Brian

I just stumbled across the webpage for The Monads. When they were compresent with us as such, the Monads were constituted by three WWU undergraduates, two of whom are now UMass graduate students, Kris McDaniel and Justin Klocksiem. I was just complimenting Kris’s philosophical abilities the other day and I forgot entirely to mention his musical accomplishments. Bad omission! If you like philosophical musical humour, you should download some of the songs they have posted. I particularly liked Meinongian Babe, which is the kind of song you might have heard on the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs had Stephin Merrit been a philosophy major. (Note that’s an 8MB download, so if everyone downloads it we’ll probably crash the UMass server.)

Richard Rorty has an article in today’s Boston Globe arguing that Davidson showed that “reality can’t be an illusion.” (Note: that quote is from the subhead not from Rorty.) Since it’s Rorty it’s little surprise that I don’t believe a word of it (sadly I don’t have time to write a long enough post to convincingly say why) but it’s a much better philosophical article than you’ll normally see in an American newspaper. (Thanks to the APA News service for the link.)

Juan Non-Volokh said that Joe Lieberman said something false on the weekend:

For example, Lieberman stated that the Bush Administration’s “Clear Skies” proposal to reform the Clean Air Act “actually would increase pollution” … He’s wrong … and should know better as a member of the Senate Environment Committee.

First, the proposed “Clear Skies” legislation will reduce utility emissions of NOx and SOx by around 70 percent. As I have noted before, the worst that can be said of “Clear Skies” is that it will reduce utility emissions marginally less than they might be reduced under current law – I say “might” because current projections presume that the current regulatory process will stay on schedule, and this is unlikely. Either way, this is not a policy that “actually would increase pollution.”

My first thought was that there’s a meaning for ‘increase’ that Lieberman could be using here. On second thoughts, I’m not so sure, but the semantic question is pretty interesting I think, at least if you’re a semi-professional semanticist.

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From the front page of yesterday’s Boston Metro:

Rice to get bigger hand in Iraq

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If you want to keep buying music without supporting the RIAA (now most famous for suing 12 year olds) it’s worth checking out RIAA Radar, which provides some lists of which albums are not released by members of the RIAA. For a good sample of what’s available, here’s their list of the top 100 non-RIAA albums on Amazon. There’s some good stuff on there, including recent albums by Múm, the New Pornographers (my favourite album of the year to date), Warren Zevon, Super Furry Animals, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Shins, the Waifs and many more.

Thanks to Virulent Memes for the link.

Brad DeLong quotes Stephen Cohen on California’s Uttermost Westerness.

Everybody knows that you can’t go west from California. There is no place wester. If we go from California to New York, we go Back East. If we go from California to Tokyo, we go to the Far East. We cannot go west. There is no way to do it.

But Tokyo isn’t the only place you can fly from California. When I’m flying from LA or SF to Sydney I certainly feel like I’m going west, not to the East. I suppose if you really want to feel like you’re on the western edge of things, you’d not only fly to Sydney but keep on going to Perth. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone whose identity was as bound up with being Western as Western Australians.

This seems a little late to matter now, but NBC has adopted the following policy regarding references to Amb. Wilson’s wife. (See end of this piece.)

NBC News has decided not to report the name of the woman whose identity was revealed in Novak’s column. MSNBC.com has removed her name from its coverage.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who Kevin Drum quotes goes out of his way to follow the same policy in the extracts Kevin has. It’s hard to believe that anyone who had an interest in her activities could have missed the story by now, or could pick it up from any of us, but it’s not obviously a bad policy.

is the title of a not bad article in The Age today on time travel. They give too much credence to branching universe hypotheses for my tastes, but there’s some fun quotes from some leading thinkers, and a relatively straightforward description of Paul Davies’s time machine plan.

Jonathan Ichikawa, who has a shiny new blog, asked me an interesting question the other day. Why are there so few ethics blogs? One simple answer would be that there are lots of ethics blogs, they are just spread around between political theory and legal theory and other areas of normative philosophy. Sad to say, these bloggers seem to be just as interested in day-to-day affairs as in high points of theory. Where’s the fun in that? (Not that they don’t write excellent posts when they do turn their attention to more theoretical matters. If only the world was less pressing.) So if any aspiring (or established) ethicist wants to start up a blog on the finer points of Korsgaard’s or Blackburn’s or Smith’s views, there’s probably a market niche waiting to be filled.

By the way, it’s a sad day when the graduate students start seeming to be appallingly young. Sad day indeed.

Matt Yglesias linked to this very interesting exit poll from the last Presidential election. Like Matt, I thought some of the voting breakdowns are striking. I knew Jewish voters tended Democratic, but I had no idea it was 79-18. I wasn’t as shocked to see that voters with no religion favoured Gore 61-28, with another 9% for Nader, but that’s still a noticable gap.

Do these results have anything to do with the ‘liberalism‘ (meaning, in this context, disposition to not vote Republican) of American academia? Perhaps. At a guess, I would say that atheists, agnostics and Jews are pretty well represented in the academy, and Protestants are not as well represented, at least relative to their size in the broader community. As noted the well represented groups tend much more Democratic (and even Green) than the under represented groups.

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There are several interesting discussions going on at the Invisible Adjunct’s, Chun the Unavoidable’s and Brad DeLong’s about scholarly publishing. The basic theme is that universities are currently making incompatible demands. Their tenure committees demand books for promotion. Their finance offices demand that the presses be profitable. And the kind of books that get published for tenure aren’t profitable.

I’m mostly posting this to link to the interesting discussions, but I thought I’d also add some points about how philosophy differs from the humanities in these respects, and how things look a little more hopeful from our shores.

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Josh Marshall reports that the WSJ got snippy with him for being so pessimistic about Bush’s polling numbers. Really, the Journal says, there’s nothing to worry about at all in the polling. As they read the trends, it is still ‘likely’ that Bush’s support level will stay above 25% between now and next November. In a spirit of bipartisan agreement, I would like to add that I too think it is likely that Bush will win more than 25% of the votes cast next Presidential election. If 25% is the over/under line, I’m betting the over. Unless the odds on under are good enough.

I can’t tell whether this is poor style, or poor grammar, or both. It’s the one sentence summary of an inside story from the front page of today’s NY Times. (It doesn’t seem to be duplicated in the online edition.)

It’s the Detroit Tigers, not Art Howe’s Mets, who are threatening to eclipse Casey Stengal’s original Mets of 1962 for most losses in a season, but the current Mets may not be better, but certainly richer, than their notorious and hapless ancestors.

The two ‘but’s close together are pretty bad, which is why I thought poor style. But I can’t imagine any sentence could start “the current Mets may not be better, but certainly richer…” which is why I thought poor grammar. It’s probably a fun game to try and formulate the precise rule they are breaking here, but I’m not going to be the one to do that.

Will Baude at Crescat Sententia has been running a series of online interviews with various bloggers. And the subject of the latest interview is me. Here’s the interview. If you want more blogger Q&As, previous blogger interviews (including Lawrence Solum, Matthew Yglesias and several permanent or temporary Conspirators) are prominently featured in the Crescat Sententia sidebar. I’d like to say that everything I say there about Crooked Timber is official CT party policy, but that would be, at the very least, a lie.