Alabama’s Amendment 2 is due for a recount on November 29th, because the vote was so close, but most commentators apparently expect it to be defeated. For those who weren’t paying attention, Amendment 2 would revoke the post-Brown constitutional amendment passed to mandate segregated education, impose a poll tax, and, most cruelly, specify that Alabama’s children have no right to a state funded education. Of course, revoking it would not guarantee a right to a state-funded education, but a central, and spurious, argument in the campaign against Amendment 2 was that revoking it would provoke lawsuits claiming that the state’s unequal provision of education was unconstitutional. Leading the charge against the Amendment: the Christian coalition. Russell Arben Fox has a lengthy and excellent discussion of the case and its implications. Although myself an atheist, I have found Russell’s post-election thoughts very helpful. His thesis, which I share, is that progressives would do better to relate to evangelicals and their ilk in new and different ways. The Amendment 2 story is good ammunition for those who disagree with us. Is there an upside? I can’t think of one, though it is notable, that, again, Governer Bob Riley is more-or-less on the side of human decency.
(I’ve turned off comments because you should be discussing this at Russell’s place).

A request aimed at those out there with halfway decent coding skills – somebody, somewhere, should write an MT-Disemvowel plugin for Movable Type. For those not familiar with the concept, disemvowelling, pioneered by “Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/, is the most effective troll-repellent yet invented. You leave the troll’s comment up, but remove all the vowels from it. It can still be read by anyone who has a bit of patience, but makes the troll look rather ridiculous. So far, on the very few occasions I’ve had to use it, it’s worked absolutely perfectly. The only problem is that it’s a bit of a nuisance – it takes a couple of minutes to remove the vowels manually from the longer harangues. Seems like something that a not-very-complicated .cgi script could accomplish in a flash – anyone out there up to the task?

Update: gratitude and kudos to Novalis, who within eight minutes of the request reheated some previously existing code to create the “Dsmvwllr”:http://novalis.org/cgi/vowel.cgi.

While we’re “on the subject”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002874.html of essayists and bloggers, I’ve always liked this bit from Samuel Johnson.

I should’ve posted about this earlier, but it’s not too late for those in New York, Milwaukee, Chicago and St.Paul/Minneapolis. The Australian singer Kasey Chambers is touring the U.S. I’ve seen her in concert twice already and it’s an experience not to be missed.

There is nothing obvious about my interest in her music. Less than two years ago a friend of mine asked whether I’d go with her to a concert. I asked her what type of music and when she mentioned “country” in her response (that included references to some other genres as well) I just said “no thanks”. My friend persisted and lent me the CD Captain. I liked it enough to ask for more and then listened to Barricades and Brickwalls. I was sold.

We saw Kasey in Philly in 2003, but she was coming down with the flu so she couldn’t sing all the songs she’d planned. Right after she stopped her tour. As unfortunate as this may seem, we were lucky because this meant that she resumed her tour a few months later in New York. So I got to see her again. And had my dissertation defense not conflicted with another one of her concerts, I would’ve gone to see her one more time.

Luckily, she’s visiting Chicagoland this time around. I’ve even managed to convince five friends to come with me (it actually didn’t take that much convincing). I just bought her Wayward Angels CD so I’m ready for all the new songs as well. Apparently she’s quite a big hit in Australia (others here are better positioned to address that), but her popularity in the U.S. still seems limited. Oh well, that just means better seats for those of us who’re in the know.:)

There seems to be another outbreak of Orwell quotation across parts of the blogosphere (at least I’ve noticed a couple of the usual suspects engaging in this over the past few days). Matthew Turner “commented”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2004/09/renegade-liberals.html on this habit in September:

bq. It’s by now well-established that a man who died over 50 years ago has all the answers to today’s problems (well except when he talks on economic policy, or social policy, or class, or etc).

Still, following a link to his “Notes on Nationalism”:http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/nationalism.html (not one of his better efforts, but anyway) I did find a few words that seemed descriptive of blogospheric “debate” :

bq. Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported — battles, massacres, famines, revolutions — tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

The LA Times reports on “an Iraqi doctor’s experiences”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq15nov15.story inside Fallujah. (via “Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/ )

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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