Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Scheffler from Berkeley to NYU

Samuel Scheffler (moral and political philosophy) at the University of California at Berkeley has accepted the senior offer from New York University, where he will join the faculty in fall 2008.  This is the second major senior loss for Berkeley in the last year:  Alan Code (ancient philosohpy) accepted an offer at Rutgers University, New Brunswick last year.

Which Journals Publish "Discussion Notes"?

David Velleman (NYU) forwards to me a query he received from an author who had submitted a "discussion"-style piece to Philosophers' Imprint, which (alas) does not publish discussion pieces.  The author wrote to Professor Velleman:

[I]t is actually quite difficult to find an appropriate place to send it to, as most journals these days are quite reluctant to publish discussion notes. Even Analysis, where the target article originally appeared, was not interested. The author of the target article, to whom I sent my paper for comment, seemed to agree with me that there were potentially issues with his arguments, which would need to be addressed. But how to make this public? Given the general inflation in publications in philosophy, it seems that space for "mere" discussion is disappearing. Can you recommend a journal to a junior philosopher looking for a publishing venue?

I'm sure others have the same question.  Answers, anyone?  As usual, non-anonymous posts strongly preferred.  Post only once; comments may take awhile to appear.

The Churchlands

The New Yorker profile of philosophers Patricia and Paul Churchland is now available on-line here.  (Thanks to Adam Bendorf for the pointer.)

For Legal Philosophers: Review of Two Books: One by, One on Dworkin (Leiter)

The penultimate draft of the review (which will appear in the TLS) is here.  The books discussed are Dworkin's recent collection Justice in Robes (Harvard University Press, 2006) and Scott Hershovitz (ed.), Exploring Law's Empire (Oxford University Press, 2006).  I was operating, needless to say, under a word limit!

Bush Administration's Torture of U.S. Citiziens and Others Finally on Trial (Leiter)

Useful story here from The Guardian; an excerpt:

Something remarkable is going on in a Miami courtroom. The cruel methods US interrogators have used since September 11 to "break" prisoners are finally being put on trial. This was not supposed to happen. The Bush administration's plan was to put José Padilla on trial for allegedly being part of a network linked to international terrorists. But Padilla's lawyers are arguing that he is not fit to stand trial because he has been driven insane by the government.

Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare airport, Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member, was classified as an "enemy combatant" and taken to a navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was kept in a cell 9ft by 7ft, with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds.....

According to his lawyers and two mental health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defence. He is convinced that his lawyers are "part of a continuing interrogation program" and sees his captors as protectors. In order to prove that "the extended torture visited upon Mr Padilla has left him damaged", his lawyers want to tell the court what happened during those years in the navy brig. The prosecution strenuously objects, maintaining that "Padilla is competent" and that his treatment is irrelevant.

The US district judge Marcia Cooke disagrees. "It's not like Mr Padilla was living in a box. He was at a place. Things happened to him at that place." The judge has ordered several prison employees to testify on Padilla's mental state at the hearings, which began yesterday. They will be asked how a man who is alleged to have engaged in elaborate anti-government plots now acts, in the words of brig staff, "like a piece of furniture".

It's difficult to overstate the significance of these hearings. The techniques used to break Padilla have been standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay since the first prisoners arrived five years ago. They wore blackout goggles and sound-blocking headphones and were placed in extended isolation, interrupted by strobe lights and heavy metal music. These same practices have been documented in dozens of cases of "extraordinary rendition" carried out by the CIA, as well as in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many have suffered the same symptoms as Padilla. According to James Yee, a former army Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo, there is an entire section of the prison called Delta Block for detainees who have been reduced to a delusional state. "They would respond to me in a childlike voice, talking complete nonsense. Many of them would loudly sing childish songs, repeating the song over and over." All the inmates of Delta Block were on 24-hour suicide watch.

Human Rights Watch has exposed a US-run detention facility near Kabul known as the "prison of darkness" - tiny pitch-black cells, strange blaring sounds. "Plenty lost their minds," one former inmate recalled. "I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors."

These standard mind-breaking techniques have never faced scrutiny in an American court because the prisoners in the jails are foreigners and have been stripped of the right of habeas corpus - a denial that, scandalously, was just upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington DC. There is only one reason Padilla's case is different - he is a US citizen.....

Now that Padilla's mental state is the central issue in the case, the government prosecutors are presented with a problem. The CIA and the military have known since the early 1960s that extreme sensory deprivation and sensory overload cause personality disintegration - that's the whole point.  "The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself. At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure." That comes from Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, a declassified 1963 CIA manual for interrogating "resistant sources".

The manual was based on the findings of the agency's notorious MK-ULTRA programme, which in the 1950s funnelled about $25m to scientists to carry out research into "unusual techniques of interrogation". One of the psychiatrists who received CIA funding was the infamous Ewen Cameron, of Montreal's McGill University. Cameron subjected hundreds of psychiatric patients to large doses of electroshock and total sensory isolation, and drugged them with LSD and PCP. In 1960 Cameron gave a lecture at the Brooks air force base in Texas, in which he stated that sensory deprivation "produces the primary symptoms of schizophrenia".

There is no need to go so far back to prove that the US military knew full well that it was driving Padilla mad. The army's field manual, reissued just last year, states: "Sensory deprivation may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and antisocial behaviour" - as well as "significant psychological distress".

If these techniques drove Padilla insane, that means the US government has been deliberately driving hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners insane around the world. What is on trial in Florida is not one man's mental state. It is the whole system of US psychological torture.

Cuomo from Cincinnati to Georgia

This is a belated bit of news:  Chris Cuomo (environmental philosophy, feminist philosophy), formerly of the University of Cincinnati, accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Georgia, where she started this past fall.

Paul Campos's Problem with the First Amendment and Academic Freedom (Leiter)

Paul Campos is the University of Colorado law professor who, disgracefully, called for Ward Churchill to be fired because of his views (though he later shifted gears to focus on the latecomer charges about plagiarism [most of which were not substantiated] and shoddy footnoting--there is a useful discussion of that topic here).  Whatever the constitutional status of "academic freedom" these days (and that is increasingly fuzzy), it is clear as day that, as a First Amendment matter, the state of Colorado can not fire Professor Churchill for holding moral and political views that others (even Professor Campos) find offensive or absurd.

Professor Campos, however, is an equal opportunity proponent of violating the First Amendment rights of academics at state institutions.  His newest target is Glenn Reynolds, aka "InstaIgnorance," the University of Tennessee law professor who uses his blog to shill for war, George Bush, and reactionary economic policies.   Professor Campos makes the correct observation that Professor Reynolds's contempt for human life rivals (indeed, probably exceeds) Professor Churchill's, though Professor Reynolds is somewhat better disposed, consistent with his moral parochialism, to American lives.  As Professor Campos correctly notes:

[J]ust as Reynolds spent years repeating Bush administration propaganda about Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, he's now dutifully repeating the administration's claims about supposed Iranian government involvement in Iraq's civil war.

But the crux of Professor Campos's criticism relates to Reynolds's call for "killing radical mullahs and Iranian atomic scientists."  Professor Campos comments:

[E]ven if Iran were at war with the United States [which it is not], the intentional killing of civilian noncombatants is a war crime, as that term is defined by international treaties America has signed. Furthermore, government-sponsored assassinations of the sort Reynolds is advocating are expressly and unambiguously prohibited by the laws of the United States.

How does a law professor, of all people, justify advocating murder? "I think it's perfectly fine to kill people who are working on atomic bombs for countries - like Iran - that have already said that they want to use those bombs against America and its allies, and I think that those who feel otherwise are idiots, and in absolutely no position to strike moral poses," Reynolds says.

Now this kind of statement involves certain time-tested rhetorical techniques. First, make a provocative claim that happens to be false. In fact, no Iranian government official has ever said Iran wants to use nuclear weapons against the U.S. Then use this claim to defend actions, such as murdering civilians, which would remain immoral and illegal even if the claim happened to be true. Finally, condemn those who object to using lies to justify murder as "idiots," who don't understand the need to take strong and ruthless action when defending the fatherland from its enemies.

The use of propaganda to help bring about the murder of people you would like to kill has been especially favored by fascists. Fascism is marked by, among other things, extreme nationalism, contempt for legal restraints on state power, and the worship of violence.

And while it would perhaps be an exaggeration to call people like Reynolds and his fellow law professor Hugh Hewitt (who defended Reynolds' comments) fascists, it isn't an exaggeration to point out that these gentlemen sound very much like fascists when they encourage the American government to murder people.

All this raises several interesting questions. For instance, does academic freedom insulate a law professor from any institutional consequences when he advocates murder? Reynolds and Hewitt, after all, certainly didn't object when University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill's celebration of the murder of American civilians raised serious questions about why the university had chosen to employ and tenure such a person, and led to an investigation of Churchill's academic record.

Indeed, Hewitt and Reynolds both went out of their way to publicize the Churchill affair, as an example of left-wing extremism in our universities.

Why does right-wing extremism in our universities, as represented by such things as law professors calling on the Bush administration to commit murder, get so much less attention?

This would have been a fine place to end, though anyone familiar with Professor Campos's record on the First Amendment rights of state university professors would realize what had to be coming:

Certainly, it's worth asking Reynolds' administrative superiors at the University of Tennessee what limits, if any, the terms and conditions of Reynolds' employment put on his behavior.

But there is no "behavior" at issue here for which it would be appropriate for anyone to make any inquiries with the University of Tennessee:  all there is is "speech," speech that is plainly not illegal (it poses no imminent danger of causing illegal conduct; nor is it illegal to express views about military strategy, even views that are predicated on tissues of confusions and false factual assumptions; nor is it illegal for a law professor to express the view that certain existing laws should be violated or repealed).  The First Amendment fully protects Reynolds's right to hold morally depraved views and to be an ignorant blowhard, just as it protects Professor Campos's right to note the fascist-undercurrent to Reynolds's rhetoric--indeed, just as it protects Campos's right to be a serial advocate for violating the constitutional rights of state university professors!  And part of that protection means that if anyone were to inquire with the University of Tennessee as to what it planned to do about Professor Reynolds's speech, the answer should be, "Absolutely nothing, it is none of our business."

These are not subtle points.  Why doesn't Professor Campos seem to understand them?

Friday Poem: "The Coming Storm"

The Coming Storm

Sky trailing gloom
lathered clouds roiling
like the grume                                                                  
  of spent soup boiled
the croup of thunder
groping upon the raspy                                                   
cusp of dark and
machinating storm
disrobing to extend
its carnal grasp
into the brooded nest
in which we frown
asleep beneath the warm
impenetrable dream
immune to harm
omnipotent for
night's brief term

ca. '95,  rev. 6/20-6/26/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Bennett from Princeton to Cornell

Karen Bennett (metaphysics, philosophy of mind), currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, has accepted a tenured offer from the Department of Philosophy at Cornell University.

Jobs at Oxford: A Guide for the Perplexed (Leiter)

My friend Michael Rosen, who taught philosophy for many years at Oxford before taking up a post in the Government Department at Harvard, sent the following remarks that others might find useful:

I looked at your blog yesterday and noticed you had a story about Oxford hiring new faculty. You reported that Oxford had offered “College Fellowships (in some cases in conjunction with University Lectureships)” to two people. To someone who knows how Oxford works, that read oddly, and not just for the quantification. That outsiders don’t fully understand how Oxford works is, of course, no surprise and I would not mention it except that Oxford is at present re-filling a number of posts (and will, I expect, be advertising more in the future) and, as your story shows, is open to the merits of philosophers who do not already have established Oxford connections. Since a number of your readers might be thinking, however casually, about applying, I thought that it would be useful if you were to host a discussion about working there. I have recent experience and so perhaps you would like me to start things off.

Let me first gloss your story by explaining the different sorts of post that there are at Oxford.

The vast majority of jobs in Oxford are what are called there “joint appointments”: that is, people have obligations to both an individual college and the central university. Such people have two contracts of employment and get two pay-slips (which helps to keep the tax authorities confused!) These joint appointments come in two sorts. One, which has until recently been the model for philosophy, combines a college “Tutorial Fellowship” with a University Lecturership (C.U.F.) and the other combines a Tutorial Fellowship with a University Lecturership. In the jargon, they are referred to as CUFs and ULs. Both have teaching duties to both an individual college and to the University as a whole and both are, effectively, “jobs for life” (there is, officially, no such thing as “tenure” in the U.K. and the university requires appointments to be confirmed by review after five years, but this hurdle, though real, is nothing like that of a tenure review at a U.S. institution). The difference between CUFs and ULs lies in how the duties are divided up. In general, the split has been two thirds: one third, with the College taking the bigger share in the case of CUFs and the University in the case of ULs. The joint appointments system has been very severely criticized over the years and attempts have been made to reform it but, for the present, it remains. I take it that Scott and Frank’s jobs are probably a CUF and a UL.

Beyond these posts, there are other kinds of job. There are a variety of temporary teaching jobs (often called College Lecturerships and Faculty Lecturerships, depending on who is paying) and Junior Research Fellowships (post-doctoral posts, for the most part). At the other end of the scale are the established professorships (those held by Williamson, Hawthorne, Broome, Irwin, Davies). They are employed by the University, although they are also Fellows of colleges, from whom they receive benefits (rights to meals, office space, etc.) but not salary. It is also possible for holders of other posts (the ULs and the CUFs) to apply for the title of “Professor” – something that gives them no further money or benefits except for making clear to those outside Oxford what distinguished people they are. Finally, a few of Oxford’s better-known philosophers (Harvey Brown, Dan Isaacson, Simon Saunders) are University Lecturers without a corresponding Tutorial Fellowship.

Obviously, if you are thinking of applying for a job at Oxford, the first thing to do is to figure out which of these categories it falls into, since the duties and salary vary quite considerably. That should be made clear in the “Further Particulars” that are sent out to prospective applicants but, in my experience, that isn’t always the case, not least because these documents are very often written by people for whom the Oxford system is second nature. In the past, jobs at Oxford have been offered with a pre-determined set of duties and a pre-determined, age-related salary. The latter was so set that it didn’t make a difference to the aggregate salary whether the post was a CUF or a UL. Thus there was little scope for negotiation between prospective faculty member and University. This has changed slightly. For established professorships, the University now negotiates salary on a case-by-case basis. The other posts are still on a scale, but there is, apparently, some possibility of advancement up the scale. Beyond this, different colleges offer different degrees of assistance with housing in the form of extra salary, joint mortgages or some combination of the two. These benefits are, so far as I know, not individually negotiable, but vary quite a bit from college to college. Often the Further Particulars are quite coy about spelling out exactly what is on offer. But, since Oxford is an incredibly expensive place to buy a house, and, since in the best case Oxford salaries are still quite low, it is well worth exploring this explicitly with the college in question (ask what is being offered and how it compares to what is offered at other colleges).

In general, the hiring process is very different from what you may be used to. Unlike the U.S., where job talks are staggered, decisions come slowly and offers are negotiated at length, Oxford has a tradition of interviewing, offering and asking for decisions very quickly. This has led to misunderstandings and bad feelings in the past. It is still assumed that if you applied for the job and put the University to the trouble and expense of interviewing you, it was because you wanted the job rather than to have a lever with which to negotiate with your original university. No doubt, the superiority of American culture will assert itself in time but, for the present, this naïve idea still has a strong hold.

 

Comments are open for additional, pertinent information--either about Oxford, or other U.K. posts to which foreigners might be applying.  As always, post only once--comments may take awhile to appear.

 

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

The wholly privatized family (Wilson)

Unicef has just released a report assessing the well-being of children in the top 21 wealthiest countries (for which there is appropriate data; see below).

The [report] looks at six dimensions of child well-being: material well-being, health and safety, educational well-being, family and peer relationships, behaviors and risks, and young people's own perceptions of their well-being.

Both the U.S. and Britain were in the bottom two-thirds of five of the six categories, and came in dead last overall, by a considerable margin.  The overall results:

(Note: Australia, Iceland, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, the Slovak Republic, South Korea, and Turkey were excluded due to lack of data).The U.S. came in last on health and safety:

While none of the countries studied can claim "mission accomplished" in securing child well-being in every measurement, the United States fared particularly poorly. It ranked last in health and safety, primarily because of high rates of infant mortality, low birth weight, and deaths from accidents and injuries.

No great surprise, given the persistent legacies of Reagan and Thatcher:

One of the study's researchers, Jonathan Bradshaw, said children fared worse in the US and Britain -- despite high overall levels of national wealth -- because of greater economic inequality and poor levels of public support for families.

“What they have in common are very high levels of inequality, very high levels of child poverty, which is also associated with inequality, and in rather different ways poorly developed services to families with children,” said Bradshaw, a professor of social policy at the University of York in Britain.

“They don’t invest as much in children as continental European countries do,” he said, citing the lack of day care services in both countries and poorer health coverage and preventative care for children in the U.S.

More discussion of causal factors here.

"Naturalism in Legal Philosophy": Revised Version Now On-Line at SEP...

...here, for those who might be interested.

BBC Reports Plans for U.S. Attack on Iran (Leiter)

Story here; an excerpt:

US contingency plans for air strikes on Iran extend beyond nuclear sites and include most of the country's military infrastructure, the BBC has learned.             

It is understood that any such attack - if ordered - would target Iranian air bases, naval bases, missile facilities and command-and-control centres....

[D]iplomatic sources have told the BBC that as a fallback plan, senior officials at Central Command in Florida have already selected their target sets inside Iran.             

That list includes Iran's uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Facilities at Isfahan, Arak and Bushehr are also on the target list, the sources say....

 BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the trigger for such an attack reportedly includes any confirmation that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon - which it denies.                               

Alternatively, our correspondent adds, a high-casualty attack on US forces in neighbouring Iraq could also trigger a bombing campaign if it were traced directly back to Tehran.

Long range B2 stealth bombers would drop so-called "bunker-busting" bombs in an effort to penetrate the Natanz site, which is buried some 25m (27 yards) underground....

Earlier this month US officials said they had evidence Iran was providing weapons to Iraqi Shia militias. At the time, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the accusations were "excuses to prolong the stay" of US forces in Iraq.

Middle East analysts have recently voiced their fears of catastrophic consequences for any such US attack on Iran.                   

Britain's previous ambassador to Tehran, Sir Richard Dalton, told the BBC it would backfire badly by probably encouraging the Iranian government to develop a nuclear weapon in the long term.

Last year Iran resumed uranium enrichment - a process that can make fuel for power stations or, if greatly enriched, material for a nuclear bomb.

Tehran insists its programme is for civil use only, but Western countries suspect Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons.                   

The UN Security Council has called on Iran to suspend its enrichment of uranium by 21 February.                   

If it does not, and if the International Atomic Energy Agency confirms this, the resolution says that further economic sanctions will be considered.

These kinds of reports are coming with sufficient frequency in the mainstream media that it appears we may be weeks or merely days away from further criminal acts of aggression by the United States, with potentially catastrophic consequences.  And we are absolutely powerless to do anything about it.  I suppose it is this scary juxtaposition--the machinations of the forces of evil conjoined with our sheer impotence--that leads so many, almost understandably, to prayer.

Warren Chisum, Barbarian (Leiter)

Austin is one of my favorite places in the world, but sometimes one wonders what it is doing in Texas, a state where reactionary ignoramus (and bigot) Warren Chisum is an elected representative.  God help us.

Friday Poem: "The Shill of Progress"

The Shill of Progress

      ("breu chausson de razon loigna")

Watch how he sweats behind his mask
Your burgher-man with clammy hands
The suave bourgeois who holds you fast
And whom you give complete devotion

As though a shill were not a shill
You spend your days pursuing him
The tales of progress that he weaves
Dispensed in increments that please

The vision his but yours the hunches
You plead his case with patient craft
Wisdom sprouts from you in bunches
You fill your shelves with artifacts

Adrift in history's discarnation
You find your ease in stale emotion
Lured by his lubricity of passion
You lie with him he lies to you

What can you do but wish it true
By promise gulled by time mislaid
Your book of life once like a dream
Its song grown faint and lost the theme

n.d. (ca '95), 5/27-5/29/98, 8/22/98
Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter.
Posted with permission.

Berkeley Makes Bid for Hitchcock

The Department of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley has made a senior offer to the very talented young philosopher of science Christopher Hitchcock at California Institute of Technology, who is perhaps best-known for his work on causation.  (An interesting side-note, confirming Rice's good eye for philosophical talent:  Hitchcock started his teaching career at Rice University; when he left for Cal Tech, Rice hired Sherrilyn Roush, a philosopher of science whom Berkeley has since hired.) 

Strange Youtubing (J. Stanley)

Colorado philosopher David Barnett keeps it weird.

Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex) on Bush's War-Mongering and the Fake War on Terror (Leiter)

Another strong statement by the one genuine libertarian in the House of Representatives:

Osama bin Laden has expressed sadistic pleasure with our invasion of Iraq and was surprised that we served his interests above and beyond his dreams on how we responded after the 9/11 attacks. His pleasure comes from our policy of folly getting ourselves bogged down in the middle of a religious civil war, 7,000 miles from home that is financially bleeding us to death. Total costs now are reasonably estimated to exceed $2 trillion. His recruitment of Islamic extremists has been greatly enhanced by our occupation of Iraq.

 

Unfortunately, we continue to concentrate on the obvious mismanagement of a war promoted by false information and ignore debating the real issue which is: Why are we determined to follow a foreign policy of empire building and pre-emption which is unbecoming of a constitutional republic?...

 

It’s important to recall that the left, in 2003, offered little opposition to the pre-emptive war in Iraq, and many are now not willing to stop it by de-funding it or work to prevent an attack on Iran.

 

The catch-all phrase, “War on Terrorism”, in all honesty, has no more meaning than if one wants to wage a war against criminal gangsterism. It’s deliberately vague and non definable to justify and permit perpetual war anywhere, and under any circumstances. Don’t forget: the Iraqis and Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with any terrorist attack against us including that on 9/11.

 

Special interests and the demented philosophy of conquest have driven most wars throughout history. Rarely has the cause of liberty, as it was in our own revolution, been the driving force. In recent decades our policies have been driven by neo-conservative empire radicalism, profiteering in the military industrial complex, misplaced do-good internationalism, mercantilistic notions regarding the need to control natural resources, and blind loyalty to various governments in the Middle East.

 

For all the misinformation given the American people to justify our invasion, such as our need for national security, enforcing UN resolutions, removing a dictator, establishing a democracy, protecting our oil, the argument has been reduced to this: If we leave now Iraq will be left in a mess-implying the implausible that if we stay it won’t be a mess.

 

Since it could go badly when we leave, that blame must be placed on those who took us there, not on those of us who now insist that Americans no longer need be killed or maimed and that Americans no longer need to kill any more Iraqis. We’ve had enough of both! 

Resorting to a medical analogy, a wrong diagnosis was made at the beginning of the war and the wrong treatment was prescribed. Refusing to reassess our mistakes and insist on just more and more of a failed remedy is destined to kill the patient-in this case the casualties will be our liberties and prosperity here at home and peace abroad.... 

We shouldn’t wait until our financial system is completely ruined and we are forced to change our ways. We should do it as quickly as possible and stop the carnage and financial bleeding that will bring us to our knees and force us to stop that which we should have never started. 

We all know, in time, the war will be de-funded one way or another and the troops will come home. So why not now?

Paul Craig Roberts on Bush, Again (Leiter)

As the new "Gulf of Tonkin" rush to war continues, it is some small consolation to read someone who doesn't pull punches on the subject of these war criminals:

What would be the consequences of a US or Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear energy sites?

At the 2006 Perdana Global Peace Forum, Australian medical scientist Dr. Helen Caldicott provided an authoritative analysis of the devastating impact on human life that would result from the radiation release from such an attack.

Dr. Caldicott described the catastrophic deaths that would result from a conventional attack on nuclear facilities and the long-term increase in cancer deaths from the radiation release.

Should the attack be made with nuclear weapons--as some of Bush's criminally insane neoconservative advisers advocate--the populations of many countries would suffer for generations from radioactive particles in air, water, and food chains. Deaths would number in the many millions.

Such an attack justified in the name of "American security" and "American hegemony" would constitute the rawest form of evil the world has ever seen, far surpassing in evil the atrocities of the Nazi and Communist regimes.

Dr. Caldicott detailed the horrible long-term consequences for the Iraqi population from the US military's current use of depleted uranium in explosive ammunition used in Iraq. Caldicott explained that "depleted" does not mean depleted of radiation. She explained that each time such ammunition is used, radioactive particles are released in the air and are absorbed into people's lungs. We are yet to see the horrific civilian casualty rate of the American invasion--or the true casualty rate among US troops.

Dr. Caldicott expressed bewilderment why the rest of the world does not stand up to the US and force a halt to its crimes against humanity.

One man heard her--Vladimir Putin, President of Russia.

On February 10 at the 43rd Munich Security Conference, President Putin told the world's assembled political leaders that the US was trying to establish a "uni-polar world," which he defined as "one single center of power, one single center of force and one single master."

This goal, Putin said, was a "formula for disaster."

"The United States," Putin said, truthfully, "has overstepped its borders in all spheres" and "has imposed itself on other states."

The Russian leader declared: "We see no kind of restraint--a hyper-inflated use of force."

To avoid catastrophe, Putin said a reconsideration of the entire existing architecture of global security was necessary.

Putin's words of truth fell on many deaf ears. US Senator John McCain, America's most idiotic and dangerous "leader" after Bush and Cheney, equated Putin's legitimate criticism of the US with "confrontation."

America's new puppets--the states of central and Eastern Europe and the secretary general of NATO, no longer a treaty for the defense of Europe but a military force enlisted in America's quest for empire--lined up with McCain's argument that Russia was in fundamental conflict "with the core values of Euro-Atlantic democracies."

Even the BBC's defense and security correspondent, Rob Watson, jumped on the American propaganda bandwagon, tagging Putin's speech a revival of the cold war.

No delegate at the security conference stood up to state the obvious fact that it is not Russia that is invading countries under pretexts as false as Hitler's and setting up weapons systems on foreign soil in order to achieve military hegemony.

The reception given to Putin's words made it clear to Russia, China, and every country not bribed, threatened or purchased into participation in America's drive for world hegemony that the US has no interest whatsoever in peace. Intelligent people realize that American claims to be a moral and democratic force are mere pretense behind which hides a policy of military aggression.

The US, Putin said, has gone "from one conflict to another without achieving a fully-fledged solution to any of them...."

In his 2006 state of the nation speech, Putin noted that America's military budget is 25 times larger than Russia's. He compared the Bush Regime to a wolf who eats whom he wants without listening....

The Bush Regime has taken the US outside the boundaries of international law and is acting unilaterally, falsely declaring American military aggression to be "defensive" and in the interests of peace. Much of the world realizes the hypocrisy and danger in the Bush Regime's justification of the unbridled use of US military power, but no countries except other nuclear powers can challenge American aggression, and then only at the risk of all life on earth.

Seeking Andrew Cross!

I want to get in touch with Andrew Cross, the Kierkegaard scholar, but no longer have current contact information for him.  Professor Cross, if you're reading, please e-mail me!  And if anyone has contact info for Professor Cross, would you please ask him to get in touch with me?  Many thanks.

"Nietzsche and Morality"...

...will be published February 15 in Europe, and available a bit thereafter in the U.S.  The volume should be of interest not only to Nietzsche scholars, but to moral philosophers who, understandably, probably find much literature on Nietzsche unsatisfying.  All the newly commissioned essays here are by either moral philosophers with an interest in Nietzsche, or by philosophically sensitive and adept Nietzsche scholars.  The essays cover the major interpretive and philosophical issues related to his critique of morality, his positive ethics, his moral psychology, and his metaethics.  The essays are by Simon Blackburn (Cambridge); Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick (Colgate); Thomas Hurka (Toronto); Nadeem Hussain (Stanford); Christopher Janaway (Southampton); Joshua Knobe (North Carolina) and Brian Leiter (Texas); Peter Poellner (Warwick); Bernard Reginster (Brown); Mathias Risse (Harvard); Neil Sinhababu (Texas); and R. Jay Wallace (Berkeley).

The Rich Get Richer: NYU Votes Out More Offers

In addition to the offer voted out to Ted Sider, the Department of Philosophy at New York University has also voted out offers to David Chalmers (philosophy of mind and language) at the Australian National University; Frederick Neuhouser (19th-century German philosophy) at Barnard College and Columbia University; Samuel Scheffler (moral and political philosophy) at the University of California at Berkeley; and Crispin Wright (philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mathematics) at the University of St. Andrews (who is presently a regular part-time visiting professor at NYU).  NYU is alreadly (by a small margin) the top philosophy department in the English-speaking world, but if they were to successfully recruit all five of these philosophers, they would be the top department by a wide margin for the next decade or more (barring fluky events etc.). 

Horsten from Leuven to Bristol

The logician Leon Horsten (who has a groovy homepage!) at the Catholic University of Leuven (in Belgium) has accepted an offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol.  Volker Halbach at Oxford, who called this move to my attention, remarks that with Horsten and other recent appointments, Bristol "has developed in a short period into one of the leading centres of formal philosophy in the UK."

Fool me twice.... (Edmundson)

Once again, the New York Times is shilling for the Bush administration's cooked intelligence.  This time Iran, rather than Iraq, is the target.  Informed Comment, the Huffington Post, and Think Progress apply cynical acid.  [Update: Paul Krugman pours it on.]

Has Hugo Chavez Opened the Door to Authoritarian Rule? (Leiter)

The right-wing media in the U.S.--and not just the far right, but the "normal" right (e.g., The New York Times)--have characterized recent moves by Venezuelan President Chavez to "rule by decree" (for 18 months) as setting the country on the road to authoritarianism.

Chavez has, of course, been a pointed (and accurate) critic of Bush and the U.S., and has created in Venezuela an alternative to the neoliberal paradigm favored by the ruling elites in the capitalist pseudo-democracies.  We have remarked before on the smear jobs in even the "liberal" media, but has Chavez now shown his true colors?  This article takes a more benign view, noting, for example, that:

In Venezuela, the enabling law is completely different [than in other totalitarian instances of such laws]....First, the President is bound by the constitution. He can only issue so-called "law-decrees" in the areas named by the National Assembly, in the time limit the Assembly imposes, and that are consistent with the constitution. In other words, he cannot arbitrarily order someone's arrest or do away with basic civil rights, for example. Some of the laws even need to be submitted to the Supreme Court, which vets the law for its constitutionality.

Second, contrary to popular belief, even though Chavez supporters control all branches of the state, law-decrees can be reversed by the most important power of all:  the citizens. That is, law-decrees can be rescinded by popular vote. According to Venezuela's 1999 constitution all laws can be submitted to a referendum if at least 10% of registered voters request such a referendum. Law decrees have an even lower signature requirement, of only 5% of registered voters (800,000 out of 16 million registered voters).

Third, the National Assembly may also modify or rescind law-decrees, at any time, should it feel the need to do so. This is quite unlike the enabling law in the U.S., known as the "Fast Track" law, where the president may sign international treaties that are automatically binding and not open to revision or rescinding by the population....

Venezuela's enabling laws are thus relatively moderate measures as far as the common understanding of "rule by decree" is concerned. The next and more important question thus becomes whether such a law will lead to law decrees that end up being dangerous for Venezuelan democracy.

Chavez critics who concede the above points imply that even if the power is limited, the lack of separation between executive and legislative will lead to disastrous results. Exactly why this is the case is never explained, other than to say that there are no "checks and balances" between the two. Certainly, with Chavez supporters controlling the legislature, the controls on the presidency are not as strong as they would be if the opposition controlled them, but this is also true for just about any parliamentary system of government and any system in which the executive and the legislature are controlled by the same party. Oddly enough, Chavez critics hardly ever raise such dire warnings about other countries where this is the case.

Actually, of course, these worries were raised in the U.S. when we had one-party control of the executive and legislative branches.  Separation of powers really only acts as a check when the branches are controlled by opposition parties--and even then, as the U.S. again illustrates, the limits on executive power may be of limited significance when the "opposition" party represents just a different wing of the ruling class.

More important than the question about "checks and balances" (which, as we saw, there are in Venezuela, in the form of the citizenry and the National Assembly), is what Chavez will do with the law. The main objectives for passing these laws, according to the enabling law text, is to promote "popular democracy," to make the state more efficient, to eradicate corruption, to increase citizen security, to nationalize strategic industries, among many other things. If this is what the laws will actually do, then what is the fuss about? Presumably Chavez critics believe that Chavez will use the enabling law to pass completely different and tyrannical laws. But is there any evidence that this might happen?

I must say I find this paragraph somewhat incredible:  under the guise of "increas[ing] citizen security," Bush has been trying to establish executive power of Schmittian proportions.  It is rather easy to see how a law that charges the executive to "increase security" or "eradicate corruption" is an invitation to limits subsantive and procedural rights of the citizenry.

On the other hand, the author does finally make a pertinent point about the enabling law in the Venezuelan case:

If we look at the previous instance in which Chavez had the power of an enabling law, in 2001, this is not what happened. The 49 law-decrees that Chavez signed into effect in November 2001 had a democratizing effect, such as the land reform that democratized land distribution, the banking reform that improved access to credit for micro-entrepreneurs, the fishing reform that empowered small fishers to increase their catch because larger fishers have to fish further from the shore, or the hydrocarbons law that increased state revenues from oil production. Based on this previous experience, there is no reason to believe that this time around Chavez will not pass the types of laws that the enabling laws says he will.

What is more, polls by the Chilean NGO Latinobarometro have shown over and over again that despite all of the opposition's dire warnings about Venezuela's supposed slide towards dictatorship, Venezuelans themselves overwhelmingly believe that their government is democratic and is getting more so with every year. Eight years into the "Bolivarian Revolution," and Venezuelans are in second place, after Uruguay, compared to all other countries in Latin America in saying that they are satisfied with their democracy. This percentage has been on the increase throughout Chavez's presidency, rising from 32% in 1998 to 57% in 2006. Meanwhile, the Latin American average was 38% in 2006. This and many other similar poll results flatly contradict the notion that Chavez is steadily heading Venezuela towards dictatorship.

My friend Dick Posner is, unlike me, a big believer in the ability of the blogosphere to correct error and provide insight by bringing together many different sources of knowledge.  This blog is fortunate to have a quite erudite readership, so let us try an experiment in this case.  I would like to invite  informed readers to offer information about the issues discussed above. What will this law mean both "in the books" and in reality?  Is Chavez, an old military man, out to establish a dictatorship?  Or is the law being misportrayed in the U.S. because of the characteristic cowardice of the media?  Post only once!  Comments may take awhile to appear, and only substantive contributions will be approved, of course.

Oxford Offers, Rutgers Losses (Actual and Potential)

Oxford University has offered College Fellowships (in some cases in conjunction with university lectureships) to:  Frank Arntzenius (philosophy of physics) at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (for University College); and Scott Sturgeon (epistemology, philosophy of mind), a Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London (for Wadham College).

Arntzenius has accepted the offer from Oxford.

In addition, New York University has joined Princeton in voting out an offer to Ted Sider (metaphysics, philosophy of language) at Rutgers.  (Princeton, as Jason reported, has also voted out an offer to Dean Zimmerman [metaphysics, philosophy of religion] at Rutgers.)

The Churchlands, and Wallace, the Ur-Darwin (Edmundson)

Patricia and Paul Churchland (Philosophy, UC-San Diego) are profiled in this week's The New Yorker (Feb. 12).  One tidbit:

"Paul, don't speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren't for my endogenous opiates I'd have driven my car into a tree...Pour me a Chardonnay...."  Paul and Pat have noticed that it is not just they who talk this way....

Not a linkable story, unfortunately, but Jonathan Rosen's appreciation of Alfred Russel Wallace--Darwin avant la lettre--is, here.  (As Robert Bork said of a seat on the US Supreme Court, this week's New Yorker is "an intellectual feast!")

Friday Poem: "Ephemera"

Ephemera

The light flicks on
the bulb glows green
the bulb glows red
we buy we sell
and think we understand

We only clutch
upon a thread
some call
enlightenment

It will not last
a winter in the mind

For now we keep
some measure and
struggle to divine
a pinhole into pleasure
the portents of decline

5/10-6/15/96, 5/28/97, 1/26/98, 5/12/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Negotiating a Job with Multiple Offers in Hand (Leiter)

A student on the job market who is in the enviable position of having multiple offers writes with some questions about what kind of negotiation is appropriate for a candidate in his/her situation. 

1. What sort of things can one negotiate about? (salary? sabbatical? teaching relief? benefits?)

2. How much money/time/etc. are we talking about here?

3. Who is my natural ally in this endeavor? Here is what it seems like to me:

   -- Other junior faculty at the institution would be willing to try to help (telling me what worked for them, etc.).

   -- The chair, to some degree. The chair wants to help me, but he (or she) needs to get along with the dean too.

   -- As far as I can tell, it is mainly the Dean that is trying to keep my salary as low as possible.

4. What sort of things would people find insulting? How might you step on people’s toes? It is a foreign enough project for me that I’m worried I’m going to make a faux pas.

5. (related) Are there risks to asking if there is anything they can do to improve the offer? I don’t want to alienate my future chair...

For purposes of discussion let us suppose that A is a top 10-15 PhD-granting department, while X is a PhD-granting program at a research university, but not in the very top ranks.  I set out some of my initial thoughts, below.  I have opened comments below and invite readers to concur, correct, or amplify, as seems appropriate.  I do not have a clear sense of whether non-research universities will negotiate about terms of employment, and so invite readers to comment on that in particular.  My comments shall be premised on the idea that we are talking about research universities, where I know such negotiation is common.

1.  Negotiation--but always approach it delicately!--seems to me appropriate in the following circumstances:  (a) you have offers from comparable departments and the terms (salary [taking some account of cost-of-living], teaching or other duties, research support) differ in significanct ways; or (b) you have an offer from A, and you want to negotiate with X in the spirit of getting X to offer you an inducement to join them.  These are the two best situations in which to raise questions about the terms of employment.  You could, of course, ask A to match X's terms, but, in general, I don't recommend it, and you had better be prepared to go to X at the end of the day if you go that route. 

2.  Topics for negotiation most commonly include salary (but bear in mind cost-of-living!), research leave, research and travel support, and (less often for a junior) teaching load.  (Perhaps most important for junior faculty is stability of your courses:  preparation is time-consuming, and it is very helpful to have a set of courses that you can repeat year after year while on tenure-track.)  If X has offered you 60K and A has made you an offer of 65K, it isn't crazy to see what X is willing to do on salary to get you to go to X over A.  If A and B--both top 10-15 departments let us suppose--have offered you 65K, but B gives you 3K per year for travel, and A guarantees only 1K, it seems quite fair (esp. if you prefer A!) to ask A if they can do better.  (Benefits are rarely, if ever, open to negotiation:  health, disability and life insurance, retirement plans, educational benefits, etc. are almost always set at a university-wide level:  no department or college will have control over them.)

3.  My inclination is to think that it is a bad idea to say, "Can you improve the offer?" in the abstract.  Be concrete.  If you have a spouse and a kid, it seems to me quite fair to say to A, "I am thrilled to have the opportunity to join your wonderful department, but X is offering so much more that I'm not sure I can support the family.  Is there any chance that you can offer a better salary?"  If you have the offer from A, but are thinking about X, it is not unreasonable, in the current market, to expect X to pay a bit of a premium--in salary, or support, or leave--to get you.

4.  Chairs do, indeed, serve under (and sometimes at the pleasure of) their Deans.  But any negotiation must start with the Chair.  Read the signals carefully!

Bear in mind that particular institutions, regardless of "prestige," may operate under all kinds of constraints.   Some may feel that they are so wonderful that they do not need to meet any outside offers.  Some may have a strong internal norm regarding equity of treatment:  why should you get more than the Asst Prof hired last year, who, as a matter of pure chance, didn't have an outside offer?  You may have received an offer on a divided vote, which means the department will not be at all disposed to cutting a special deal.  And so on.

Non-anonymous comments stand a much better chance of being approved; please post only once, as comments may take awhile to appear.

"Is a university without physics and philosophy a university?" (Leiter)

Obviously not, but Indiana State University proposes to eliminate its Philosophy Department (with four faculty), as well as its Physics Department, while upgrading Insurace and Risk Management; Physical Education; Exercise Science (not to be confused with Phys Ed!); Packaging Technology; and Textiles, Apparel & Merchandise.  As philosopher Steven Hales from Bloomsburg University (who called this story to my attention) pointed out to me:  "All of these are bachelor degrees, not certificates or minors."  So Indiana State will award a B.A. in "Physical Education," but never again in Physics or Philosophy.

Put aside whether anyone, anywhere in the world, ought to receive a college degree for studying "Physical Education," it is very clear that Indiana State must drop the "university" from its name, and choose a more apt name, like "Indiana State Vocational-Technical School."  There is, no doubt, need for such vocational and technical training, but it should not be done under the guise of pretending to be a university or institution of higher learning.  To be the latter, the school simply must offer a systematic course of study, leading to a degree, in central disciplines like Physics and Philosophy.

You may e-mail your comments or a link to this item to Dr. Karen Schmid, the V-P for Academic Affairs at Indiana State. 

Let us also hope the AAUP is monitoring this situation to ensure that faculty in the affected academic programs are being treated fairly.

UPDATE:  Please see in particular the comments below from Professor Gennaro, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Indiana State.

The Coming War with Iran: Count the Democrats In! (Leiter)

A propos our discussion the other day, this item is pertinent and probably sound in its prognosis:

Despite [Senator Barack] Obama's reassurance that he did not support the war from the beginning, along with [former Senator John] Edwards' claims that he's had a change of heart on his past pro-war votes -- neither candidate distinguished their position from the Bush administration when it came to the looming Iran confrontation.

In fact two weeks earlier, while visiting Israel, Edwards laid out his position on Iran quite succinctly:

Let me be clear: Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons ... The vast majority of people are concerned about what is going on in Iraq. This will make the American people reticent toward going for Iran. But I think the American people are smart if they are told the truth, and if they trust their president. So Americans can be educated to come along with what needs to be done with Iran.

Hillary Clinton pushed virtually the same bitter line while addressing the annual AIPAC convention held in New York City last week. "U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal: We cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons,'' Clinton told the crowd of Israel supporters. "In dealing with this threat ... no option can be taken off the table.''

Barack Obama has also been upfront about how he would deal with Iran, arguing that he would not rule out the use of force and supports surgical strikes of alleged nuclear sites in the country if diplomacy (read: coercion) fails. To put it bluntly, none of the front running Democrats are opposed to Bush's dubious "war on terror" or his bullying of Iran. They support his aggression in principle but simply believe a Democratic presidency could handle the job more astutely. All put Israel first and none are going to fundamentally alter U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

And so it goes in the one-party state.  It wouldn't matter, of course, if it did not put all of humanity at risk.

Body Integrity Identity Disorder (Edmundson)

Some of us think that all value is in some sense subjective.  Many others of us think that personal autonomy is an objective value (if any are) and that what we choose to do with ourselves is, morally speaking, up to us.  Many of us also think that in some sense our bodies are ours to do with as we wish, so long as what we do with them doesn't harm or directly offend others.  What then to make of people like Susan Smith, the pseudonymous author of "I won't be happy until I lose my legs" (The Guardian, 1/27)?

I was six when I first became aware of my desire to lose my legs. I don't remember what started it - there was no specific trigger. Most people want to change something about themselves, and the image I have of myself has always been one without legs.

To the general public, people like me are sick and strange, and that's where it ends. I think it is a question of fearing the unknown. I have something called body identity integrity disorder (BIID), where sufferers want to remove one or more healthy limbs.  Few people who haven't experienced it themselves can understand what I am going through. It is not a sexual thing, it is certainly not a fetish, and it is nothing to do with appearances. I simply cannot relate to myself with two legs: it isn't the "me" I want to be. I have long known that if I want to get on with my life I need to remove both legs. I have been trapped in the wrong body all this time and over the years I came to hate my physical self.

Not an easy case to know what to think about, nor to think about at all.  But saying, "Well, Susan, if that's what you really want...," doesn't seem to be quite the right way to leave it.

[Upate: Carl Elliott (Philosophy and Bioethics, Minnesota) has written on BIID, also known as apotemnophilia, in "A New Way to Be Mad," Atlantic Monthly (Dec. 2000).]

[Further update:  A must-read on BIID is Tim Bayne and Neil Levy's “Amputees By Choice: Body Integrity Identity Disorder and the Ethics of Amputation”, Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 75–86 (2005) available here (thanks to Iain Brassington for the pointer).  Also, my colleague Eric Rovie is currently revising a paper on BIID: I am hoping to link a draft shortly.]

Florida Academics Can Not Use State Funds to Travel to Certain Countries (Leiter)

A federal court has now upheld the constitutionality of the law...

...restricting students, faculty members, and researchers at the state's public colleges and universities from traveling to Cuba and four other countries that the U.S. government considers terrorist states....

Faculty members had asked the judge to lift the travel restrictions, arguing that the law violated their First Amendment rights and impinged on the federal government's ability to regulate foreign commerce....

The law prevents students, professors, and researchers at public universities and community colleges in Florida from using state or federal funds, or private foundation grants administered by their institutions, to travel to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. Those at private colleges in Florida are forbidden to use state funds for that purpose.

Putting aside the fact that if the Florida legislature really wanted to prevent travel to states that support terrorism, they would have had to bar all domestic travel with state funds by its professors (or at least travel to Miami, one of the major launching pads for terrorism in the Northern hemisphere--for example), this law clearly impinges the academic freedom of all those historians, sociologists, economists, archaeologists, etc. who might have sound scholarly reasons to need to visit these countries.  (That it violates the ideal of academic freedom does not, alas, mean it violates the First Amendment, especially given the increasingly cramped interpretation the courts have given to academic freedom as a constitutional right.)  It is also a pointless embarrassment for the state universities in Florida.

"Why Evolutionary Biology is (so far) Irrelevant to Law" (Leiter)

A revised version of this paper I wrote with the philosopher of biology Michael Weisberg at Penn is now on-line at SSRN.  This is pretty much the penultimate version, and comments would still be timely and welcome for a few more weeks.

Pilger on the Coming War with Iran (Leiter)

An excerpt:

In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran's nuclear threat. In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of  building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest.

Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations – until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear program to military use. The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to "go anywhere and see anything." They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El-Baradei, says that an attack on Iran will have "catastrophic consequences"   and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.

Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world's fifth military power with thermonuclear weapons aimed at Middle East targets, an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions and the enforcer of the world's longest illegal occupation, Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.

The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran's "nuclear ambitions," just as the vocabulary of Saddam's non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage....

The one piece of "solid evidence" is the threat posed by the United States. An American naval buildup in the eastern Mediterranean has begun. This is almost certainly part of what the Pentagon calls CONPLAN 8022, which is the aerial bombing of Iran. In 2004, National Security Presidential Directive 35, entitled Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization, was issued. It is classified, of course, but the presumption has long been that NSPD 35 authorized the stockpiling and deployment of "tactical" nuclear weapons in the Middle East. This does not mean Bush will use them against Iran, but for the first time since the most dangerous years of the cold war, the use of what were then called "limited" nuclear weapons is being openly discussed in Washington. What they are debating is the prospect of other Hiroshimas and of radioactive fallout across the Middle East and Central Asia. Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker last year that American bombers "have been flying simulated nuclear weapons delivery missions ...since last summer."

The well-informed Arab Times in Kuwait says Bush will attack Iran before the end of April. One of Russia's most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov says the US will use nuclear munitions delivered by Cruise missiles launched in the Mediterranean. "The war in Iraq," he wrote on 24 January, "was just one element in a series of steps in the process of regional destabilization. It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries. [When the attack on Iran begins] Israel is sure to come under Iranian missile strikes. Posing as victims, the Israelis will suffer some tolerable damage and then an outraged US will destabilize Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution . . . Public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian hysteria, leaks, disinformation etcetera . . ."

There can be little doubt that the craven Democrats in our one-party state (who have already acquiesced in the escalation of the Iraq war) will strongly support a military action against Iran, especially if Iran attacks Israel in response to a U.S. (or Israeli) air assault on alleged nuclear targets.  It is all similar to scenarios we have contemplated before.  In Iraq, Bush has relied on back-door draft policies to staff the war of aggression and the resulting occupation, but an Iran-Israel conflict would, presumably, provide the pretext for the inevitable conscription of new troops, or at least conscription of personnel for non-combat "support" functions (thus freeing up combat forces), as was hinted at in the State of the Union address, when Bush said:

[O]ne of the first steps we can take together [in the fake "war on terror'] is to add to the ranks of our military so that the American Armed Forces are ready for all the challenges ahead.  Tonight I ask the Congress to authorize an increase in the size of our active Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 in the next five years.   A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve.  It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them.  It would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.

History of the APA (J. Stanley)

Here is a nice post by Brit Brogaard about this history of the APA, reporting on a 1926 paper by Gardiner. The remarks she cites at the end by Gardiner seem just as apt today as then.

Fun at MIT (J. Stanley)

My alma mater is now sponsoring vicious competitive duels between its alumni; the results are of the first duel are reported here (thanks to Richard Zach for the pointer).

Molly Ivins (1944-2007)

Obituaries by Ruchira Paul here, by Paul Krugman here.

Aqua Teens Imperil Homeland Security (Edmundson)

America's hysteria level has been raised to Level Red, as reported by the AP:

BOSTON (1/31) -- Several illuminated electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. Most if not all of the devices depict a character giving the finger.

Peter Berdovsky, 29, of Arlington, was arrested on one felony charge of placing a hoax device and one charge of disorderly conduct, state Attorney General Martha Coakley said later Wednesday. He had been hired to place the devices, she said.

Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down and bomb squads were sent in before authorities declared the devices were harmless. Turner Broadcasting, a division of Time Warner Inc. and parent of Cartoon Network, later said the devices were part of a promotion for the TV show ''Aqua Teen Hunger Force,'' a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries and a meatball....

''We're not going to let this go without looking at the further roots of how this happened to cause the panic in this city,'' Coakley said at a news conference. Those conducting the campaign should have known the devices could cause panic because they were placed in sensitive areas, she said....

''The packages in question are magnetic lights that pose no danger,'' Turner said in a statement....It [also] said the devices have been in place for two to three weeks in 10 cities: Boston; New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Atlanta; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; Austin, Texas; San Francisco; and Philadelphia.  There were no reports from police Wednesday of residents in the other nine cities spotting similar devices.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke praised Boston authorities for sharing their knowledge quickly with Washington officials and the public. ''Hoaxes are a tremendous burden on local law enforcement and counter-terrorism resources and there's absolutely no place for them in a post-9/11 world,'' Knocke said.

''Aqua Teen Hunger Force'' is a cartoon [that] includes two trouble-making, 1980s-graphic-like [sic] characters called ''mooninites,'' named Ignignokt and Err -- who were pictured on the suspicious devices. They are known for making the obscene hand gesture depicted on the devices.

As FDR said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself and suspicious thingies in our sensitive areas.  More here, and here. For nostalgic reminders of the pre-9/11 mindset, see here. 

[Update: The Boston Globe (2/1) reports that "Berdovsky, who described himself as 'a little kind of freaked out,' faces up to five years in prison on charges of placing a hoax device in a way that causes panic and disorderly conduct."  In another story, the Globe informs us that:

The ads were the latest incarnation of viral marketing, an advertising technique that is exploding in popularity as a way to reach younger consumers inured to the effects of traditional commercials. Like viruses, the ads are intended to spread on their own, creating word-of-mouth buzz by cropping up in unexpected places outdoors and on the Internet.

The company behind the ads for "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" was New York-based Interference Inc., whose chief executive officer, Sam Travis Ewen, was recently named one of Brandweek Magazine's