So, when Michiko Kakutani (the daughter of the famous mathematician btw) writes an article “deploring the tendency”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html?pagewanted=1&ref=books of modern culture towards semi-coherent mash-ups of other people’s work, and the article is itself a semi-coherent mash-up of the work of other people (mostly themselves deploring semi-coherent mash-ups), is she being obtuse, quite brilliant in a self-undermining way, or something else entirely? I genuinely can’t figure it out.
Guardian story “here”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/18/alex-chilton-dies.
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The blogosphere was very exercised about the arguments for and against war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but as both conflicts have dragged on there has been less sustained attention given to the developments within those countries. Still, a trip over to Amazon presented me with a list of possible books to read about Iraq, the invasion, the occupation, the current situation, etc. Not so for Afghanistan where the top choice was an updated edition of a book first published in 1981 ( _Afghanistan: Land of Conflict and Beauty: A History of Conflict_ by John C. Griffiths). So is there anything? (And if not, why not?)
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Long ago, before there was the internet, I was so much more persistently and baldly ignorant about various and sundry things that interested me. Example: I just got a guitar – well, in October – and resolved that I would finally learn to play after all these years. Needless to say, I can find lots of videos and online resources. It’s highly satisfactory. When I tried to learn guitar in college, only to give up quickly, I had none of that. (I had a teacher but, looking back, he was a bad teacher. Probably it was my fault, too.) I’m a lefty, which means I now occasionally Google up things to to with left-handed guitar. Which means that I randomly found a video of former Cars guitarist Elliot Easton musing about growing up a left-handed guitarist. Not a thrilling interview, but he remarks, off-handedly, that he had been playing left-handed for some time before learning that left-handed guitars – not just restrung righties – actually existed. And then he muses generally about how little information you had. You were just staring at a few LP covers, wondering what the hell was going on. You were pretty sure to suffer some or other stupidly and persistently huge hole in your knowledge-base, due to the accident of not happening to know someone who told you the thing any fool would Google up in a minute today. I think about the things that interested me, growing up – like science fiction novels, for example. And comics. And I realize that almost everything I knew about these things that mattered a great deal to me (did you notice?) I learned by talking to about six people, four of whom were kids like me, and going to four different stores in my hometown. (And sex. Did I mention that, as a young teen, I was quite intrigued by the topic of sex, but – sadly – lacked reliable sources of information and reportage on the subject.) I suspect you could provide your own examples, if you grew up pre-internet. And I feel it’s pretty important, somehow, that those of you who grew up post-internet probably can’t provide your own examples. Or rather fewer.
Of course, this is a flagrantly obvious thought: the internet = important! I don’t really know what to say about how it has made a difference, specifically, that things like serious young left-handed guitarists who don’t even know there are such things as left-handed guitars are now more infrequent occurrences. These sorts of minor epistemic follies tended to elude systematic documentation. Information now gets spread more easily and therefore efficiently. That’s for sure! But I feel there’s more to be said about the ways in which the shape of an individual’s whole view of the world used to be a lot less …(what’s the word?) … internetish? Maybe I should Google up something about Marx + “the idiocy of rural life”. I know that’s Marx’s phrase but I’ve never read what he had to say on the subject. (Well there you go!) Possibly there is some analogy to be drawn.
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Sad and upsetting times in Ireland. Cardinal Brady, it turns out, was instrumentally involved in the closed investigation of the monstrous Fr. Smyth, and himself swore to secrecy two children raped by Smyth. The incident simply resulted in Smyth getting some form of censure from the Church and going on to rape and abuse many, many more children. Whose parents were in turn stonewalled by the Church. How does anyone get over this? Should they?
Meanwhile, Pope Ratzinger is wriggling off the hook – at least this hook, this time – for his own involvement in a cover up. It’s odd to me that people are searching so intently for Ratzinger’s smoking gun, when as head of the Congregation for the Indoctrination of the Faith, he wrote to bishops telling them that breaking the seal of secrecy on church investigations of sex abuse was punishable by excommunication. That’s the smoking gun that destroyed not just the childhoods and perhaps lives of one or two children in Ratzinger’s direct responsibility, but thousands of children around the world who deserved better from the one, true Church.
The Irish adult voices of raped children are joined by American ones; people now grown up who were raped and abused by Fr. Smith when he was sent away from these shores and off to where he wasn’t known and could start again. A Connecticut woman poignantly asks why she was repeatedly raped by a priest who had been sent to America instead of to the police. An Irish woman asks why no one went to the police. If they had, she might have been saved. Many might have been saved. [click to continue…]
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“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/03/assorted-links-12.html links to a post on a blog that I had hitherto been unaware of, “True Economics”:http://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2010/03/economics-11032010-replying-to-prof.html (proprietor: Constantin Gurdgiev, Adjunct Lecturer in Finance with Trinity College, Dublin and Chairman of the Ireland-Russia Business Association), asking the question “How much did the Irish government subsidize housing?” I’m writing a review of Fintan O’Toole’s “Ship of Fools” which speaks specifically to this question, and the answer is ‘not very much at all.’
Gurdgiev’s post is both quite mad and oddly charming, combining denunciations of the ‘Stalinesque schemes’ to provide development funds for Western Ireland and a railway link thereto, with quite sincere-sounding suggestions that he wants to engage with his critics. His intent is to rebut Paul Krugman’s “recent column”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/opinion/08krugman.html on the Irish economic collapse (Krugman builds explicitly on this “recent report”:http://www.irisheconomy.ie/Notes/IrishEconomyNote10.pdf by three Irish economists). But his post, entertaining though it is, cannot be taken as a reliable guide to housing policy in Ireland, or indeed to Ireland’s economic crisis.
[click to continue…]
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My friend Tony Laden says, “I am toying with an idea for a new upper-level undergraduate ethics class that would take as its reading a group of about 10-15 really fantastic papers in ethics that are accessible to undergrads, and then working through them one at a time at whatever pace the class finds worthwhile. So they don’t have to survey the field or hang together on a topic or in a tradition. They just have to be really good pieces of philosophy and/or really good pieces of ethics.”
I think it’s a great idea. My top-of-the-head suggestions are below the fold. Some of these would be on any list I made, but another day other papers would have come to the top. Feel free to add, debate, etc.
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If you are one of the few remaining people not to have tried it out, watch this movie or this Daily Show clip and then come back here. The rest of you know that Chatroulette is a human slot machine where pretty much every other round comes up with some guy abusing himself or demanding that any ladies within range expose themselves. As a trained observer of human behavior I was professionally obliged to investigate. Bearing in mind the second sort of modal user, I used the following image:
Selected perfectly SFW results follow.
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Dutch politics was shaken up today, when “Wouter Bos”:http://www.pvda.nl/politici/politici/wouterbos, the political leader of the social-democrats, “PVDA”:http://nu.pvda.nl/, announced that he will leave politics in order to be able to spend more time on another major responsibility he has in life – his three children and his wife. His children are almost one, four, and six, and his decision to want to spend more time with them was the only reason he gave in his unexpected “farewell speech”:http://nu.pvda.nl/berichten/2010/03/Verklaring+Wouter+Bos.html. The Dutch cabinet was dissolved recently over a dispute between the Christian Democratic Party (“CDA”:http://www.cda.nl/) and the PVDA on whether or not to continue sending troops to Afghanistan, and elections are scheduled for early June.
I think this is a great loss for the social-democratic party, a great loss for Dutch politics and public life, but an amazing supporting signal for the kind of feminist movement which I endorse. A top male politicians says: “Enough. I don’t want to have children and a wife whom I never see.” And he uses the right word: “major responsibility”, not just something he fancies doing. His decision will serve to an increasing acceptance that both men and women are entitled to combine having a family with doing paid work – even if this implies that they need to quit a top position.
I’ve seen many short interviews today with other Dutch politicians and other public figures. And it’s interesting that most of them said they “understood” his decision, adding that he made enormous sacrifices to his family life in the last years. Of course, it is likely that other motives played a role too – but I don’t see any serious grounds for doubting his official reason as being the main reason for his decision. When about six years ago, he was ‘merely’ an MP (and not yet a Minister of Finance), he choose to use his legal right to parental leave and thus was home with his baby one day a week. I therefore think that the few public figures who have today said that his was just ‘an excuse’ and that he should give his ‘real reasons’ for quiting politics are wrong and should be deeply ashamed of themselves. If a woman were to give ‘time for family’ as the reason we would believe her; if a man, who earlier on in his political life took parental leave, gives the same reason, we should similarly believe him. Anything else would be wrong and sexist. I hope he and his kids will enjoy the time together.
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The Republican campaign to rename everything after Ronald Reagan has reached new heights of absurdity with the suggestion that Reagan should replace Ulysses S. Grant on the $US50 bill. A couple of questions struck me here
(a) Wasn’t Grant a Republican himself ?
(b) Don’t the Repugs have anybody other than Reagan to name things after?
The answer to the second question turns out to be “No”, and explains the first. Looking back at Republican presidents, nobody is really keen to remember Bush I and II, Ford or Nixon, and the same applies to Hoover[1], Coolidge and Harding. But at least some effort is required to forget these guys, unlike the non-entities who followed and immediately preceded Grant.
In the 20th century, Eisenhower was successful and widely admired, but has long been denounced by movement Repugs as the archetypal RINO. More recently, the same condemnation has been extended to Teddy Roosevelt. That leaves Lincoln and Grant. This otherwise unexceptional NYT story about Texas school textbooks explains (if you read through to the end) why these founding heroes of the Republican party are being downgraded.
With the obligatory exception of Washington, the only American presidents who pass the purity test of today’s GOP are Reagan and Jefferson.*
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Cosmic Variance‘s Sean Carroll doing a very good job indeed on The Colbert Report. That shit is hard. Along the way he makes deft use of a Dara O’Briain line (“Of course science doesn’t know everything — if science knew everything, it would stop”) that I believe I introduced him to, so therefore I take full credit for all the laughs he got and expect to receive a check for any royalties accruing from Colbert-related sales.
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“Charlemagne’s prediction”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2010/02/not_federal_union_yet 1 that the Greek crisis would have no substantial effects for EU integration is looking “decidedly wobbly”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2b0933f4-2b1a-11df-93d8-00144feabdc0.html.
bq. Radical plans for a European version of the International Monetary Fund to bail out crisis-hit countries would need a new treaty and the agreement of all European Union member states, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, has warned. Throwing her weight behind the proposals from Wolfgang Schäuble, her finance minister, Ms Merkel admitted that the European Union had lacked the tools to deal with the Greek debt crisis: “The sanctions we have were not good enough.” But she added that a full-scale negotiation of the EU’s 27 member states would be needed to set up a European Monetary Fund, which would be able to bail out eurozone members subject to strict budgetary conditions. “Without treaty change we cannot found such a fund,” Ms Merkel told foreign correspondents in Berlin yesterday.
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I now have in front of me the final issue (vol. 10 no. 3) of Imprints, currently subtitled “egalitarian theory and practice” but originally “a journal of analytical socialism”. Conceived in Dunkin Donuts Piccadilly Circus branch in 1995, and launched in London during Euro 96 (we crowded round a small radio after the launch conference to hear the England-Spain penalty shoot-out), Imprints has been an important part of my life for nearly 15 years. We’ve interviewed many of the important intellectual figures of the left: Cohens Joshua and G.A., Philippe Van Parijs, John Roemer, Ruth Lister, Carole Pateman, Martha Nussbaum, Nancy Fraser … there’s a long list, and published some good and interesting work. But circulation was always small, and the effort involved in a small group self-publishing was large. A couple of years ago we believed we had a deal with a publisher to take the grind off our hands, but it all fell through at the last minute and it has been hard to rally the troops ever since. Many thanks to all our readers and contributors: it has been fun to work with you. Subscribers should get their final copies within the next month.
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This story (via Leiter) concerns the requirement in Pennsylvania that any university department within the PASSHE system that graduates fewer than 30 majors over five years justify its existence. A theater and dance department chair is quoted as follows:
“This is an insult to many of our faculty who feel what they do is central to the life of the university,” said Dr. Slavin, who also is vice president of the campus chapter of the faculty union, the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties. “Challenging them to justify their existence is really a slap in the face.”
It is odd that in “normal” times it is just assumed that the departmental units can carry on without ever having to justify or even reflect very much on their existence or what they are supposed to be doing? It is entirely un-obvious why many departments should continue to exist (and some of the most un-obvious graduate huge numbers of majors); and one might have thought that it was a good idea even in normal times to review the justifications of their existence. The fact that there is so little reflection on the missions of departments is down, in part, to a failure of management; a failure that is just made starker by the demand that departments picked out by some arbitrary feature which, until this moment, they have been given no reason to think was a problem.
The issue made it to Leiter because several of the Philosophy departments in those institutions fall into the low-major category. But is producing Philosophy majors the point of having a Philosophy department? In Our Underachieving Colleges
I don’t think of the curriculum, or the mission of my department in my institution, that way at all.
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