The Guardian has “a report”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/careers/story/0,9856,1351765,00.html on what academic life is actually like in the UK today: the pressures of the RAE, invasive management practices, requirements to mollycoddle students, requirements to provide an audited paper-trail documenting the mollycoddlling etc. It also comments on the fact that for many academics there is no clear boundary between home and work. As the report say, we get no sympathy, because the public image is of people giving the odd lecture and reading at the leisure in the library.

With kids being questioned by the Secret Service over Bob Dylan songs, probably better enjoy this one while’ it’s still legal. It’s a version of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” by Oui 3, the only good British hip-hop band ever[1], a track that I’ve been looking for for about five years and finally found on the Splendid website. “A Break From the Old Routine” is actually their best track, but I haven’t found that.

Footnote:
[1]That is, unless someone on the Lazyweb can point me in the direction of a copy of “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” by Definition of Sound

Kieran complains that

When you’re a Sociologist like me, and your field has no credibility, people just assume you’re stupid and don’t bother sending you their Final and Completely True Theory of X in the first place. On the other hand, it does invite people to assume the answer to any problem you are studying is simply obvious common sense.

But sociology is a victim of its own success here. All of the big insights of sociology, from its beginnings in the 19th century up to 1950s work like that of Erving Goffman are indeed common sense, not because they were already known, but because they have been incorporated into the intellectual baggage of everyone in Western societies, educated or not. No one, for example, would be accused of talking academic jargon if they raised the problem of “peer group pressure” at their local school, or made a reference to ‘social status’.

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Lots of fun and games coming out of the Telegraph / George Galloway libel trial, so I thought I might as well dig up the second ever post I did on CT, handicapping the race a bit. I’m not sure that I’ve got much to add to that post, to be honest; even the links seem to still be alive. The Telegraph is going for a defence of qualified privilege, and Galloway isn’t trying to suggest that the documents were fakes, so it is likely to all turn on the question of whether the Telegraph’s journalism at the time was “responsible”. In which case, my guess is that much will depend on the judge’s interpretation of a Telegraph editorial at the time which contained the phrase “there is a word for taking money from a foreign power … treason”. Charles Moore’s trash-talking of Galloway during the period when he thought GG wasn’t going to sue might also come into the equation. My guess is that Galloway wins, but wins small as he is in large part the author of his own misfortune by cuddling up to Saddam so much. A bit disappointing for free speech fans, because it maintains the irritating state of affairs arising from Times vs Reynolds; while the House of Lords has hung out the tantalising prospect of a generalised public interest defence, nobody has actually won a case on one yet.

“Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2004/11/im_not_going_to.html comments on how the Republicans in Congress have increasingly opted for getting the bare minimum vote necessary to pass legislation – 50% plus one. He notes that he’s “sure there is a whole body of political science literature on this question, and the rational choice model that dominates the field would probably predict exactly this behavior.” He’s right – the body of work in question is called minimum winning coalition theory. What’s interesting is that this theory is based on the hypothesis that politicians are only interested in divvying up the spoils of office – i.e. that they have no substantive interest in policy. Rational choice social scientists predict that actors may form wider coalitions than the minimum winning ones to pass legislation when they are genuinely interested in policy outcomes. Cue “Sam Rosenfeld”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/11/index.html#004793:

bq. There’s a mentality in the Republican leadership that if a significant number of Democrats support a bill somehow it’s tainted. …“Part of it goes back to the K Street thing, where they want to be able to say to their funders that the only people who can deliver anything for you are Republicans.” If House Republicans can make their Democratic counterparts irrelevant to the process of passing the nation’s laws, they can make them irrelevant to big political contributors.

Looks to me as though this particular hypothesis is getting some strong empirical support.

One of the advantages of not being a philosopher — and, in particular, not being a metaphysician — is that you don’t get emails like this:

Dear “Mrs Paul”:http://www.u.arizona.edu:~/lapaul,

may I offer you a final (as I think) ontological argument and ask your disproof on it? I’d be very thankful to you for answer.

Sincerely yours,

etc.

I imagine “Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/ gets similar stuff on why gold is the One True Measure of Value, and “Jaques Distler”:http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/ has a folder of proofs that String Theory was Anticipated by the Ancients. When you’re a Sociologist like me, and your field has no credibility, people just assume you’re stupid and don’t bother sending you their Final and Completely True Theory of X in the first place. On the other hand, it does invite people to assume the answer to any problem you are studying is simply obvious common sense.

Now that Arafat is dead, it’s at least possible that Israel and the Palestinians will recommence negotiations. One important question is how the US can best try to encourage peace. During the election campaign, both Kerry and Bush tried to make clear their unconditional support for Israel. However, on one reasonable reading of the situation in the Middle East, promises of unconditional support may not be in Israel’s best interests.

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I spent yesterday afternoon and evening watching the third part of Phyllida Lloyd’s new production of the Ring for ENO. (See also my reactions to “The Rhinegold”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001476.html and “The Valkyrie”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001860.html ). “Siegfried”:http://www.eno.org/whatson/full.php?performancekey=20 has to be my least favourite of the Ring operas, but that didn’t stop me from having a thoroughly good time. The reason it’s my least favourite is that this part of the Ring is a very unsatisfactory piece of work. For one thing, the eponymous “hero” (sung by Richard Berkeley-Steele) is an unattractive oaf, and for another, the villain of the first two acts is an anti-semitic caricature. Finally, the music undergoes a massive shift in quality and tone between Act 2 and Act 3, as a result of Wagner having developed a new musical language during the twelve years he put the work aside. But, but …

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Supporters of both sides in the war in Iraq, and particularly those who are or were associated with the left, have described it as a “war of liberation”. Here, for example, is John Pilger and here is Norman Geras. Presumably Geras and Pilger each think the other is wrong.

The obvious position for an opponent of the war is that both are wrong. On reflection though, I think that Geras and Pilger are both right.

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For anyone planning to come along to the debate, there has been a venue change – the details are below. For anyone wanting to know what I’m going to say in response to the question, the short answer is ‘no, they didn’t.’

WHEN:
Thursday, November 18
7:30-9:00 pm

WHERE (note new location!):
Porter’s Dining Saloon
1207 19th St. NW (19th and M Street)
Washington, DC

“Delicious Monster”:http://www.delicious-monster.com/ is a two-person company out of Seattle with a good pedigree in the Apple development community — even though half the company is eighteen years old, he’s been writing good software for the past three years. They have just released “Delicious Library”:http://www.delicious-monster.com/, a cataloguing application for books, music, movies and computer games. John Siracusa has a “detailed review”:http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/delicious-library.ars at Ars Technica. As Siracusa points out, an application designed to keep a catalog of your books and whatnot is fundamentally a boring idea. Yet Delicious Monster has managed to make it cool.

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Pharyngula “has a post”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/sultana_of_the_texas_taliban_scourge_of_scholars_despoiler_of_textbooks/ about how the Texas School Board is trying to exclude not just the mention of evolution from school textbooks, but also references to pollution, global warming, overpopulation, contraception and “married partners” (might include gays). (This kind of thing doesn’t alarm the Dupe, who “argues”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2109377/ — if “argues” is the right word — that Bush’s victory is a triumph for the forces of secularism.)

Tyler Cowen, in India, “discusses how the people of Calcutta might adjust to rising sea levels”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/11/how_quickly_wil.html , how many of them would leave, etc (via “Davos Newbies”:http://www.davosnewbies.com/ ). There’s a certain Swiftian quality (no doubt unintended) to Cowen’s contemplation of the fate of these poor Indians. If the costs and burdens he suggests do fall on such people (as they probably will) then it puts in perspective the fatuousness of the arguments advanced by Bjorn Lomborg and others to the effect that we shouldn’t do anything about global warming because the costs of action will exceed the benefits. The costs will be incurred by the poor in places like India who will end up with their homes and workplaces under water, and the benefits have been and will be reaped by the already rich in the first world who carry on driving their SUVs. If the economist and policy-wonks who parrot the Lomborg line are proposing a massive compensatory transfer from the winners to the losers then I haven’t heard of it. _Qu’ils mangent de la brioche_ .