Mark Kleiman noticed that opponents of gay marriage are also opposed to civil unions. He writes, “So the overwhelming majority of people who don’t want to let gays get married also don’t want to recognize their committed relationships in any other way.”
It’s hard for someone like me to keep a realistic perspective about the portion of Americans who don’t approve of gays.
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I’m not going to Talk Like O’Reilly today. To attone for my sins, I am going to talk about his book, “The O’Reilly Factor- The Good, The Bad, and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life.”
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I’m embarrassed pleased to report that I’m the first victim subject of a “Normblog profile”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_09_21_normangeras_archive.html#106457158565367983 .
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There are several interesting discussions going on at the Invisible Adjunct’s, Chun the Unavoidable’s and Brad DeLong’s about scholarly publishing. The basic theme is that universities are currently making incompatible demands. Their tenure committees demand books for promotion. Their finance offices demand that the presses be profitable. And the kind of books that get published for tenure aren’t profitable.
I’m mostly posting this to link to the interesting discussions, but I thought I’d also add some points about how philosophy differs from the humanities in these respects, and how things look a little more hopeful from our shores.
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Josh Marshall reports that the WSJ got snippy with him for being so pessimistic about Bush’s polling numbers. Really, the Journal says, there’s nothing to worry about at all in the polling. As they read the trends, it is still ‘likely’ that Bush’s support level will stay above 25% between now and next November. In a spirit of bipartisan agreement, I would like to add that I too think it is likely that Bush will win more than 25% of the votes cast next Presidential election. If 25% is the over/under line, I’m betting the over. Unless the odds on under are good enough.
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Edward Said “is dead”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/obituaries/25WIRE-SAID.html .
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I can’t tell whether this is poor style, or poor grammar, or both. It’s the one sentence summary of an inside story from the front page of today’s NY Times. (It doesn’t seem to be duplicated in the online edition.)
It’s the Detroit Tigers, not Art Howe’s Mets, who are threatening to eclipse Casey Stengal’s original Mets of 1962 for most losses in a season, but the current Mets may not be better, but certainly richer, than their notorious and hapless ancestors.
The two ‘but’s close together are pretty bad, which is why I thought poor style. But I can’t imagine any sentence could start “the current Mets may not be better, but certainly richer…” which is why I thought poor grammar. It’s probably a fun game to try and formulate the precise rule they are breaking here, but I’m not going to be the one to do that.
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Stephen Pollard is often worth reading on education, though almost always wrong. Take his “latest post”:http://www.stephenpollard.net/001180.html (and article from Fabian Review) in which he attacks the British left’s skepticism about specialist schools. I’m on record as being skeptical about the particular version of specialization Pollard attacks, and also as favoring abolition of private and selective schools in the UK (not in the US), another position he attacks. I am also, unlike most people with my politics, a strong supporter of parental choice. But Pollard is not, it seems. He says that we should fund ‘whatever parents, not bureaucrats or politicians, want’. But he also wants schools (run, let me tell you, by government-funded bureaucrats) to be able to select students. So whose choice is decisive in where a kid goes to school? Not the parent’s choice, but the bureaucrat’s.
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Shameless plug: a group I work with at the University of Virginia law school is hosting a “panel”:http://www.law.virginia.edu/lawweb/lawweb2.nsf/pages/lev2calc?OpenDocument&Fr1=zzzlawnotes2.law.virginia.edu/lawweb/event1.nsf/WABW&Fr2=/home2002/frames/lf_News.htm on “Women in the Judiciary” later today. Two federal appellate judges and a justice from the “Virginia Supreme Court”:http://www.courts.state.va.us/scv/home.html will take questions for about an hour and half. Dahlia Lithwick (to whom this slightly “scary”:http://www.blueblanket.net/Dahlia/dahlia.html fan blog is devoted) kindly agreed to moderate.
Preparing for the panel, I came across some interesting–though not terribly surprising–demographic information on women in the U.S. federal judiciary. The Federal Judiciary Center has a nice “database”:http://www.fjc.gov/newweb/jnetweb.nsf/fjc_history?OpenFrameSet (look for the Federal Judges Biographical Database) that lets you search for information about federal judges using about a dozen different variables, including who nominated them and when. I ran a search on “Nominating President” and “Gender” and got these results:
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It’s a bright day for the rainbow of opponents who lobbied all summer against the excesses of the European software patenting directive. News.com reports that the European Parliament voted yesterday to pass the extremely unpopular software patent directive. The European Parliament could have thrown out the directive, but instead lumbered it with some amendments that may make it too difficult to implement in the member states. Though the result is messy, the EP’s vote has allowed common sense (and the conclusions of independent research) to prevail. It strikes a blow against oligopoly and tries to keep the way open for truly competitive innovation. (see some economists dismiss as daft the idea that software patenting creates economic growth.)
This directive should have been a relatively straightforward housekeeping exercise in making sure patents are enforced in all EU countries. But it opened another front in the war to extend intellectual property rights protection to every half-decent or half-baked idea any Dilbert can come up with.
Aside from the immediate analysis of the directive and its aftermath, there is some more food for thought; firstly, the benefit, if any, for the US in pressing for these extensions, and secondly, the contempt with which the Commission has treated the European Parliament.
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I was thinking over some of the responses to my discussion of “sufficientarianism” below, and noticing how common is a certain type of right-wing response to facts about the plight of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our societies. To whit:
bq. It isn’t true.
or
bq. It may be true, but it doesn’t matter.
or
bq. It’s true, and it matters, but doing something about it would (a) have the perverse effect of making that thing worse, or (b) make something else worse. etc etc.
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Thomas Friedman’s piece today on the link between Cancun and the war on terror is a little flip, a little glib, but basically on the money.
Reminds me of Will’s monologue in Good Will Hunting on why not to join the NSA …
(though of course Friedman’s less sharp, less funny and also, sadly, not Matt Damon).
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My favorite spoof of movie cliches is right here, but the good people at Fametracker are having some fun with them in this discussion thread.
Highlights from the comments:
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Will Baude at Crescat Sententia has been running a series of online interviews with various bloggers. And the subject of the latest interview is me. Here’s the interview. If you want more blogger Q&As, previous blogger interviews (including Lawrence Solum, Matthew Yglesias and several permanent or temporary Conspirators) are prominently featured in the Crescat Sententia sidebar. I’d like to say that everything I say there about Crooked Timber is official CT party policy, but that would be, at the very least, a lie.
True to form, she’s jumped in already, but I wanted to welcome Eszter Hargittai as the latest member of the CT catnet. Eszter is a sociologist, is newly ensconced at Northwestern, was an office-mate of mine for a while in graduate school, has far too many publications for someone who just started their job last week, and has an Erdõs number of three.
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