September 2004
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Grad School in Political Science or Philosophy for the Study of Political Philosophy?
A student writes: “Having used PGR while going through the graduate admissions process last year, I thought I’d offer a suggestion. After studying philosophy and political science while an undergrad at [a liberal arts college], my main interest going into grad school graduate school was political philosophy/theory. The dilemma faced by someone like myself is…
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Bush Making Americans Less Safe
The saga continues: “Michael Scheuer, the longtime CIA counterterrorism official who headed the agency’s Usama Bin Laden Unit from 1996 to 1999, sent a letter to the congressional intelligence oversight committees that discussed, among other things, how the unit has grown weaker in the three years since 9/11. Here is the relevant section of Scheuer’s…
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Telephone polls are not reliable: an anthropologist’s perspective
Details here: “We Americans simply don’t answer our phones like we used to. Entire industries are now devoted to helping us not answer the phone. Voicemail, Caller ID, caller-specific-rings, cell-phones, even email have fundamentally transformed the ways we (don’t) answer the phone when it rings. These and other technological innovations have moved us from a…
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PGR Surveys in Process
Last Thursday, 453 e-mail invitations went out to philosophers around the world to participate in the faculty quality surveys for the 2004-06 Philosophical Gourmet Report. Some faulty e-mail addresses for about 4% of the recipients required resending invitations later on Thursday and on Friday, but it now apperas that all but 2 of the nominated…
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2000 Nader Supporters Call for Supporting Kerry/Edwards in 2004 in Swing States
Details here. Signatories include Noam Chomsky and Jim Hightower, among others.
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Getting Really Sick in America
Whatever the problems with health care systems in civilized countries like Canada, this stuff doesn’t happen. In Canada, health care is rationed, when it is, by need; in the United States, it is rationed by wealth. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy are very pleased with this approach.
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Presidential Race Still a Dead Heat, Republican Pollsters Notwithstanding
The media continue to accord attention to the Gallup polls, despite their evident bias and unreliability (Gallup, run by Republicans, intentionally and by its own admission includes a larger sample of Republicans in its pool) (link via For the Record, whose own comments on the subject are worth reading too). This has created the impression…
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The horrors on the horizon
Some cheery thoughts for your Monday morning: Let us suppose, as certainly is quite possible (perhaps probable), that the Bush people are re-elected, legally or otherwise (legally, not legitimately!). Here is one scenario that may be in store, and that is certainly being discussed outside the mainstream media in the U.S., though not in sources…
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Redactions on Government Documents “for reasons of national security”
Maybe. Or maybe not: “Anybody who has read many official documents—including those making headlines in the last year or more—has seen plenty of redactions (those portions that are blacked out or otherwise made unreadable). This, we’re told, is for legitimate reasons, such as ‘national security’ or ‘protecting intelligence sources and methods.’ But now we have…
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Sieg Heil, American-style
Details here: “Sue Niederer, 55, of Hopewell, N.J., got handcuffed, arrested and charged with a crime for daring to challenge the Bush policy in Iraq, where her son, Army First Lt. Seth Dvorin, 24, died in February while attempting to disarm a bomb. “She came to a Laura Bush rally last week at a firehouse…
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Haakonssen from BU to Sussex
Knud Haakonssen (history of modern philosophy; moral, political, and legal philosophy) at Boston University, who is perhaps best known for his seminal work on the Scottish Enlightenment and the history of natural law philosophy, will take up the Chair in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex in January.
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More Police State Tactics at the Republican Convention…
…but less lite than before. This item is quite shocking, once again, calling to mind another place and time: “My 21-year old daughter disappeared from NYC last Tuesday afternoon [September 7] when walking with friends through a park where no protest was being held — and was held prisoner — without being charged — by…
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Non-Sequitur Alert
This time, alas, the culprit is Stephen Bainbridge (Law, UCLA), who purports to take issue with my extended discussion of nascent fascism in the United States. Readers may recall that I discussed (depending on how one individuates them) two to three dozen different kinds of evidence–cultural, intellectual, rhetorical, political, economic, legal, etc.–pointing towards fascist tendencies…
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Dick Cheney: Business Partner of the “Axis of Evil”
This would make for a good set of political ads, even better than the Smear Boat Veterans, and with the added virtue that they’re factual: “The record shows that over the last decade, Cheney was willing first to do business with countries on the U.S. government’s terror list, then to travel abroad and condemn U.S.…
Then my question is how many of ordinary mathematicians also qualify as artists of their profession…