December 2004
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Communicating with “the Right”
For the Record has an illuminating posting on the subject; be sure to get to the bit about the victims of domestic violence.
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Advice for Academic Job Seekers
Those seeking teaching jobs in law or philosophy may want to review the items in this category, which many job seekers reported finding helpful last year. Best of luck to all job seekers during this stressful process!
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Some of the treats we can expect from the Texas legislature
Perhaps the best thing about the Texas legislature is that it formally meets only once every two years: this limits, somewhat, the amount of mindless damage it can do. But the Texas Taliban is gearing up for big victories in the session that begins in January: The first bill assigned a priority number in the…
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Don’t expect any Bush photo-ops in recognition of this achievement:
Details here: US troops injured in Iraq have required limb amputations at twice the rate of past wars, and as many as 20 percent have suffered head and neck injuries that may require a lifetime of care, according to new data giving the clearest picture yet of the severity of battlefield wounds. The data are…
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“Atheist”: the Perfect Insult
Pharyngula has details.
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Northwestern Law Makes Bid for San Diego’s Prakash
Northwestern University School of Law has made an offer to Sai Prakash (securities regulation, public law) at the University of San Diego School of Law. San Diego (which has beaten Northwestern before, when both were competing for leading law of religious liberty scholar Steven Smith when he was leaving Notre Dame) is apparently making a…
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H.L.A. Hart’s View of Dworkin
One of the really striking revelations in Nicola Lacey’s new biography of the great legal and political philosopher H.L.A. Hart is that Hart–like so many others it turns out–felt that Dworkin had badly and in some ways irresponsibly misrepresented Hart’s work. A few illustrative examples from Professor Lacey’s account ("Herbert" is Hart): Herbert’s sensitivity to…
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Juan Cole Wipes the Floor with Two Right-Wing Liars: David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes
Here. It couldn’t happen to nicer folks.
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Waco H.S. Students Fight Back Against the Texas Taliban
Kudos to these brave young people who live in a town that is midway between Austin and Dallas (geographically, that is), and is home to Baylor University, the well-known Baptist university: The way they saw it, it was as if someone approached you to sell you a vacuum cleaner, and when you declined, the solicitor…
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Generation gap
I guess I’m getting old, since I have no idea what this is about.
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Torture Charges Filed Against Bush Under Canadian Criminal Code
Details here; scroll down for more information. Now if we could just get an indictment for the "supreme crime" of "preventive" war…. (Thanks to Matthew Scott for the pointer.)
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Theocracy Watch
Reader Stephen Latham flags this one, which is really breathtaking in its stupid venality: Look for national parks’ geology to be written more in the image of creationists over the next four years in the continuing effort to create "faith-based parks." An ongoing dispute at Grand Canyon National Park bookstores is that Grand Canyon, a…
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“Rhinoceros” in America
Quite some time ago, I remarked regarding the run-up to the Iraq war that, In an American version of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros–the brilliant, "theater of the absurd" rendering of the mass insanity that beset Germany in the 1930s–the American population was progressively whipped in to war frenzy through a series of lies, more or less brazen,…
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The Right’s Attitude Towards “Dialogue”
It’s well-summed up by this cartoon.
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More on the Value of Liberal Arts Majors
Reader Dulani Jeetander writes: I thought the earlier NY Times article missed the point regarding training in the liberal arts. This article shows the other side of all those well trained (and paid) engineers and computer scientists who despite their facility with equations have a hard time communicating. An excerpt: [A] study, by the National…
I suspect we differ on big picture questions about how correlated various different mental abilities are. I think a reasonable…