by Brian on July 24, 2003
Like Henry I was bemused by Randy Barnett’s MSNBC effort. I was thinking of teeing off on some of the details, but Fisking is so 2002. And Henry’s and Tim Lambert’s responses are better than anything I could have done. So instead I’ll just mention something that arose almost in passing in the article.
bq. The Supreme Court “decided the election” (rather than reversed a rogue Southern state Supreme Court and restore the rulings of local, mainly democratic, election officials).
I guess there is a typo here, and ‘democratic’ should be ‘Democratic’. Either way, there is something very odd about the fact that we can tell the political sympathies of electoral officials from their past public pronouncements.
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by Brian on July 22, 2003
From the NY Times review of 28 Days Later
bq. ”28 Days Later” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has many scenes of maiming, dismemberment, clubbing, shooting, bayoneting and shoplifting.
Actually it’s not _entirely_ obvious that any shoplifting takes place, but we’d need another law and cinema post to work that out.
by Brian on July 19, 2003
by Brian on July 18, 2003
We all know there are lots of horror stories about trying to find work in academia. The smart money is on not even starting a PhD unless you are prepared to sell your soul on the job market. Just say no to those fancy scholarships. Unless, it seems, they’re from a good school in philosophy, where the numbers don’t exactly support the bad tidings.
Thanks to lobbying from various sources (prominent amongst them being Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet Report) we now have quite a bit of data about how philosophy PhDs do on the job market. And the news on the whole is fairly good, or at least much better than I had expected.
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by Brian on July 17, 2003
by Brian on July 16, 2003
by Brian on July 12, 2003
Andy Egan at Philosophy from the 617 responds to some of the debate Henry’s Harry Potter post produced, and in doing so brings up an interesting point about how we judge fiction. Lots of people say that in fiction, especially visual fiction but also in written works, the author should show the audience what happens, not tell them what happens. But what exactly does this rule mean?
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by Brian on July 12, 2003
In Josh Marshall’s excellent reporting on the uranium claim in the State of the Union one of the frequent qualifications he makes is that what Bush said was “technically true”. Even if it worked, this would be a fairly pedantic defence if the White House insisted on it. At least in Australia it’s _misleading_ the House that’s the hanging offence, not necessarily _lying_ to it, and presumably the SOTU should be held to as least as high a standard as daily question time. But in any case the defence doesn’t hold up. For what it’s worth, Bush’s line wasn’t even technically true.
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It seems like it is Nozick-bashing day Down Under. First Ken Parish links to his favourite online criticisms of Nozick. Then John Quiggin follows up with a different criticism. Quiggin’s argument is that given some plausible assumptions about history, we can justfy (heavy) taxation even by Nozick’s lights. Premise one is that Nozick agrees that if one person, say the king, or one group, say the parliament, owned all the land, then they could justly charge rents on all who inhabited that land. Whether we call these taxes or not doesn’t change the fact that they are justified. Justification does not turn on whether something is called a rent or a tax. Premise two is that at some stage the land was owned by some such person or group. Premise three is that current states can be construed as owning the land they govern because they traded for it with the previous owners. Conclusion, all taxes are justifiable rents.
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