by Brian on January 12, 2004
Katherine at Obsidian Wings has three good posts up (one two three) about the Maher Arar case I mentioned yesterday. I’m feeling a little guilty about that post because I let my outrage over the administration’s treatment of allied citizens get in the way of proper scepticism about the story. Obviously I don’t know that Arar was innocent, for example, though if what’s reported is true it’s still outrageous even if he’s guilty. I’m still of the old-fashioned school of thought that says a fair trial and all that is a good thing even for the most vicious of criminals. But we need to know a lot more about the case before leaping to conclusions, and Katherine is doing a very valuable service in putting together the available evidence from all sides.
UPDATE (13/1): Katherine has three more links up (four five six) which are again recommended.
by Brian on January 12, 2004
Philosophy Talk, the philosophy radio program featuring Ken Taylor and John Perry, will be debuting its first regular season on KALW at 12 o’clock tomorrow San Francisco time (that’s 3pm in New York, 8pm in London and 7am Wednsday in Melbourne, if I’ve done the math correctly) and you can listen over the internet via the KALW link. The trial run program they did last year was very good I thought, so it should be worth a listen. Tomorrow’s show is on Bush’s doctrine of Preemptive Self-Defence.
by Brian on January 11, 2004
CT doesn’t have many of these posts – lots of links with little analysis. Most of the following are horror stories of various kinds.
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by Brian on January 10, 2004
Brian Leiter has two interesting posts up (one two) on the question of whether academics should be able to claim scholarly credit for blogging. It is fairly clear that good blogging should count as service. Indeed in all my recent self-promoting activities I’ve been plugging my work on various blogs as a service both to the public and the profession. But whether this counts as scholarly work is a tougher question.
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by Brian on January 9, 2004
Kevin Drum picks up on something Matthew Yglesias noted a while ago: the American government spends more per person on health than some governments that run quite good comprehensive public health systems. The data almost suggest that public health care is more efficient than private health care. Of course, if America gets better quality health care for all the extra $$$$$ it is spending, this conclusion wouldn’t follow. There’s remarkably little actual data to bear that out, but if you trawl through Kevin’s comments board you’ll find lots of people reporting fourth- or fifth-hand anecdotes to that effect. So I thought I’d add my own little anecdotes, comparing the only two countries I’ve ever spent significant time in. My non-expert observations suggest
1. A person with private health insurance in Australia gets higher quality health servives than a person with private health insurance in the US.
2. A person without private health insurance in Australia gets much higher quality health servives than a person without private health insurance in the US.
3. In some cases (e.g. mine) a person without private health insurance in Australia gets slightly better health servives than a person with private health insurance in the US.
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by Brian on January 6, 2004
by Brian on January 4, 2004
Here’s Wolf Blitzer’s current poll question
Do you think any of the Democratic candidates for president can beat George W. Bush?
I honestly don’t know what this means, so I figure I’d throw it over to the LazyWeb. It seems to me that if I answer ‘Yes’, I’m implying that I believe that any of the Democratic candidates for president can beat George W. Bush. And that’s false since I know Sharpton and Kucinich can’t. (At least if we ignore distant possible worlds they can’t.) But if I answer ‘No’ I’m implying that I don’t believe that any of the Democratic candidates for president can beat George W. Bush. And that’s false since I know Dean, Clark, Kerry etc can all handily whip Bush.
The problem is that ‘any’ behaves differently in positive and negative environments. Maybe this is just a presupposition failure, as in “Have you stopped voting Republican?” but I don’t remember seeing it discussed before.
by Brian on January 3, 2004
I have an inexplicable fondness for college ‘football’, but I’m worried about what will happen to the economy Sunday if this NY Times report is correct.
If the [LSU] Tigers win and claim the Bowl Championship Series title, Saban will be paid one dollar more than the highest-paid college coach in the nation, according to an incentive clause in his contract.
Since Saban is a college coach, it seems he must be paid a dollar more than he is paid. Which can only happen if a dollar is worthless, which I imagine would be rather disasterous for well-established economic relations.
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by Brian on December 20, 2003
I’m in the odd position that my favourite ethical theory is one I regard as having been decisively refuted. The theory is a form of consequentialism that I used to think avoided all the problems with traditional forms of consequentialism. I now think it avoids all but one or two of those problems, but those are enough. Still, whenever I feel like letting out my inner amateur ethicist, I keep being drawn back to this theory.
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by Brian on December 18, 2003
Did anyone else get the Nigerian Spam email from “John Adams” of the “Senate Committee on Banks and Currency”? I thought at first it would be moderately amusing, perhaps suggesting I get involved with something obviously fraudulent like purportedly buying the Midwest for pennies per hectare, but it turned out to just be a regular fraud letter with the grammatical mistakes fixed. I haven’t been following these letters for a while (thanks Thunderbird spam filter!) but it might be fun to see if they evolve a little.
by Brian on December 12, 2003
It’s a law of nature that whenever normblog moves to a new platform the first profile has to be of a Timberite. So today’s profile is of me.
by Brian on December 9, 2003
by Brian on December 9, 2003
From the National Post.
[A]n American from San Diego is quoted saying: “What bugs me about Canadians, if I may, is that they wear that damn patch on their bags, the Canadian flag patch. That way, they differentiate themselves from us.”
by Brian on December 9, 2003
David Brooks, who lives in Washington, DC (and has done so for decades I’d guess), attacks Howard Dean, who has lived and worked in Vermont for decades, for describing himself as ‘rural’. Brooks, all the while, is happy to apply that term to himself (perhaps sarcastically). I think Brooks’s view (as far as one can ever read a coherent view into David Brooks) is that where one lived at age 7 is the sole determiner of the appropriateness of this kind of geographic classification. That’s a view, I guess, but not a very plausible one. I don’t have any particular fondness for Dean, but ‘attacks’ like this only make him look good.
(UPDATE: I see Josh Marshall had this one 30 minutes before I did – and with actual data to back up his claims. I should not try and compete with real journalists.)
by Brian on December 8, 2003
Normally thinking about either the monarchy or the English rugby team makes me nauseous, but I thought this story was quite amusing.
Scrum-half Matt Dawson revealed that the players had first learned of the invitation as a result of a text the queen sent to her grandson Prince Harry just minutes after Wilkinson’s drop goal clinched their final victory over Australia. Dawson told BBC Radio: “It was quite funny how we found out about it. Harry told us, ‘I’ve just got a text from my nan and she wants to give you a party’.”
By the way, I think if the ‘rules’ for punctuation made any sense there’d be an extra full stop at the end of the last sentence.