I was posed this problem by someone in a very highly ranked research department in one of the social sciences (not Philosophy, not Madison), and post with permission.

Graduate Admissions Committee for the department in question is deciding whom to admit. For said discipline, as for several others, there is a website on which potential students gossip share information about the departments to which they are applying, and many do so anonymously. However, many such students say enough about themselves that if you are in possession of their file (as graduate admissions committee is) you can identify them with near, and in some cases absolute, certainty. One applicant to said department behaves on the website (under the supposed cloak of anonymity) like… well, very badly, saying malicious things about departments he has visited, raising doubts about whether he is honest and the kind of person it would be reasonable to want other students to deal with, and generally revealing himself to be utterly unpleasant.

Question: is it wrong for the GAC to take this information about the applicant into account when making a decision? Secondary question: does it make a difference to your answer that the department is in a private, not a public, university?

This is somewhat tangential to the recent Edwards-bloggers incident. Amanda Marcotte has been recieving some loathesome hate mail, some of which she excerpted on Pandagon. The site is down right now but I’ll insert a link when it’s back up. (It’s my understanding that Melissa McEwan has been getting similar threats, though I don’t know if she’s posted any. And yes, they are two completely different people.) Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom, in the course of a post which can pretty fairly be characterized as “they were asking for it”, notes that “some of the emails, apparently, resemble the kind that Michelle Malkin receives on a daily basis.” This moves me to note that people on left sites do say crazy sexist and racist things about Malkin all the time. I think she’s a bad person, and out at the dog-whistle end of annoying, almost outstripping the human capacity to detect maddening stimuli (cf. thisYouTube video, which achieves the heretofore-thought-impossible feat of making me wonder for a moment whether she might not be crazier than Pam Oshry). Nonetheless I often see people in comments threads go straight to the “me love you long time”. That ain’t right, people. In related news, as a feminist I heartily condemn the Iranian government’s treatment of women, just not in a way that makes me want to drop tactical nukes on the women.

“The problem with espousing hatred of gay people and darkly suggesting they “shouldn’t exist”? It creates problems for homophobes.”

Full explication/evisceration at Julian Sanchez’ “place”:http://juliansanchez.com/notes/archives/2007/02/whys_he_gotta_go_making_life_h.php.

Charlie Cray forwarded me a link to this forthcoming “documentary”:http://www.indiesunderfire.com/index.html on the demise of independent bookstores and the rise of chains. This is something that I have more ambiguous feelings about than many lefty academics. On the one hand, there are independent bookstores in DC and elsewhere that I love, cherish, and try to shop in whenever I get a chance. But on the other, I grew up in a small town without a bookshop of any description whatsoever, a place which was a little like Penelope Fitzgerald’s “Hardborough”:http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/07/reviews/970907.07cunning.html?_r=1&oref=slogin before Ms Green arrives. A couple of times a year I would go to Fred Hanna’s when we visited relatives in Dublin, but the rest of the time I relied on what I could get from the local library or the small rack of paperbacks at the local newsagent. I’d have killed for a chain bookstore somewhere close by, and I find it hard to imagine that my teenage equivalent somewhere out there in the heartland today wouldn’t feel the same way.

There is something being lost as independent bookstores close; a lot of valuable, local knowledge possessed by smart, book-obsessed employees who could give good leads on other books that you ought to read if you liked or were interested in _x_. But the increase in choice provided by the spread of chains (and the Internet) to places that were badly served in the past isn’t to be discounted either. What is a more unalloyed tragedy in my eyes (and not only mine; I think I’m stealing this claim from Teresa Nielsen Hayden) is the demise of the kind of variegated paperbook rack in the newsagent/drugstore that got me reading in the first place. These mixed together bestsellers, unabashed junk, and all sorts of other obscure, semi-obscure and eccentric books. They got me hooked on reading. My impression is that these racks aren’t out there any more, in either Ireland or the US – the places that had them have either gotten rid of them altogether, or only use them to sell the same five or six bestsellers that everyone else is selling.

Looks like everyone around here is just too shy to mention it, but all this week Crooked Timber has been among the blogs discussed and/or vivisected by “Movable Snipe,” a regular feature at the website Jewcy.com. The various CT-related entries are all conveniently available here.
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I read “this post”:http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2007/02/are_we_who_you_.html by Jodi Dean a week or two ago, and found one of her claims a little annoying; in the middle of criticizing efforts to ‘define’ the subject matter and approach of various intellectual approaches, she opines:

Can it mean anything, then, to reject or criticize political theory as a whole? If one is a formal modeller, yes. One is saying that only with formal methods can anything significant be said about politics. But, this is not a critique. It is simply a rejection. I don’t critique formal modelling in my work. I simply reject it. I find it uninteresting and irrelevant.

Now this may quite likely just be unfortunate wording on her part, but it reads to me as though she is ‘defining’ formal modellers as people who argue that only formal methods allow you to say anything significant about politics. Which, if this were indeed what she meant to say, is not only a sweeping generalization, but quite untrue.

But this post isn’t meant to be a gotcha; I accept that it’s quite likely that she meant to say something different. What I want to write about is something else altogether. When someone from a particular intellectual community rejects another intellectual community _tout court_, as Jodi Dean is doing here, what might you recommend them to read in order to show that the intellectual product of this community has meaning on _their_ terms, as best as you understand them?

In this particular case, I think I’d recommend Jodi read Donald/Deirdre McCloskey’s _The Rhetoric of Economics_, possibly together with Ariel Rubinstein’s “Comments on the Interpretation of Game Theory” (Econometrica 59 (1991):909-24) to show how questions of rhetoric and interpretation are absolutely central to unresolved difficulties at the heart of formal theory. If I were trying to persuade a Habermasian, I’d suggest instead that they take a look at Jim Johnson’s “Is Talk Really Cheap? Prompting Conversation Between Critical Theory and Rational Choice.” (American Political Science Review 87 (1993):74-86) instead. If I were trying to persuade a skeptical formal modeler to go in the other direction, I might suggest Bourdieu’s _Distinction_. Which makes for a broader point, I think. There are very few intellectual communities that are so completely antithetical to each other that there aren’t some points of tangency between them, books; articles, essays that potentially speak to both. These points of tangency are probably not going to be part of the core conversation in either community, but they’re usually the more interesting for that. Any others out there worth mentioning?

UNICEF has released “a study”:http://www.unicef-icdc.org/presscentre/presskit/reportcard7/rc7_eng.pdf on the well-being of children in 21 OECD countries. The countries are ranked according to their average child well-being. The top four are the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, and the bottom two are the United States and the United Kingdom. Ranking countries always attracts the attention of the media, with the Dutch media proudly announcing that “children are nowhere as happy as in the Netherlands”:http://www.volkskrant.nl/buitenland/article397676.ece/Kinderen_nergens_zo_gelukkig_als_in_Nederland, and the “BBC”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6359363.stm reporting on reactions in the UK.

Here are some thoughts about this report from a Dutch perspective — I’ll leave it to others to comment on the problems the UK, USA or other countries are facing. What follows are just some thoughts for discussion and not a full explanation of why the Dutch are so high in this ranking (for other discussions of the report, see “here”:http://www.peaktalk.com/archives/002597.php, “here”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2013309,00.html and “here”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Child-Welfare.html) [click to continue…]

Another “bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=200, this time with Megan McArdle on global warming, minimum wage and healthcare, for those as wants to see (not as much in the way of fireworks as those who have seen our interactions in the blogosphere might expect).

The Dutch educational and academic system is in crisis. In the last couple of years, media coverage on schools and universities has been rather alarming, with reports on high drop out rates, 18 year olds who can’t decently write and who think opinions are factual knowledge, primary schools teachers who don’t sufficiently master mathematics, the brain drain of the best university students, overworked university staff, cutting of budgets and so on and so forth.

But now there is hope. Today, the media reported that the new minister for education, research and culture will be Ronald Plasterk, a highly succesful biologist who is a “Professor of developmental genetics”:http://www.niob.knaw.nl/researchpages/plasterk/groupleader.html at Utrecht University. He has also been a columnist for the daily newspaper “De Volkskrant“:http://www.volkskrant.nl/ and has criticised the previous educational policies in his column for that newspaper. He is also known to be an atheist, which, in my view, is a good thing given that the coalition contains, next to Plaskerk’s social-democratic labour party “PVDA”:http://www.pvda.nl, two Christian parties (the center-right Christian Democratic Party “CDA”:http://www.cda.nl/ and the left-bending “ChristianUnion”:http://www.christenunie.nl/en/).

I very much hope that Plasterk will be as strong in politics as he has been succesful in the sciences, so that he can fix our educational and academic system….

The first ever episode, available for a week. Here. Never say we don’t look after you.

It is February 14, and that can only mean one thing — the arrival of this year’s batch of Valentine’s Day slogans from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization:

Proletarians And Oppressed Peoples,

1. Progressive And Revolutionary People Everywhere, Resolutely Uphold The Militant Bolshevik Spirit And Revolutionary Romanticism Embodied In Comrade Valentine!

2. Decisively Smash Retrograde And Joyless Ultra-Left Lines Which Disparage Proletarian Love And Desire!!

3. Warmly Celebrate The 20th Anniversary Of ACT-UP, A Militant Organization Which Attacked The Bourgeois State and Big Capital On Behalf Of LGBTQ People And All AIDS-Affected Oppressed Communities Worldwide In 1987 And Has Remained On The Offensive For Two Decades! ! !

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I’ve been struck by the eagerness of the usual crowd to jump on the latest story casting doubt on the reality of anthropogenic global warming, in this case the cosmic ray story being pushed by Svensmark and Calder. You would think after so many previous hopes (urban heat islands, satellite data, the adaptive iris, attacks on the hockey stick and so on) have come to nothing, and with the public debate lost beyond any real hope of salvage, that sensible rightwingers would at least wait and see before running their usual boilerplate on stories like this.

At the very least, in this age of Google, you’d think they might check whether the story is actually a new one. In fact, like most such claims, the cosmic ray idea has been around for quite a while. It’s been taken to pieces many times (William Connolley covers the story as Revenge of the killer cosmic rays from hell). It even got batted about on Oz blogs a few years back. Of course, the cosmic ray theory might pan out, but looking at the mountain of evidence pointing the other way, and the failure of so many previous efforts in this direction, you wouldn’t want to bet your credibility on it, assuming you had any.

At this point, I can’t help but be reminded of the running joke in Peanuts where Lucy promises to hold the football so Charlie Brown* can kick it. Every time, she tells him, it will be different from all the previous times. Every time, Charlie falls for it. And every time, she pulls the ball away at the last minute.

* Pop culture reference corrected thanks to Paul G Brown – I had remembered Linus as the kicker.

Oddly, “3quarksdaily links”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/02/homeland_securi.html to a parody of “ready.gov”:http://www.ready.gov/ as though it had only recently appeared. “Here’s a post of mine”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/02/20/public-service-announcement from almost exactly four years ago about this. (Four years! Jaysus.) It was one of the earliest bits of blogging I did that got some circulation. Rereading it now, I think the narrative it presented holds up rather well in the light of recent history. Certainly better than the official version. So here it is for old times sake, below the fold.

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Via “Matt Yglesias”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2007/02/assassination_vacation/, a vintage “bit of Glenn Reynolds”:http://instapundit.com/archives2/2007/02/post_2501.php.

bq. I don’t understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy, or an invasion, is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs’ expat business interests out of business, etc.

The whole “24 outlook on life”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/10/takin-care-of-business/ is really catching on. As I’ve been “saying”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/2005/12/19/spying-at-home/ for “years”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/2004/12/03/freedom-on-the-march/, secret state-sponsored assassination and torture programs are why I am a libertarian. Plus all the cool military hardware, obviously. Those guys had flat panel screens before anyone. And those little communicator watches, too. I bet they have iPhones already. _Exploding_ iPhones. On to Tehran!