Since I’ve argued previously that there’s a lot of confusion in discussions about equality of opportunities and of outcomes, I was interested by this story that UK Home Secretary David Blunkett has hired as special advisor on race someone named Matt Cavanagh, most notable for writing a book called Against Equality of Opportunity which says that employers should be permitted to engage in racial discrimination.

This interview with Cavanagh in The Guardian does not seem very promising – he comes across as the worst kind of contrarian[1] – but is not really enough to go on. So I was hoping someone with a subscription to the London Review of Books might send me a copy of Jeremy Waldron’s apparently favorable review. In case you’re worried about the sanctity of intellectual property, I am a subscriber but I’ve never registered with the website and don’t have the required address slip to hand.

Meanwhile, I’m confident that lots of readers (and probably other CT members) will be well ahead of me, so I’d welcome comments, particularly setting me straight if I have misunderstood Cavanagh (or Waldron).

fn1. That is, one who makes great play with contradictions in the conventional wisdom, does not put forward a coherent alternative, but nonetheless makes authoritative-sounding pronouncements on public policy.

I’ve been meaning to blog for the past week about a topic which caused some lively debate over Sunday lunch with some friends last week, prompted by political philosopher Paula Casal’s article “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Animals?” (Journal of Political Philosophy 11/1 2003). Muslims and orthodox Jews are only allowed to eat meat slaughtered according to Halal or Kosher procedures. These procedures are typically worse from the animal’s point of view that the “humane” methods required for slaughtering cattle normally (at least in the UK). Now as far as I know there’s no religious requirement on Muslims or Jews to eat meat slaughtered by these methods: that’s to say Muslims and Jews can be vegetarians if they want to be. The religious requirement is simply that IF they eat meat, these slaughtering methods must be used. The question that then arises is this: should adherents of these religions (and other similar ones if there are any) be given an exemption from standard animal cruelty regulations to permit them to continue to use these methods?

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Invisible Adjunct generated a long discussion by asking why Americans don’t have vinegar with their fries. (They do, in fact, in the Northwest). My favourite hypothesis is this:

bq. Almost all the vinegar in the US has been supplanted by factory-made industrial acetic acid solution crap (“white vinegar”). Even the mass-market “apple cider vinegar” is factory-made crap made by mixing the white stuff with apple juice. As a result, most US residents will simply have no idea what vinegar really is. They have to go to a real pub (rare), or some other extraordinary place like Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor ( http://www.zingermans.com ), to get real vinegar these days. Therefore anybody who tries it with the vinegar one can buy will deeply regret it.

This is analagous with my combined hypotheses about why Americans don’t like fruitcake and Brits don’t like Bagels. American fruitcake is a terrifying concoction of food colouring and formaldehyde, that no-one in their right minds would want to have in the house, whereas British fruitcake is a rich and exotic mingling of booze, dried fruits, sugar and fat. Its just a different item. Similarly bagels — bagels in the UK are normally dried out old pieces of cardboard, as opposed to the wonderful moist morsels one can easily find here in the US (and my east coast friends tell me I’ve never even had real bagels.

Great post by Laura about The Mommy Myth. The book is apparently about the sense of guilt mothers have about not spending 24/7 with their children. Laura says this:

bq. What is the source of this more demanding style of parenting? The authors blame a vast right wing conspiracy, which they intelligently call the Committee for Retrograde Antifeminist Propaganda or CRAP. (Call me an academic snob, but I was really irritated by this. Also, trying to be cute, they call the former Soviet Union, those pesky Russkies. Finger nails on a blackboard.)

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Looking back at the debate over the Spanish election outcome, it struck me that many of the contributions to this debate suffered from a confusion between electoral outcomes and notions akin to Rousseau’s “general will”. My own contributions weren’t entirely free of this fallacious reasoning.

To clarify my point, suppose purely hypothetically that it could be shown beyond doubt that, in the absence of the terrorist attacks, the PP would have won, and that those who changed their votes did so in the hope that this would appease terrorists and induce them to direct their attacks elsewhere. Much of the debate has taken it as self-evident that, if this were true, then it could justly be said that the Spanish people had displayed cowardice, given in to Al Qaeda and so on. But even in this hypothetical case, this would not be true. It would only be true that the 5 per cent or so of Spaniards who changed their votes had done this. (I’d better emphasise again that I don’t believe the hypothesis to be true, and am using it only as an analytical device).

To take a marginally less controversial example, one way of interpreting the results of the most recent presidential election in the US is that the voters couldn’t make up their minds between Gore and Bush and decided, instead, to leave the choice up to the Supreme Court. Stated baldly, the claim seems evidently silly, at least to me, but when I checked, it wasn’t hard to find exactly this analysis being offered by Time Magazine

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Despite having lived my entire life in two of the leading basketball countries of the world, there are many things about basketball I still don’t understand. Like, how can a foul you intended to give not be an intentional foul? I suspect that’s one of those odd quirks of the interpretations like the outside strike that we just have to live with. But here’s a more serious question.

Why is it that players are always taken out of the game when they get into foul trouble?

If they stay in the game, the worst thing that can happen is they foul out. And the cost of fouling out is that you have to spend part of the game on the bench. So to avoid the risk of the player spending a chunk of time on the bench, you make them spend a chunk of time on the bench. This doesn’t obviously make sense.

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Via “Kevin ‘the Animal’ Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_03/003504.php we learn that John Gray, author of _Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus_ is pretty touchy. He’s “threatening to sue”:http://www.gavinsblog.com/mt/archives/000906.html a blogger who “pointed out”:http://www.gavinsblog.com/mt/archives/000533.html last November that Gray’s Ph.D was of dubious provenance. I thought this was pretty well known — I mean, _I_ knew it, and it’s not like I keep up with the news. He got it from Columbia Pacific University, an unaccredited diploma mill somewhere in California. There was a “TV story”:http://www.insideedition.com/investigative/johngray.htm about it a while ago. But though CPU may be defunct (by the by, what computer scientist would not want a degree from CPU?) there are plenty of others. Enroll at “Strassford University”:http://strassuniversity.org.uk/, for example (discussed further in “this CBS news report”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/07/25/eveningnews/consumer/main565236.shtml), or “Glencullen University”:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/materials/work/slides/Glencullen%20University_files/, notionally located in the heart of “Dublin”:http://www.ireland.com/education/el/news4.htm[1], or just cut to the chase and “design your own degree”:http://www.ineedadiploma.com/pages/886679/index.htm — literally — at “Ineedadiploma.com”:http://www.ineedadiploma.com/pages/808468/index.htm. This last site helpfully reminds you that, although “All our diplomas are printed on high quality parchment paper [and] all transcripts are printed on tamper proof, security paper,” and that  ”You also have the option of adding a security hologram to any transcript”, nevertheless “none of our items are intended to be used for unlawful misrepresentation or fraudulent purposes.” 

fn1. Glencullen “also operates”:http://www.adn.com/24hour/nation/story/600189p-4642228c.html as the University of Wexford, which I suppose isn’t _that_ far from Dublin, but also as the University of San Moritz, which makes you hope the students don’t have to walk across campus to get from one lecture to the next.

If you’re at all interested in legal academia, and if you haven’t already discovered them, some of the folks previously at “En Banc”:http://www.enbanc.org/ have formed a new blog called “De Novo”:http://www.blogdenovo.org, which is devoted in part to running on-line “symposia”:http://blogdenovo.org/symposia.html. I think this is an excellent innovation, and the De Novo bloggers are off to a great start. They’re currently running a blog-symposium–a blogosium?–about “Perspectives on Legal Education” (see “Day 1”:http://www.blogdenovo.org/archives/000035.html, “Day 2”:http://www.blogdenovo.org/archives/000037.html and “Day 3”:http://www.blogdenovo.org/archives/000049.html). For anyone thinking about going to law school, or currently suffering through it, there’s an especially good post by “Dahlia Lithwick”:http://www.blogdenovo.org/archives/000046.html.

The next symposium topic is “Internet, Law and Culture,” and they’re currently accepting submissions.

Harvard Law Review recently published a sympathetic note of a book by a certain “Francis Beckwith”:http://www.francisbeckwith.com/ on so-called “intelligent design” (that’s creationism with bells and whistles on, to you and me). Brian Leiter took them “to task for this”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000878.html (as well he might) and became the object of “a vitriolic polemic in the conservative National Review”:http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/baker200403150909.asp . The pompous and moralizing tone of the National Review’s article starts to look a little inappropriate, though, one we realize that the author — who is described as “a freelance writer in Texas” — is, in fact, “the aforementioned Beckwith’s graduate student and teaching assistant”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000952.html . It’s a small world.

The Gadflyer version of Political Aims doesn’t seem to have a way to link to individual posts, which is a shame. This one from Amy Sullivan on the Medicare bill is a doozy:

Let’s review. The Medicare bill only passed the House after Republican leaders:

a) broke all institutional precedent and held the vote open for a record three hours, instead of the traditional fifteen minutes;
b) used the extra time to “convince” a handful of representatives who had already voted against the bill to change their votes;
c) possibly threatened and/or bribed at least one representative;
d) broke the additional precedent of barring non-Members from the floor of the House during a vote by allowing HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson to “have a little talk with” some recalcitrant representatives; and now
e) lied about what they knew the final cost of the measure to be.

No wonder they’re spending federal tax dollars trying to convince us all that it was such a great idea. There’s absolutely no way the thing would have passed if the truth had been on the table. This isn’t a little political spat. This is pattern and practice. And it’s important. So pay attention.

P.S. Another post worth reading on the subject. The punchline is that the actuary was ordered not to present his findings on the bill for two reasons. The first, of course, was that he showed that the costs for the bill were higher than the House leadership was promising. The second is that they showed that the Republican plan “could increase premiums for those who stay in traditional programs by as much as 25 percent.”

The phenomenon of recommendation letters for students being written by the student was discussed a few months back, but, as recommendation letters aren’t a big deal here in Australia, I didn’t pay much attention. Today, however, I met a new version of this. I got an email from someone in the US, previously unknown to me, attaching a CV and a draft recommendation letter, and asking me to sign it. I declined without reading the CV, and without formulating a precise reason. Has anyone else encountered this?

When Jim Treacher linked to the homepage of the imaginary horror writer Garth Marenghi, he found a real gem. Garth Marenghi is wonderfully done narcissistic hack, the page is hilarious, and the internet is a beautiful thing for hosting it. (Oh, the internet. How can I stay mad at you?)

From one of the interviews:

What, scientifically speaking, is the most frightening thing ever?

Garth: I’m not a scientist. I’m a fabulist, a shaman, a ferryman, a dreamweaver. But that’s not to say I don’t put forward scientific propositions. In Black Fang, I dared to suggest that if pollution kept progressing at its current rate, rats would soon be able to drive buses. This week, as I sauntered through Soho, I witnessed a rodent sniffing curiously round a discarded rollerskate. Are we really so far away from my apocalyptic vision? I fear not friend.

A description of one of his books, Afterbirth:

It’s the year 2050 and everyone can choose the perfect baby. Blue eyes, blond hair, and calcium-rich blood. Everyone, that is, who can pay. (Many people can’t pay). The West Country’s most beautiful woman, Silvie Mink, is certain her newborn will be as drop dead gorgeous as her. But when her baby drops dead, knifed by her own placenta, she knows her DNA modification program has gone too far…

TAGLINE: After birth, comes Afterbirth

(On a related note, happy Day-Before-Zombie-Movie, everyone.)

For the first time in ages I am not teaching a course in which I’m going to use this game, but this morning I got a plaintive email from a former grad student saying that she had lost her copy, and wanted to use it in a class she is teaching. So I thought I’d post it just so that it is available to anyone who hasn’t already made it up themselves. The game is heavily adapted from a series of experiments done by Frohlich and Oppenheimer, and I’ve refined it over the years. It always seems to work well, even with lower-division students in low-discussion classes. I tend to use it prior to asking them to read any Rawls, and spend about 10-15 minutes at the beginning of the game explaining each of the principles and insisting that I really mean it that they can make up their own principles. I assume lots of people have done something like this, so if your version has features you think I should incorporate please let me know.
(Note, as you can see I do not distinguish the two aspects of the second principle — when I have done that it has confused the students and made the game work less well — this way, in fact, they frequently distinguish the issues themselves in the class-wide discussion we have after the small groups have worked it through).

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“Another Damned Medievalist”:http://www.blogenspiel.blogspot.com worries in “comments”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001522.html about the perils of blogging for the untenured academic.

bq. I’d like to ask those of you who already have tenure and may be on hiring committees — what happens if you know a candidate from the blogosphere? Should people on the market blog (Ms Mentor says to be careful)? If the blog is not academic, is it relevant to the search (although I can’t imaging that it wouldn’t have some influence on whether a candidate is a ‘good fit’? Inquiring minds want to know!

As an untenured faculty member meself, I have little wisdom to offer.