing to the salient Singaporese ministers to beg for them to change their minds. The very least one could expect our government to be doing is not doing more favours for the Singapore government while they plan to murder an Australian, but that seems too much for John Howard, even when proposed by one of his own MPs.
Two stories from the Sydney Morning Herald this morning tell us a lot about the Howard government. The front page story concerns the government’s new anti-terror laws, and the main feature is about how to decode the government’s industrial relations policies.
Following up on Chris’s post, I thought I’d note an interesting contrast between how religion and politics mix in my home country and the country I work in.
Ted Barlow has just sent along word that he’s gotten out of Houston safely, and is now with his fiancee and dog in Washington, D.C.
I’m very pleased to hear that Ted is OK, and I hope everyone that everyone here knows will be just as safe in the days ahead.
I agree entirely with Henry that blogging can be extremely useful for an young academic career, although perhaps not for exactly the same reasons.
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Brad DeLong has two posts up defending Richard Layard’s defence of Benthamism against criticism from Fontana Labs and Will Wilkinson. I think Brad is misinterpreting Bentham, so while his defence might be a defence of something interesting (say, preference utilitarianism) it isn’t much of a defence of Bentham.
The President of Cornell, Jeffrey Lehman, resigned in somewhat mysterious circumstances at the weekend. Lehman was the first Cornell alum to be President, and it had seemed like he was treating this as a job for life. But after just two years he has jumped off the ship, in his words because the “Board of Trustees and [he] have different approaches to how the university can best realize its long-term vision.” This isn’t maximally plausible. The best story on the background to Lehman’s departure is by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed. I suspect there is still a bit more to this story to come out.
For some unknown reason my browser ended up pointed at Right Reason earlier, and I saw a post by Dan Bonevac on Ann Coulter. Well, I thought to myself, if there are going to be any sensible conservatives in blogtropolis, Bonevac, who is a pretty fine philosopher, should be among them. If someone is going to be able to show what is valuable in contemporary conservatism by distinguishing it from what Ann Coulter does, it should be him. Sadly, that wasn’t to be.
Josh is entirely right that Sen John Conryn’s statements in the Senate today about violence against judges are utterly unacceptable. Saying that judges are somehow to blame for violence against judges and courtworkers should be enough to get you kicked out of any ethically responsible caucus. This being the contemporary GOP, I’m not holding my breath.
From the New York Times article on the Pope’s Death as of 3.25pm East Coast time.
Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.need some quote from supporter
John Paul II’s admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.
Somehow I don’t think the middle paragraph was meant to be there. And I would like to see those masses of Christian Evangelicals among whom the Pope’s views on the death penalty were echoing. I thought some of them were arguing we were too restrictive in our killing practices.
Sadly I can’t link to it directly because it’s in an annoying popup, but the discussion of the best college basketball players of the year on ESPN.com, featured an hilarous quote from Andy Katz about Australian Andrew Bogut.
Bogut is a unique foreign player. He has a toughness that contradicts the stereotype of foreign big men and has helped him become a force in the paint.
I’ve heard of German stereotypes and American stereotypes and Australian stereotypes and so on, but the idea of there being a stereotype for foreigners, i.e. non-Americans, as such is astounding. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so other in my life.
Seriously though, were Australians in the NBA perceived of as weaklings? I wasn’t following American sports when Luc Longley was with the Bulls, so for all I know he’s responsible for Americans thinking of us foreigners as people who can be blown over with a puff of wind.
As an alien who will presumably have to apply for residence in the US one of these days, I found this post at TalkLeft somewhat disturbing.
Homeland Security is requiring immigrants in 8 cities who are in the process of applying for residency to wear electronic monitoring ankle bracelets 24/7.
These people have never been accused of a crime. There are 1,700 of them to date. Homeland Security says monitoring will prevent those ordered deported from running and hiding. But, a 2003 Justice Department report (pdf) blamed inadequate record keeping by immigration officials as the reason for problems deporting non-detained aliens.
I’m ever so glad the GOP is such a strong supporter of small government and individual liberty.
More seriously, it’s times like this that I think Adam Morton may be right – our complacency about the morality of institutions of citizenship and borders could very well look like a serious moral shortcoming when history casts its judgment on our era.