Michael Bérubé tosses out an aside in a “post”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/theory_tuesday_act_v_scene_iii/ on Raymond Williams and culture.

bq. Left media critics make much of the fact (to take a random example) that millions of Americans believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11, and I have heard any number of my colleagues adduce this as evidence of the Foxification of national discourse. But the curious thing is that on September 12, 2001, millions of Americans believed that Iraq was involved in 9/11, and Iraq’s refusal to denounce the attacks didn’t exactly reassure those people. The question remains, then, of whether Fox News actively recruits people to the “Iraq was involved” agenda, or whether it simply confirms the Cheney-Rice conspiracy theorists in what they already believe.

As it happens there _is_ evidence that Fox News has a real and quite substantial effect on people’s politics (albeit on voting behavior rather than the propensity to believe in conspiracy theories). Stefano Della Vigna and Ethan Kaplan have a paper (“pdf”:http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/foxvote06-03-30.pdf#search=%22fox%20news%20effect%22 ) which compares voting in the 1996 and 2000 presidential and senate elections in towns where Fox News was introduced on cable and in towns where it wasn’t. They argue that there isn’t any substantial difference between the two different groups of towns besides the introduction or lack of same of Fox News, providing a sort of natural experiment. However, there are significant _ex post_ differences in the degree to which people in these towns then vote for Republicans. Between 1996 and 2000, Republicans gain between 0.4 and 0.7 percentage points more of the vote in towns with Fox News than in towns without it. DellaVigna and Kaplan reckon that Fox News persuaded between 3% and 8% of its audience to vote Republican.

I’m now on on the West coast after spending a chunk of last week driving to Palo Alto from Chicagoland.* I didn’t have much time so I just got on I-80 and drove with few interruptions. I made a stop in one of the more populated parts of Wyoming: Buford. As you can see from the sign, the town has a population of two. It’s also noteworthy due to its high elevation, apparently the highest on I-80. I had no idea I was that high up had it not been pointed out on this sign as the roads on the way weren’t particular steep. In any case, I am curious, what makes a town a town? The Eisenhower Expressway Interstate System (I-80) goes by plenty (more than plenty, in fact) unpopulated areas with just a house here or there. So what makes Buford a town of two vs just a house attached to another town?

[*] For those not familiar with distances in the US, this is similar – in terms of distance, pretty much nothing else – to something like driving from Moscow to Madrid.

As I mentioned recently, I am hiring for a full-time staff position in my research group. Details are below. If you know of someone in the Chicagoland area who may be interested (or someone somewhere else who’d be up for moving to the area), please let them know about this opportunity. Or if you can think of relevant mailing lists, please let me know. (I’ve posted it on air-l and CITASA. I’ve put an ad on Craig’s List Chicago and on Salon Jobs. And I’ve sent a note to a bunch of people I know both in Chicagoland and elsewhere. I welcome suggestions for additional ways of publicizing it though. For now I’m holding off on posting it on Monster.com.) Thanks!

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Although the U.S. Constitution of 1787 does not include the word “slavery”, there are five more-or-less direct references to it, and other more indirect references. Article IV, Section 2, is the fugitive slave clause – any person “held in service or labor in one state, under the laws thereunto, escaping into another … shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

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This post contains more newly translated bits of Nietzsche on Kant. (The response to my first post was good, so I am encouraged to follow up.) [click to continue…]

This one’s for John.

Update: The bizarrest bit of the story is at the end:

A Devon and Cornwall Police spokeswoman said: “This isn’t just a petty issue. This has been ongoing for two or three years.”

I thought I’d lost the ability to be shocked and awed by spammers’ ability to construct useless spam sites full of spammy spam. A google search for “learning and development consultancy” yields a top of the page result as follows:

“Learning and Development – consultancy and services from …
Performance By Design provides consultancy on how to increase the benefits of learning in organisations and enhance management development.
www.performance-by-design.com/Learn.htm – 38k”

Plausible tagline, plausible blurb, plausible url. But when you get there, it’s a bunch of advertising links for curtains, drapes and after-dinner speeches.

It looks like these people aren’t just busy gaming search engines for the top spot, but are putting significant effort into appearing to Internet users to be content-rich, legitimate sites. And yes, I do believe it is illegitimate to fool users into thinking they’ll find something relevant and useful when they click through, and not a page full of third party advertising, however ‘relevant’ it may be. (Parked domain monetization was a hot topic at a recent ICANN meeting. I wrote a long MBA paper about this issue a while back, and found these two papers on search engine gaming absolutely fascinating. And my colleague Dave Piscitello has rather firm views on the topic.)

In a “recent comments thread”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/23/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-nations/ , I got into trouble for asserting that Christopher Hitchens had clearly never read Günter Grass’s ” _Crabwalk_ “:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156029707/junius-20 since, in the course of “a polemic”:http://www.slate.com/id/2148094/nav/tap1/ that was nasty even by his standards, he described the book thus:

bq. suddenly there is Grass, publishing a large and cumbersome account of the sinking of a German civilian vessel in the Baltic in 1945 ….

By contrast, Dan Jacobson gives “an accurate and balanced account”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/09/writers_choice__1.html of the book (warning: plot spoilers), coupled with some reflections on Grass’s recent disclosures about his SS membership as part of the “Writer’s Choice” series at Geras’s site. (I wrote about _Crabwalk_ in “a post last year”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/27/crabwalk/ , before the recent revelations.)

Update: Ian Buruma, in the New Yorker, has “an interesting piece”:http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/060918crat_atlarge on l’affaire Grass.

The open letter on childhood written by a bunch of academics, authors, celebrities and others (including Harry’s dad) seems to me causing a bit of a stir. Why did they send it to the Telegraph I wonder, rather than the Times (the traditional place) or the Guardian (read by more people who work with children, I imagine). Perhaps they think that Cameron’s Tories are going to win the next UK election and that they might make more impact on policy via the Telegraph. Anyway, it is hard not so sympathize with their sentiments even if the list of issues is an odd assortment:

Well what do you expect? If you make a lot of noise about having to have a competitive and flexible labour force — as NuLab have — then mum and dad are going to be working all hours to pay the mortgage, and when they are at home are going to slump in front of the TV after they’ve heated the ready-meals in the microwave. It wasn’t alway like this, of course. Look at _Astérix chez les Bretons_ (1965) and you’ll see the Brits being ridiculed by the _French_ for their relaxed pace of life, for taking time off for tea, and for keeping the weekend sacred. I guess we had time for children then too.

The Netherlands is rightly regarded as one of the most gay-friendly countries. But in recent years there has been a growing concern about increased intolerance towards gays. The Dutch Parliament has therefore asked the “Social and Cultural Planning Office”:http://www.scp.nl/english/ to conduct a study on the acceptance of gays in this country, which was published last Friday. Is the Netherlands really a good place to be gay? [click to continue…]

This short Jack Balkin “essay”:http://www.thepocketpart.org/2006/09/06/balkin.html seems to me to be the best thing I’ve read on the relationship between blogging and scholarship.

Law professors now agonize over whether blogging constitutes legal scholarship and what this will do to the legal academy. They needn’t bother. The real threat to quality comes not from the medium of blogging itself but from using citation counts, links, page views, and downloads as measures of merit. People won’t just apply these criteria to judge blogs. They will also apply them to standard-form legal scholarship online. Blogging, in fact, is sui generis. It blurs the traditional boundaries between scholarship, teaching, and service because it transcends the normal audiences and expectations of legal scholarship. Over the years, legal scholarship has become an increasingly self-contained community where scholars write only for each other. Bloggers have burst out of that model: they talk to many different audiences, they teach the world about law, and they perform a public service by drawing attention to the legal and policy issues of the day. Blogging may give scholars publicity that gets their work a look. But it will not by itself generate a scholarly reputation or make a scholarly career—at least, that is, until social and technological change thoroughly reconstitute our standards of merit. … The wrong question to focus on is whether hiring committees should count blogging as legal scholarship. The right question is how we should re-imagine our vocation as professors of law in light of new online media. Should we continue to speak mostly to ourselves and our students, or should we spend more time trying to teach and influence the outside world?

I’m thinking about these questions because I’m deciding whether or not to list a very small part of my blogging – the seminars that I’ve organized and am organizing around academic books – on my cv as some form of academic activity – perhaps under the heading of “unconventional publishing.” Any thoughts?

So I’m four weeks into teaching recent continental philosophy and some things have worked. One thing I did – sort of for myself, sort of for the class – was collect all the bits of Nietzsche where he talks about Kant. The idea was to give my lecture on the legacy of Kant by bouncing off a series of selected Nietzsche bits. So I would end up introducing Kant and Nietzsche simultaneously, getting most of the 19th Century in between. (This was the theory. My mileage varied considerably.)

To get my bits I went to the Nietzsche Channel and searched likely terms, then cut and pasted. Then arranged chronologically. That was easy. Then I added bits this method missed. I ended up with about 18,000 words. It turned out to be an engrossing read when I got it all laid out, end to end. As Nietzsche says somewhere or other … damn, can’t find the quote. Something about the long logic of his thought on eternal recurrence. Anyway, there’s often a long logic to Nietzsche’s recurrent treatments of given themes. Also, he talks about Kant when he wants to generalize about broad currents in the history of modern philosophy, so in this case there’s breadth as well as length. (I would be quite grateful if someone would make neat little editions of all the bits of Nietzsche about eternal return, or about pity, or about Plato and Socrates. But maybe that’s just me.) Anyway, I made a start at my own English translations of the bits I collected. (My German is rusty and needs exercise.)

First, to propitiate the translation gods, a bit of silly poetry from The Gay Science: [click to continue…]

This post is reproduced from September 13, 2004. I don’t think I have anything better to say, but I wanted to say something. My thoughts are with the families of all those who perished five years ago. [click to continue…]

“The Path to 9/11 is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11‘s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to ‘transform Hollywood’ in line with its messianic vision.”

Plenty more where that came from, here.