Via Unfogged: Was Dubya’s watch stolen off his wrist while he worked the crowd in Albania? Seems too funny to be true. Looking at it from around 50 seconds into the clip, you can see the watch as he reaches to shake hands with people, then there’s no watch. It’s possible that it was grabbed and fell off, as Bush seems to look down at the ground just around key moment. But it’s hard to tell. The Zapruder film of this Administration.
“Here”:http://www.nos.nl/nosjournaal/artikelen/2007/6/12/120607_bush_horloge.html is a higher-resolution video, via “Alan Bostick”:http://www.spicejar.org/asiplease/archives/000605.html, and some “comments”:http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/06/bushs_watch_sto.html from Bruce Schneier on the various official construals of the event. Bush’s hand goes back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left.
Interesting to see that he was so popular over there. Albanians are also crazy about “Norman Wisdom,”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1251406.stm as it happens.
I’ve been planning to write up something on Dan Nexon and Tom Wright’s _APSR_ piece on the politics of empires, which I think is a really important piece of work in international relations theory but haven’t gotten around to it yet (other promised reviews to finish first – next up Scott Page’s new book). Luckily, Alex Cooley has “done it for me”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/06/america_and_emp.html. The original article is available as a PDF “here”:http://homepage.mac.com/mgemmill/Nexon_Wright_Empire.pdf.
Last year, the Chronicle organized a “conversation”:http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i16/16a00801.htm between Michael Bérubé, who’s now my co-blogger, and David Horowitz. I enjoyed the conversation greatly, not least because Bérubé had the better of it; Horowitz had considerable difficulty in keeping up with Bérubé, who clearly didn’t take him at all seriously. But this provoked a debate in the comments section here at CT, with some commenters, including “Harry”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/#comment-181414, suggesting that Bérubé should have engaged seriously with Horowitz rather than poking fun at him. I didn’t and don’t agree – I think that poking fun at Horowitz is _exactly the right thing_ to do. But I recognize that it’s necessary to make arguments as to why this is possibly so. Small-l liberal academics – that is, academics who are committed to certain standards of diversity and plurality as a basis for academic argument – have an obligation to engage in reasoned debate with people that they profoundly disagree with, or at the very least to recognize that these people not only have a right to participate in argument, but very likely have something of value to contribute to it.
So why shouldn’t we engage in serious argument with people like David Horowitz? After all, he seems (some of the time) to be inviting us to? In this overly long blogpost, or overly short essay, I want to argue that this question is important to understanding Bérubé’s recent book, _What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and Bias in Higher Education_. (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Berube%20liberal%20arts, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWhats-Liberal-About-Arts-Classroom%2Fdp%2F0393060373%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1181579041%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325). I also want to argue on behalf of a possible answer to this question, which I draw from Max Weber’s idiosyncratic and agonistic version of liberalism. The short version: I think that we need not only to distinguish (as Bérubé does) between substantive liberalism and procedural liberalisms, but between different procedural liberalisms that are appropriate to different contexts. I suspect (although I’m not entirely sure) that there’s a proto-argument along these lines buried in Bérubé’s book – and I think that Max Weber’s essays on Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation help to draw it out. This said, my thinking on this is still a bit in flux (i.e. good tough criticisms are greatly appreciated).
Example: Scott Kaufman contributes, in civil fashion, to a thread at Jesus’ General – and as a result, he is defamed to his entire local academic community as a white supremacist! One of the General’s commenters – Ghost of Adolph Rupp, a.k.a. ‘John Casper’ – took it upon himself to email a bunch of people at UC Irvine (Scott’s department head, dean, various politicians across the whole state, I gather) as a generous public service.
Scott K. is innocent as charged. But that isn’t to say these allegations can’t be career-threatening, eh? (Stay classy, John Casper!)
You can read about the whole sordid saga at Scott’s blog – starting here. (A post explaining the fight that caused the fight that caused this problem.) The latest development, depressing but relatively inconsequential compared to the defamatory emails, is that Patriotboy (Jesus’ General) ain’t exactly coming up heaped in glory. Go read, if you care to. I guess the main post, reporting the first wave of emails accusing Scott of ‘refined white supremacy’, is here.
So Scott’s life is officially a mess. So if you are a friend, drop a comment, extend him your support and best wishes that an idiot hasn’t managed to wreck his career in vile and irresponsible fashion. I have the flu and am going straight to bed, probably will not be contributing to any discussion for the next 14 hours or so. So no fighting, if you please.
Most people (in the German sample population) initially react more, as regards self-reported happiness, to a change in income than to a change in occupational status, but gradually get habituated to changes in income. This is consistent with the standard view of the happiness literature, that income changes don’t have a big effect on happiness, so that people in rich countries aren’t on average much happier than those in poor countries. Moreover, by looking at the same people over relatively short periods of time the analysis overcomes, to a significant extent, the objection I’ve made previously, that the scale on which happiness is measured is inherently relative to some notion of what is reasonable to expect.
I am working on the Introduction to an edited volume on the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes work involved in empirical social science research (to be published by The University of Michigan Press in 2008). While each chapter in the book gets into considerable detail about how to approach various types of projects (from sampling online populations to interviewing hard-to-access groups, from collecting biomarkers to compiling cross-national quantitative data sets), I want to address more general issues in the introductory chapter.
One of the topics I would like to discuss concerns larger-level lessons learned after conducting such projects. The motivation behind the entire volume is that unprecedented things happen no matter the quality and detail of preparation, but even issues that can be anticipated are rarely passed along to researchers new to a type of method. The volume tries to rectify this.
I am curious, what are your biggest lessons learned? If you had to pick one or two (or three or four) things you really wish you had known before you had embarked on a project, what are they? I am happy to hear about any type of issue from learning more about a collaborator’s qualifications or interests, to leaving more time for cleaning data, from type of back-up method to unprecedented issues with respondents. If you don’t feel comfortable posting here, please email me off-blog. Thanks!
I think I speak for every single reader and contributor to Crooked Timber when I say that we haven’t had nearly enough posts on the subject of heterodox economics recently … [click to continue…]
Cary Nelson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, came by the Inside Higher Ed offices for lunch earlier this week. The organization is having its annual meeting, starting today. He agreed to do an interview for a podcast, and spent about an hour talking to the editors and staff with a microphone there on the table, amidst water bottles, sandwich wrappers, and chocolate-chip cookies.
Though I’m not sure he could yell on-message one-liners in the manner required to make it on cable TV, Nelson seemed otherwise quite well-spoken. He fielded a pretty hard-edged question about the Ward Churchill case, and talked some about the idea of a major campaign to raise public awareness of the meaning of academic freedom. (“Major” as in requiring a budget of $30 million, which would mean funding from other than AAUP coffers.) And he addressed the topic of academic boycotts and the AAUP’s attitude toward them.
A selection of highlights from the hour is available here as an mp3. Mentioned only in passing is the fact that AAUP will be issuing a major statement on academic freedom in September — in large part, it sounds like, because of a perceived lack of understanding of the concept even by university professors.
Meanwhile, another AAUP member named John K. Wilson has published a manifesto complaining that the organization is “fading in importance” due to its “calcified traditions.”
I try to avoid commenting on the material posted on Norman Geras’s site. But today he posts “a letter from Professor Daniel Statman”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2007/06/dark_days_for_t.html to “a colleague” in the British Society for Ethical Theory explaining why Statman feels unable to attend the forthcoming “BSET conference”:http://www.bset.org.uk/conference.html at Bristol (my institution). Statman — who specializes in writing on the ethics of war and whose “oeuvre“:http://philo.haifa.ac.il/faculty_pages/statman.htm contains a philosophical defence of targeted killing in the so-called WoT — is clearly a political animal and not just a wounded academic. You can read the whole letter at Normblog, but I thought I’d just comment on this paragraph:
bq. As you surely recall, in the past I used to come regularly to the meetings of BSET, which I always felt were among the highest-quality conferences in ethics worldwide. For the last two years, I haven’t been able to attend the meetings, but I did plan to do so this year and I sent the registration forms to Bristol two weeks ago. But after learning about the UCU resolution to promote an academic boycott of Israel, I have changed my mind. In the present circumstances, I don’t think I’ll feel comfortable at an academic institution or conference in the UK. I don’t feel like sitting down to dinner with people some of whom may have voted to boycott me and my colleagues. Nor do I feel like having dinner with people who, though against the boycott, nevertheless believe the offensive and absurd claim that Israel is an “apartheid state,” which makes all Israelis, academics in particular, morally polluted. And maybe, above all, I’d rather avoid the heightened self-consciousness which I fear will be inevitable in the circumstances. (Which of these folks voted to boycott me? Was that a friendly smile or the opposite? Is he being nice to me in spite of my being Israeli, because of, or regardless of? Was that political comment a provocation or just innocent small talk? And so on and so forth.)
The first thing to say is that Statman is, of course, free to associate or not with whoever he chooses, and thereby to _boycott_ whoever he likes (including people he suspects, without evidence, of beliefs he might find offensive). The second is that just 158 people voted for the motion at the UCU conference, so it is very unlikely that Professor Statman would indeed face the prospect of dinner with anyone who voted to boycott him and his colleagues. In fact, since the motion passed is at best construed as being a vote to “promote” the boycott (that is to require discussion of it in branches), a point he acknowledges in his initial formulation, it seems certain that he won’t have to dine with such a person. The third is that it is hard to imagine why the claim that Israel is an “apartheid state” (absurd or not) is particularly morally polluting for Israeli _academics_ , as Statman states. He worries that even non-boycotters might have beliefs he finds offensive — I wonder if he is so fastidious about avoiding people who might have morally offensive beliefs elsewhere (Haifa, for example?). I suggested in my last post on this issue (to remind people, I was opposing the boycott) that one effect of the proposal is to facilitate we-are-the-victims grandstanding. Statman’s letter, and his use of Geras’s website to publicize it, would seem to be just such an instance.
Over at the RSMG blog, Nanni points out that Reed Elsevier will no longer host arms fairs. This has followed a long campaign by academics and others. The case raised a bunch of questions about boycotts. My general feeling was that moral suasion should be tried first, but that if that failed, boycotts should follow. It’s not clear whether the outcome was purely the product of suasion or whether increasingly loud noises about possible boycotts prompted Elsevier to move.
In a recent “post about citing papers on the web”:http://metaphysicalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/06/ethics-of-citation.html, Ross Cameron drew the following conclusion.
bq. I’m tempted to think that if you put a paper up on the web, that’s to put it in the public domain, and it’s no more appropriate to place a citation restriction on such a paper than it is on a paper published in a print journal. I’m even tempted to think that conference presentations can be freely cited; i.e.that I shouldn’t have to seek Xs permission to refer in one of my papers to the presentation X gave.
The particular issue here is what to do about papers that the author posts and says at the top “Please don’t quote or cite”. (You occasionally see ‘don’t circulate’ as well, which is a little odd.) I’m not sure how common these notes are outside philosophy, but they are pretty common on philosophy papers posted on people’s websites. Now on the one hand, there is something to be said for following people’s requests like this.
On the other hand, as Ross notes, the requests can lead to annoying situation. One kind of case is where the reader notices an important generalisation of the paper’s argument. Another case is where the conclusion of the paper supplies the missing premise in an interesting argument the reader is developing. Either way, the reader is in a bit of a bind.
I think the main thing to say about these situations is that writers shouldn’t put such requests on their papers.
Ever since Google’s street view service was debuted there have been “many discussions over its privacy implications”:http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Google+Street+View%22+privacy&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=G0c&pwst=1&start=90&sa=N. I’ve found most of these fairly overblown, but this morning I started to get a better sense of what some of the concerns might be about. Writing on the SMH’s news blog, Matthew Moore “writes”:http://blogs.smh.com.au/newsblog/archives/freedom_of_information/013696.html approvingly,
bq. Mr McKinnon reckons you can hardly have a reasonable expectation of privacy on a public street when every second person has a video camera or mobile phone and when Google is now using street-level maps with images of real people who have no idea they have been photographed.
“This”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004576.html is a nice story. The latest issue of Southwest Airlines’ inflight magazine features some “recommended diversions”:http://spiritmag.com/clickthis/8.php. They include the usual summer books, movies and music, and a plug for “Language Log”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/ as blog reading. Academic blogs have come a long way if they’re being recommended in inflight magazines. Now we only have to get them to be promoting other academic blogs the same way.
I’ve been seeing a lot of references to Language Log around the web recently, particularly to their prescriptivist-bashing posts. I particularly liked this attack on the “alleged rules for using less and fewer”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/, complete with examples from King Alfred’s Latin translations. It’s an example of how academic blogs can make an impact on public life not by dumbing down their work, or by stretching to find alleged applications, but simply by setting out their work in a clear and accessible way. Or, to bring things back to a favourite theme of mine, of why academics should get credit for successful blogs not necessarily as examples of research, but as examples of service to the community. Now giving people diversions alongside summer blockbusters isn’t quite the same kind of service as solving their medical or social problems, but it is a service, and a praiseworthy one.