So which Republican candidate will be first to match or beat bin Laden’s 2.5% flat tax proposal? I wonder what his plan for health care reform looks like.
Compare and contrast this:
With this:
Looks like everything in rugby has gotten more professional over the past 25 years. Bonus haka (vs Ireland) below the fold.
The Rugby World Cup starts this weekend, with France vs Argentina tonight. I haven’t been able to keep up with the form this time. I think Ireland are looking slightly shaky in the run-up. They’re in the same pool as France and Argentina, so that’s going to be tough, with France having home-field advantage and Argentina being the dirtiest team in Europe. England are hoping for a revival. I would, ideally, like to see them semi-revived and then re-crushed, but I’ll settle for straightforward humiliating defeats. Thanks to their crap form they may have a helpful underdog status, however. As for the Southern Hemisphere, all the Kiwis I know are in their usual frame of mind, viz titanic self-confidence combined with a desperate fear that the All Blacks will choke yet again.
Ow, ow, ow. Comment 2 is also pretty funny. Actually, the whole thread is hilarious.
This “FT piece”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5f67d75a-5cdb-11dc-9cc9-0000779fd2ac.html on GWB’s magical market pony plan for preventing mortgage foreclosures by handing the problem over to “an opaque part of the financial system normally associated with moves to evict families from their homes” is tough and on-target.
An estimated 6m high-risk subprime loans, worth a total of more than $1,000bn, are outstanding, which will in many cases reset to higher interest rates in the next 18 months, putting more than 2.5m Americans at risk of foreclosure. … The response to this crisis outlined by the president places considerable faith in the ability of mortgage servicers to mitigate this blow by helping distressed borrowers to stay in their homes. … Edward Lazear, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said: “I believe, and I think the president believes, that markets are very good at finding ways to solve problems.” But many experts claim that the mortgage service sector is not fit for this purpose. They argue it does not have the capacity to perform this role, and lacks the personnel, financial resources, technical tools, experience, incentives and oversight to deal with an economic crisis of this scale. “Theoretically, it makes sense, but not in the real world,” said Scott Syphax,a director at the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco. “These institutions are not built to handle this scale and volume of problems.” … as more service companies fall into the hands of vulture investors, the task of co-ordinating a national response is likely to become complicated. “The fixes being proposed by the president are not going to result in Americans being rescued from their homes, quite the opposite,” said Richard E. Gottlieb, a lawyer who specialises in mortgage servicing.
There’s very little that I find more annoying than the “magic of markets” arguments that various right wing hacks and ideologues spew at the drop of a talking-point. It makes me want to forcibly enrol the responsible parties in an economic sociology program until they see the errors of their ways. Markets can indeed do extraordinary and impressive things, but they rather obviously depend on previously existing institutions, expertise and social conditions if they are to work. Not to mention proper incentive structures. These can’t be whistled out of thin air. The claim that a business sector composed of small firms specializing in foreclosure and themselves terrified of bankruptcy will have the appropriate motivations and expertise to stave off this crisis is self-evidently bogus, if you look at it at all closely. But sprinkle some of that schmeconomics 101 pixy dust on it, and you can get away with it, thanks to the supine US journalism industry (I don’t know of any US publication which has even _mentioned_ this as a problem; perhaps I’m wrong).
This “ZDNet article”:http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6205716.html on datascraping firm Rapleaf is both interesting and disturbing.
In the cozy Facebook social network, it’s easy to have a sense of privacy among friends and business acquaintances. But sites like Rapleaf will quickly jar you awake: Everything you say or do on a social network could be fair game to sell to marketers. … By collecting these e-mail addresses, Rapleaf has already amassed a database of 50 million profiles, which might include a person’s age, birth date, physical address, alma mater, friends, favorite books and music, political affiliations, as well as how long that person has been online, which social networks he frequents, and what applications he’s downloaded. … All of this information could come in handy for Rapleaf’s third business, TrustFuse, which sells data (but not e-mail addresses) to marketers so they can better target customers, according to TrustFuse’s Web site. As of Friday afternoon, the sites of Rapleaf and Upscoop had no visible link to TrustFuse, but TrustFuse’s privacy policy mentions that the two companies are wholly owned subsidiaries of TrustFuse.
… In other words, Rapleaf sweeps up all the publicly available but sometimes hard-to-get information it can find about you on the Web, via social networks, other sites and, soon to be added, blogs. … Apart from the unusual TrustFuse business, Rapleaf is among a new generation of people search engines that take advantage of the troves of public data on the Net–much of which consumers happily post for public perusal on social-networking sites and personal blogs. The search engines trace a person’s digital tracks across these social networks, blogs, photo collections, news and e-commerce sites, to create a composite profile. … There doesn’t appear to be anything illegal about what these companies are doing. No one’s sifting through garbage cans or peeking through windows. They’ve merely found a clever way to aggregate the heaps of personal information that can be found on the Internet. … Just ask Dana Todd … “It’s my growing horror that everyone can see my Amazon Wish List. At least I didn’t have a book like ‘How to get rid of herpes’ on there, but now I have to go through and seriously clean my wish list,” she said.
This raises all sorts of interesting issues for privacy, going way beyond the dumb-teenager-spliff-smoking-photo-on-MySpace kind of story that get most public attention. If I’m understanding the article correctly, Rapleaf have figured out ways to get at some information from social networking sites that the users of these sites mightn’t have wanted to share with the outside world. This isn’t illegal, but it is fishy. Also, by aggregating together information about people’s networks and tastes across a variety of different websites and networking sites, it’s likely that the firm can draw non-obvious connections that people would prefer not to be drawn. US privacy law is notoriously patchy (your video rental records are heavily protected, thanks to efforts to embarrass conservative Supreme Court nominees, your sensitive financial information … not so much), but I’m not sure what kinds of policies would effectively protect those people who wanted to protected from this kind of widescale data trawling, even in more privacy friendly jurisdictions like the EU. That said, I’m personally quite creeped out by this kind of thing (albeit not creeped out enough to stop blogging or to withdraw my profile from social networking sites, for whatever good that would do me at this stage).
This may come as a surprise to some readers, but all I know about nightclubs I have picked up from watching Knocked Up (thanks Rebecca) and reading Tom Slee’s excellent No-One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart
sophisticated-seeming-but-ultimately-dull-witted people, and the club provides that good only if the bouncers admit a high enough proportion of such people.
I was reminded of this when I read this excellent paper by Sally Haslanger about the position of women in Philosophy Departments (via Leiter). I’m going to resist the temptation to summarise for two reasons: one is that all faculty members in Philosophy Departments should read the whole thing and carefully, the other is that I don’t want any misimpressions caused by my summary to influence subsequent discussion. Read it.
Why was I put in mind of the little I know about night-clubs?
Sometime around next Sunday, Wikipedia will reach 2 million articles. It’s about eighteen months since the millionth article was added, and the number of new articles has stabilized at around 2000 per day. So the shift from exponential to linear growth (in article numbers at least) has taken place a bit sooner than I expected. Some disorganised thoughts follow.
Superhero blogging is the province of other members of this collective. But here — via Dan Myers, outgoing chair of the Notre Dame sociology department — is Rory McVeigh, incoming chair of said department, welcoming new grad students to the program. Dan explains the hat in coldly rational terms. But I prefer to think we’re witnessing the birth of a new Supervillain: Doc Socc, whose origin story begins with the mild-mannered but brilliant young Rory being continually passed over when it was time to choose teams in grade school, and who subsequently used his genius to develop the FootieTron (pictured), a prosthetic attachment that enhanced his football skills a millionfold. Once he tried it on, however, an accidental burst of gamma radiation made the device meld with his brain and now Doc Socc is on a quest to make THE WORLD play soccer FOREVER in teams of HIS choosing. Muaahahahahahaha. Special powers: tactical planning, team organization, long throw, kills enemies from a distance with deadly-accurate soccerbomb passes, close up by hacking expertly at their ankles. Noted ability: when captured, convincingly feigns mortal injury (writhes on ground clutching leg or head) to generate diversion and/or sympathy. Then escapes.
What do we think of Mike “The Most Feared Man On the Hill” Rogers, and the ethics of outing? Defend your answer from first principles, if you would be so kind.
There is indeed a culture of corruption, and it extends well beyond any single politician. It swirls around big government. It always has and it always will. It has become institutionalized in many ways. And that culture of corruption celebrates clever word games used by unelected judges to exercise power they don’t have as they rewrite the Constitution; it demeans people of faith who speak out against the culture of corruption and for — dare I say — family values; it undermines and seeks to demoralize Americans in uniform as they fight a horrible enemy on the battlefield; it demonizes entrepreneurs and successful enterprises; it uses race, age, religion, gender, and whatever works to balkanize Americans; and so on. This is the real culture of corruption. Let’s call it what it is — modern liberalism. And its impact on our society is far worse than the disorderly-conduct misdemeanor to which Larry Craig pled guilty and for which he has now resigned.
Yesterday evening, at the editorial meeting of the Dutch philosophy journal Filosofie en Praktijk (Philosophy and practice), we had a discussion about what methods are used in political philosophy. One editor mentioned that he is doing quite a bit of refereeing for the National Science Foundation, and that many political philosophy research proposals are quite vague on the methods that they’ll use. There is often some reference to ‘reflective equilibrium’, he said, but is that really all we do? Similarly, I noted that the “ECPR’s”:http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/ Summer school on Methods and Techniques this year had no “courses on offer”:http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/events/summerschools/ljubljana/courses.aspx on methods in political theory. And I know of several political science departments where the traditional ‘methodologies’ course includes all sorts of fancy quantitative and qualitative methods, but no political theory methods.
So do political theorists and philosophers have no methods? Of course not. But perhaps we are not so explicit about them than the empirical sciences or the theoretical disciplines that use methods such as game theory or formal modeling. I don’t doubt that we do use methods, but perhaps they are more implicit in our work. I have to confess that I’ve found it harder than I liked to answer colleagues who asked me what precisely our methods are (in fact – it’s not just colleagues – Last year when I had a 45 minutes interview with the Dutch National Science Foundation for the VIDI-grant competition, the only question I got was about the methods I would use in my political theory research).
So I’d like to ask two questions: What are the methods of political theorists and philosophers? And is there a good book or set of articles on “methods and techniques in political theory and philosophy” ? Or should we simply apply what is written in a good textbook on analytical philosophy?
I’ve gotten a couple of reprint requests for the essay I did a while back for the “Boston Review”:http://www.bostonreview.net on the netroots and the Democratic party. Since the copyright for the essay reverted back to me when the _BR_ published it, the easiest thing for me to do is to republish it here under a Creative Commons license, so that people can do what they want with it (under the broad parameters of the license). It’s beneath the fold in html format; one of these days I’ll port it into skinny-font LaTeX to annoy Daniel (if someone wants to do this themselves, of course go right ahead). I do make two (non-binding) requests of anyone who uses it. First, please say that it was first published in the _Boston Review_, and if you publish it on the WWW, link to their website at http://www.bostonreview.net. Second, in the unlikely event that you want to publish it in print, please send me a copy.
This is probably a good time for me to mention that the BR‘s website has just undergone a substantial “redesign”:http://www.bostonreview.net ; it now looks much spiffier. The most recent issue has already gotten some attention because of Glenn Loury’s “piece”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR32.4/article_loury.php on the prison system/; also worthy of note are George Scialabba’s devastating little “essay”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR32.4/article_scialabba.php on Philip Rieff, and Roger Boylan’s “article”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR32.4/article_boylan.php on Nabokov.
Back in June, I wrote three columns (”The Three Atheists,” “Atheism and Evidence” and “Is Religion Man-Made?“) about the recent vogue of atheist books, books that accuse religion of being empty of genuine substance, full of malevolent and destructive passion, and without support in evidence, reason or common sense.
The authors of these tracts are characterized by professor Jacques Berlinerblau of Georgetown University as “the soccer hooligans of reasoned discourse.” He asks (rhetorically), “Can an atheist or agnostic commentator discuss any aspect of religion for more than thirty seconds without referring to religious peoples as imbeciles, extremists, mental deficients, fascists, enemies of the public good, crypto-Nazis, conjure men, irrationalists … authoritarian despots and so forth?”
In a similar vein, Tom Krattenmaker, who studies religion in public life, wonders why, given their celebration of open-mindedness and critical thinking, secularists “so frequently leave their critical thinking at the door” when it “comes to matters of religion?” Why are they closed-minded on this one subject?
But my question for you is: why can’t the likes of Stanley Fish go three paragraphs without insulting his opponents and adding injury in the form of the worst sort of brazen ‘why are they still beating their wives’ question? Riddle me that.
I would also like to request a moratorium on critiques of liberalism that consist entirely of a flourish for effect – with accompanying air of discovery – of the familiar consideration that liberalism is inconsistent with blanket, categorical tolerance of absolutely every possible act and attitude. That is, liberalism is incompatible, in practice, with any form of illiberalism that destroys liberalism. If something is inconsistent with liberalism, it is inconsistent with liberalism. Yes. Quite. We noticed.
Also, it might not be a half-bad idea to notice that liberalism is not incompatible with religion, merely with illiberal forms of religion. Just as liberalism is incompatible with illiberal forms of secularism. Which suggests that there may be a need to revisit Fish’s title: “Liberalism and Secularism: One and the Same”.
(Also, the sentence, “in liberal thought, ‘reasonable’ is a partisan, not a normative notion,” is conspicuously confused.)
I’m not a big fan of the academic interview, perhaps having been put off it by attending “A conversation with Jacques Derrida” while I was in graduate school (better, perhaps, than the “Rudolph Bahro interviews Himself” that’s in one of the Socialist Registers in our downstairs loo). So I only read Political Questions: Five Questions in Political Philosophy
Why were you initially drawn to political philosophy?
What do you consider your most important contribution to political philosophy and why?
What is the proper role of political philosophy in relation to real, political action? Can there ever be a fruitful relation between political philosophy and political practice?
What do you consider the most neglected topics in late 20th century political philosophy?
What are the most important unsolved questions in political philosophy and/or related disciplines, and what are the prospects for progress?
Obviously the responses vary in their level of interest. There are no shocking revelations – William Galston doesn’t renege on his pluralism; Amy Gutmann doesn’t come out in favour of dictatorship. And there is an unevenness in how fully people answer the questions; some are too lengthy and others, frankly, too terse (I’d have liked to hear more from Allen Buchanan and Phillippe Van Parjis in particular). And there are missing characters – I’m not going to propose anyone for elimination, but it would have been nice to hear from Elizabeth Anderson, Loren Lomasky, and Norman Daniels. (I presume that some people refused to be interviewed — how else to explain the absence of G.A. Cohen, for example?).
I was most interested in what people had to say about question 3.