Amitai Etzioni has a post up about workplace relationships, which addresses a number of genuine issues, and it certainly says far more about me than anything else that I can’t stop giggling about them.

The communitarian position on workplace relationships is not, as I’d expected, the unequivocal condemnation that one might have expected (simply on the basis that a random sampling of communitarian position papers suggested to me that they might be against anything fun). It’s quite nuanced and well worth a read. It’s all very easy to get all moralistic and say that this, that or the other kind of relationship is “off limits”, but to be frank, with working culture going the way it’s going, where the hell else are we going to meet people our own age?

Update: To make it clearer, the post is specifically about the University of California’s code of employment which basically is meant to stop professors from interfering with the cargo. I have to say it seems like an extraordinary imposition to me:

“However, as one professor argues, the rules are necessary because of the power gap that exists between professors and students, which precludes such relationships from ever being truly consensual. ”

Is it just me, or is this unbelievable balderdash? Are we really trying to claim that a relationship between a dashing young prof and a graduate student can never be “truly consensual”? Only according to a standard by which there have been approximately five “truly consensual” relationships in the history of sex. You don’t have to be Michel Foucault to see through this one.

From the front page of yesterday’s Boston Metro:

Rice to get bigger hand in Iraq

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Daniel Drezner is getting angrier about the Plame case. This is the Bush quote that got him worked up:

I mean this town is a — is a town full of people who like to leak information. And I don’t know if we’re going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there’s a lot of senior officials. I don’t have any idea. I’d like to. I want to know the truth. That’s why I’ve instructed this staff of mine to cooperate fully with the investigators — full disclosure, everything we know the investigators will find out. I have no idea whether we’ll find out who the leaker is — partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers. But we’ll find out.

Jack O’Toole writes:

Okay, let’s try to sort all this out with a thought experiment. In our scenario, it’s September of 2001, and this is what we’re hearing from our president:

“I don’t know if we’re going to find out who killed all those Americans in New York and Washington,” Bush said. “I don’t have any idea. I’d like to. I want to know the truth.”

But, Bush said, “International terrorism is a large thing, and there’s a lot of terrorists.”

Pretty ridiculous, huh? You can’t even imagine it. The Man from Crawford just doesn’t talk like that when evil is loose in the land, when serious crimes involving our national security have been committed. So isn’t it reasonable, important even, to ask why he’s suddenly talking that way now?

Incidentally, for those poor confused souls who aren’t sure that Plame really was undercover, there’s a Washington Post profile that might help clear that up:

Her activities during her years overseas remain classified, but she became the creme de la creme of spies: a “noc,” an officer with “nonofficial cover.” Nocs have cover jobs that have nothing to do with the U.S. government. They work in business, in social clubs, as scientists or secretaries (they are prohibited from posing as journalists), and if detected or arrested by a foreign government, they do not have diplomatic protection and rights. They are on their own. Even their fellow operatives don’t know who they are, and only the strongest and smartest are picked for these assignments.

But isn’t the real story… um…

Polls have shown public opinion toward President Bush souring over his handling of the economy and Iraq. But an item tucked away in last week’s CBS News/New York Times poll adds insult to injury. Despite three tax cuts in as many years, only 19 percent said Bush’s policies made their taxes go down. Forty-seven percent noticed no effect, while 29 percent perceived that their taxes have gone up. (my emphasis)

Wow. I would have thought that the “taxes went down” number would be at least 40%, which seems to be a floor for conservative/ Republican opinions. (The precise wording of the question is “Do you think the policies of the Bush Administration have made your taxes go up, go down, or have the policies of the Bush Administration not affected your taxes?”) Here’s a story about the poll, and here are the details.

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For heartless capitalists only: the Financial Times advises us that “stuffed kittens”:http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?id=031004000901&query=kittens&vsc_appId=totalSearch&state=Form may be a sound investment. As long as they’re high quality stuffed kittens, of course.

From the “Guardian’s profile”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,9061,1057511,00.html today of Tory Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin:

bq. On his extensive office bookshelves there are enough volumes of Socrates … to suggest he is someone who thinks about politics using rare quantities of abstract nouns.

Shome mishtake surely? (Thanks to John Kozak in comments to an item below for the heads-up.)

Suppose there are two possible states of the world, S1 and S2, and we don’t know which of the two states the world is in. An event E occurs which is consistent with the world being in either S1 or S2, but is more likely in S1 than it is in S2. We should surely say that, given E, the world is more likely to be in S1 than in S2, and that _to that extent_ E (though consistent with both possible states) is evidence for the world’s being in S1.

Such evidence isn’t, of course, conclusive. After all, by hypothesis, E is _consistent_ with both possible states. But evidence doesn’t need to be conclusive evidence to count as evidence.

That sensible view of what evidence is “doesn’t appear to be shared by new enviroblogger Professor Philip Stott”:http://greenspin.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_greenspin_archive.html#106545283636725804 , whom I welcome to the blogosphere in the traditional way – by arguing with him.

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If you want to keep buying music without supporting the RIAA (now most famous for suing 12 year olds) it’s worth checking out RIAA Radar, which provides some lists of which albums are not released by members of the RIAA. For a good sample of what’s available, here’s their list of the top 100 non-RIAA albums on Amazon. There’s some good stuff on there, including recent albums by Múm, the New Pornographers (my favourite album of the year to date), Warren Zevon, Super Furry Animals, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Shins, the Waifs and many more.

Thanks to Virulent Memes for the link.

A soccer world cup championship is down to the finals, but you’d be hard-pressed to know it. I’m not surprised that here in Chicagoland it has not been at the forefront of sports headlines. With all the focus on the Cubs there would not be much coverage even if the US had made it to the finals. Alas, it didn’t. It’s down to Sweden and Germany.

It’s been interesting to watch the rise in the popularity of women’s soccer in the US. There are two things standing in its way: one is that it’s a women’s sport, which tends to be less popular overall (although we are seeing some change in that, but not too much) and it’s soccer, which is not exactly the most popular sport in the United States if you judge by media coverage. But it’s not that simple. Soccer is actually quite popular when it comes to participation and going out to see a game [pdf]. It is also a very popular high school sport in the US and many of those participants are girls. So no, it’s not because soccer is somehow inherently un-American that it has not gained popular appeal. I’m sure the fact that it is hard to break the game up into sections to accomodate commercials has to do with it. But I don’t want to get into too much popsociology here. There is a book on this, Offside, which the reviews on Amazon suggest is a good read on the topic. (The reviews will also give you an idea of the argument of the book. I don’t feel comfortable commenting on that since I haven’t read it myself.)

I was at the 1999 World Cup opening game and it was very exciting. This year, most of the games have been broadcast on ESPN2 or even less mainstream channels in the US limiting the size of audiences. I only happened upon the Canada-Sweden game today by accident. Are the games getting better coverage in other countries? The final will be broadcast on ABC so that should reach more people. How many will be watching is another question. I’m planning on throwing a Women’s World Cup Final brunch party to add to the fun.

Over at Slate, Steven Landsburg has a piece on the finding that the parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than the parents of sons:

bq. In the United States, the parents of a girl are nearly 5 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of a boy. The more daughters, the bigger the effect: The parents of three girls are almost 10 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of three boys.

The article goes through a number of mechanisms that might explain the difference, though none are entirely convincing. The language of the article is egalitarian, talking mainly about the preferences of parents. But two of the three hypotheses put forward suggest that the preferences of the father drive the outcome rather than those of the mother. More importantly, the emphasis on parental preferences is ultimately a bit restricting.

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The winners of the 2003 Ig Nobel Prizes were announced a few days ago. They are brought to you by the fine folks at the Annals of Improbable Research and they honor people whose achievements “cannot or should not be reproduced.” This year’s winners include: the inventors (discoverers?) of Murphy’s Law; the authors of a paper entitled “An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces”; the authors of a paper entitled
“Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans”; and the biologist who documented “the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck” (complete with link to photos!). You can watch the webcast of the awards ceremony here.

Since so much of the blogospherical comment on media coverage of the Iraq war has focused on the BBC (sometimes justifiably, sometimes not), I was interested to read “this Asia Times report”:http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EJ04Ak01.html (via “Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/ ) which tells us that there is a strong correlation between getting your news from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox and having false beliefs about the war. That doesn’t show, of course, that people got their false beliefs from watching Fox, another possibility is that having a lots of false beliefs just predisposes people to tune into that channel. Here’s the end of the article:

bq. The study also debunked the notion that misperceptions were due mainly to the lack of exposure to news.

bq. Among Bush supporters, those who said they follow the news “very closely”, were found more likely to hold misperceptions. Those Bush supporters, on the other hand, who say they follow the news “somewhat closely” or “not closely at all” held fewer misperceptions.

bq. Conversely, those Democratic supporters who said they did not follow the news very closely were found to be twice as likely to hold misperceptions as those who said they did, according to PIPA.

I tuned into the BBC’s Panorama last night, which consisted of an investigation into Camp Delta at Guantanamo and also the conditions under which detainees are held in Afghanistan itself. Whilst Panorama can be a sensationalist programme with a definite agenda, the specific allegations made can’t easily be wished away or dismissed as biased or malicious. Many of these are familiar to people, but I was sufficiently engaged by the broadcast to want to rehearse them here. I’m going from my memory of the programme, so I may have missed some details. The points raised included:

bq. That numbers of people have been detained in Guantanamo after being denounced by their enemies and business rivals as a means of settling petty scores. (When the baselessness of the charges against them became clear, they were simply dumped back in Afghanistan to pick up their lives as best they could.)

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For the first time since 1973, Israel has attacked targets in Syria. The attacks were in response to the most recent suicide bomb attack in Haifa. According to CNN, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. described the attack as a “measured defensive operation” aimed at destroying a training camp run by Islamic Jihad. Syria denies the camp was a terrorist base. It was certainly inside Syria, though — about 14 miles from Damascus. I don’t have much to say about this, other than to ask whether better-informed people than me think this is going to escalate Israeli-Palestinian conflict outside of Israel and the Occupied Territories.