by John Holbo on February 23, 2005
My colleague, Mike Pelczar, passed this under my nose this afternoon. A letter in the latest APA Proceedings and Addresses volume:
Why are philosophers limited to one-at-a-time journal submissions? Law professors can submit articles to as many journals as they like. It seems to work. We can submit book manuscripts to multiple publishers …
[Stories about inordinately slow responses from journals.]
Why can’t the APA do something about this? My first suggestion is that the organization force the journals to allow multiple submissions. My second suggestion is that we organize a little civil disobedience. People are afraid of breaking the custom (surely it’s not more than that?) but if enough people did it, it would cease to exist.
Bonnie Steinbock
University at Albany/SUNY
This seems to me an eminently reasonable proposal. Discuss. I would be interested to hear how things work differently in law and other disciplines. Probably Eugene Volokh has written some big old thing addressing this very question. But I must have missed it.
[click to continue…]
by Maria on February 23, 2005
Via Statewatch, a story of four Air Horizon passengers being prosecuted by the French government for objecting to a forced deportation on their flight. Probably the most chilling aspect is the insistence by cabin crew, policy, the airline and the state that it’s perfectly normal to share a plane with a hysterical man crying “I am not a slave” as he is assaulted and gagged by a glove shoved into his mouth.
This is the reality of European immigration policy, whether we like it or not. And as bizaare and Kafka-esque as it is to prosecute people who object to being made a part of the machinery of expulsion, the fact is that the young Congolese man was safer on a commercial flight than using another means.
Perversely, I’m glad that four articulate and well-connected Europeans are being prosecuted for doing their moral duty. It seems to me that every time we accept a narrowing of human rights as a trade-off for better security, we do so on the unspoken assumption that the person suffering will never be ‘one of us’.
by Chris Bertram on February 23, 2005
The ghastly Rod Liddle has “a piece in the Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=5703&issue=2005-02-19 alleging that Tony Blair’s Labour Party has a strategy of pandering to anti-Semitic prejudice in order to win over Muslim voters. The piece contains such gems as “many psychoanalysts believe that the Left’s aversion to capitalism is simply a displaced loathing of Jews.” (Tony Blair’s Labour Party has an aversion to capitalism???!!!) Liddle’s usual sensitivity to the feelings of minorities is expressed in his recent “Things I shouldn’t say about black people”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1491679,00.html in the Sunday Times, “ably exposed by Matthew Turner”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2005/02/bad-maths.html . Melanie Phillips (about whom see also Chris Brooke “here”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2005_02_01_archive.html#110908416817746981 ) is now promoting the “Labour anti-Semitism theory”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17081 in the notorious FrontPage magazine.
Which is more likely (a) that New Labour strategists have decided on a campaign strategy on the lines delineated by Phillips and Liddle or (b) that someone else (perhaps some adviser to Tory Central Office?) has decided that an effective strategy for unsettling Labour politicians and putting them on the defensive is to fling around allegations of anti-Semitism?
[Small update: John Band “makes the point”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/full_post.asp?pid=808 that we shouldn’t let our disgust at the antics of the likes of Liddle and the Tory party blind us to the real problem of anti-semitism and recommends “this piece by Johann Hari”:http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=571 , a recommendation I endorse.]