Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

A New Academic Law Blog...

...from Pittsburgh law prof Michael Madison here, with an IP/technology focus. Judging from his links, there is also reason to hope that the bizarre rightward tilt of the law blogosphere (Volokh, the San Diego folks at Right Coast, Althouse, Reynolds, Bainbridge) is not being augmented by this latest addition! (The tilt is odd given that the legal academy leans liberal [more liberal than left!], yet aside from Yale's Balkin and Miami's Froomkin, there is little prominent liberal legal academic blogging going on out there. And then, of course, I'm out here all by my lonesome on the left....)

Some Thoughts on Nietzsche and Foucault

These are "discussion notes" I prepared for a seminar recently; perhaps they will be of interest to others. Bear in mind: they are merely discussion notes, not a draft of a scholarly paper! (One side note: I take up, below, the topic of Foucault, Weber, and the "iron cage of modernity" alluded to in an earlier posting, which prompted some reader queries.)

"NOM" is a reference to my Nietzsche on Morality, FR to Rabinow's The Foucault Reader collection.

=============

I. Nietzsche and Foucault: Why read them together?

A. Nietzsche is one of Foucault’s most frequent, and positive, reference points (see NOM, p. 2 for an example from The Order of Things). Foucault suggests (sometimes only implies) that he is developing Nietzschean themes, continuing Nietzschean lines of inquiry, etc.. I would like to understand both (1) why Foucault thinks this, and (2) whether he is right.

B. I begin from a position of some skepticism about whether Foucault is right. Here is an outline of the skeptical case:

1. Nietzsche is a philosophical naturalist: he thinks there are facts about human beings (type-facts, I call them, i.e., facts about the physiology and unconscious psychology of human beings) that explain much of their conscious life, in particular, their moral and philosophical beliefs. Nietzsche proffers a somewhat speculative account of how these type-facts figure in the explanation of beliefs, and embeds this naturalistic account in the context of a critique of morality (how an account of the genesis of the beliefs figures in a critique of the beliefs is a topic to which we’ll return at length).

2. This is not Foucault’s kind of project: Foucault takes “facts about human nature” to be artifacts of particular discursive regimes, i.e., structured discourses conceptualizing human selfhood that are propounded by the various human sciences. If “human nature” is a “construct” (a key notion, to which we’ll have to return), then there would be no special interest, beyond an historical or sociological one, in understanding how those facts about human nature figure in the explanation of, e.g., moral beliefs. We wouldn’t, in other words, understand anything about the real cause of moral beliefs, only about how a certain discursive regime—itself without any special epistemic standing—conceptualizes those causes.

3. The problem, in short, is that Nietzsche, on this rendering, is interested in first-order theory, i.e., an account of what human beings are really like, an explanation of our moral beliefs, and so on. By contrast, Foucault is interested in meta-theory, i.e., some account of the status or nature of our first-order theories. Here is a typical Foucault formulation (from “Truth and Power” in FR, 60): he describes his project as “”seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false.”

(a) “Effects of truth” are, I take it, the various first-order discourses or practices in which people make claims of the form, “It is true that X,” or “It is false that Y,” e.g., “It is true that our morality has its origin, in part, in the slave revolt in morals described in GM I.”

(b) An “historical” understanding of these “effects” aims to understand both (i) when these discourses or practices came about, i.e., when did it develop that, at a particular moment, under particular socio-economic conditions, people started talking about “the unconscious,” “the insane,” “the deviant,” etc; and (ii) how these discourses are structured (i.e., what are the “rules” for making “true” claims in these various discourses—this is the legacy of structuralism, which becomes less important in Foucault’s work after the 1960s).

(c) The claim that the “discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false” suggests that the first-order theories, whose historical origins are to be traced, are themselves non-cognitive, i.e., non-truth-evaluable. That is, to ask whether, e.g., the psycho-analytic theory of the mind is true or false is--syntactic appearances notwithstanding—on a par with asking is the yumminess of chocolate true or false? One can ask, of course, within the rules of psychoanalysis, whether it is true or false that homophobia is a kind of defense mechanism, i.e., a reaction formation (it is true); but it makes no sense to ask whether the psychoanalytic theory as a whole is true or false. (There is a curious resonance here with Rudolf Carnap’s old distinction between “internal” and “external” questions in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology”—one of the distinctions Quine purported to repudiate in “Two Dogmas” and subsequent work. An “internal” question, per Carnap, is internal to a “linguistic framework,” which is a conventional practice in which the criteria for truth or falsity of particular ontological claims are set [it is true that “there is a table in the seminar room” within the framework of things and the “thing-language”]. By contrast, an “external question” would be a question about the truth or reality of the framework itself [is the “thing-language” true, is it genuinely and successfully referential?]; this question can’t be answered; whether to adopt a framework is settled on pragmatic grounds. [Carnap thinks this because he thinks that “to be real in the scientific sense means to be an element of the framework” and therefore we can’t ask the question about reality or truth of the framework itself])

C. Is the skepticism too hasty? Here’s some reasons why it might be:

Republican Delegates Mock the Troops

Story here. Timely evidence of Mr. Keillor's point about the Republican Party having been taken over by the lunatic fringe.

UPDATE: Vietnam Veterans of American officially object to being mocked by the chicken hawks.

Breslin on the Protests at the Republican Convention in NYC

Column here.

Are Philosophers Harming Themselves in Fellowship Competitions?

A well-known philosopher who has done reviewing for the National Endowment for the Humanities writes:

"Here is an interesting piece of news about how our profession is viewed by Washington, i.e., the NEH. We have the reputation of being the most critical board in the humanities. Perhaps not surprising. But the net result is that our hypercriticism is undermining members of our own profession; philosophy candidates give themselves much lower grades than other fields, and so they lessen their chance of getting grants. I am told that NEH takes this into account in making its final decisions on grants; but I cannot believe that they can fully compensate for the damage we do to ourselves. Such are the rewards of rigour nowadays! After having giving the lowest grades on the panel, I am now ashamed of myself and urge gradeflation."

I invite philosophers to comment. No anonymous postings.

UPDATE: One trusted reader (not a philosopher) writes: "Imagine: the higher your standards, the poorer your opportunity. Surprise."

Garrison Keillor on the Republican Party

A finely crafted essay here; an excerpt:

"Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned—and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

"In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. 'Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,' says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. 'I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.' The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.

"The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous."

More Voting "Irregularities" (or Fraud?) in Florida

Details here. This is extraordinary, and bodes ill for November.

Some Guest Bloggers Will be Visiting

Starting September 7, and running for a week, philosophers Benjamin Hellie (Cornell) and Jessica Wilson (Michigan) will be taking over here; you can see some of their fine blog work at For the Record. (I'll be in the UK some of that time, speaking at the "Nietzsche and Ethics" conference at Sussex.)

Then, the last week of December, we'll have another treat (and I'll enjoy another break): Richard Posner--distinguished jurist, founding father of the economic analysis of law, most-cited living legal scholar, scourge of Dworkin and formalist jurisprudents (not to mention admirer of Nietzsche!)--has kindly agreed to blog here, to share some of his views about matters jurisprudential--from Holmes to pragmatism to (one of my favorite Marxian themes in the Posnerian corpus!) the irrelevance of normative ethics--and perhaps other topics as well.

I'm grateful to Professors Hellie and Wilson and Judge Posner for agreeing to visit, and I'm sure regular readers will enjoy it, as will I.

Creationist sneaks in to science journal

One of the creationist conmen associated with the Discovery [sic] Institute has an article in a science journal, which, we can be sure, will be broadcast far and wide by the creationist public relations folks. Details on the article and its real merits are here.

Constituents that count get results!

Details here:

"Placing a heavy emphasis on energy production in the American West, the Bush administration has moved aggressively to open up broad areas of largely unspoiled federal land to oil and gas exploration.

"The administration has pressed for approval of new drilling permits across the Rocky Mountains and lifted protections on hundreds of thousands of acres with gas and oil reserves in Utah and Colorado. In the process, it has targeted a number of places prized for their scenery, abundant wildlife and clean water, natural assets increasingly valuable to the region's changing economy.

"Soon after taking office in 2001, the Bush White House set up a little-known task force that acts as a complaint desk for industry, passing energy company concerns directly to federal land management employees in the field. Although the creation of White House task forces is commonplace, experts on the executive branch say it is unusual to have one primarily serving the interests of a single industry.

"In addition, the Bureau of Land Management has been pushed to issue drilling permits at a record pace for three of the last four years, an increase of 70% since the Clinton administration.

"Internal memos and interviews show senior administration officials have directed federal employees to be responsive to industry, commended offices that approved large numbers of drilling permits and chastised those that were slow."

"Truthout" Coverage of Republican National Convention has Begun

Here. I'm still waiting for Jimmy Breslin's first column on those "mean whites from low IQ states."

Inside the blogosphere humor: Fafblog nails Instapundit

Here. This is particularly good because it calls him, and so many other blog sites, on the absurd pretense that they are cutting-edge journalists, going where no regular journalist would dare to go. In general, of course, the blogger journalists are simply as trivial, cowardly, and unreliable as the regular kind. The main difference is that the blogger journalists that prattle on about their courage and insight are generally far to the right of the mainstream media (which means, of course, that they are VERY far to the right of civilized political opinion).

Publication schedule for Philosophical Gourmet Report, 2004-06

I'm getting a fair number of queries now wondering when the new PGR for 2004-06 will be out. Here's the tentative schedule.

The on-line survey invitations will go out on Wednesday, September 15 to the 454 nominated evaluators, and the data will be collected over roughly a 3-week period.

The Report itself will be out not sooner than the end of October, and not later than November 15, 2004.

Please pass this information on to your friends, colleagues, and students who might be interested!

New Law Blog...

..."Biz Fems Speak," featuring female corporate law professors, including one of our distinguished graduates now in academia, Christine Hurt '93, who teaches at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

Here's a Real Story about a Real Draft Dodger

Here is the video of former Texas Lieutenant Governor Barnes apologizing for helping George W. Bush, and the children of other wealthy supporters, avoid the Vietnam War through National Guard service.

UPDATE: And Michael Moore has some great ideas here for more ads the Bush Campaign can run:

"ANNOUNCER: 'Mr. Kerry's biggest supporter, Sen. Max Cleland, claims to have lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam. But he still has one arm! How did that happen? One word: Cowardice. When duty called, he was unwilling to give his last limb. Is that the type of selfishness you want hanging out in the White House? We think not. Vote for the man who would be willing to give America his right frontal lobe. Vote Bush.'"

Duke Law School: "Rankings? What, me worry?"

Well, yes.

The more interesting question is whether the loss of Van Alstyne, Culp, and Byers last year will be offset by the additions of Chemerinsky, Fisk, Saltzman and some junior faculty, such that Duke will improve from its current position of 17th in faculty quality, well below the five schools US News ranks immediately behind it (Cornell, Berkeley, Georgetown, Texas, UCLA). My guess is Duke may see some slight improvement; together with losses at Northwestern and Cornell this past year, I can imagine them cracking the top 15 in a tie with some others. But we'll see later in the fall...

Why Rice University Should be the Next Great University

Rice University in Houston has been in the news of late due to its new President, former Columbia Law Dean David Leebron. Leebron has an interesting task before him, because Rice is both an excellent, and underperforming, university, for reasons I'll explain.

Let's start with the excellence. Rice has an exceptional undergraduate student body; many of our best students at UT Law every year are from Rice, and two of my most distinguished colleagues, Thomas McGarity (UT Law '74) and Ronald Mann (UT Law 85) are Rice graduates. This year, we have an outstanding candidate on the teaching market, Christopher Lund, who was a Rice grad and who, like McGarity and Mann, also compiled an exemplary academic record at UT Law. One of the ten or fifteen most selective colleges in the country, Rice also offers one of the best student-faculty ratios in the nation.

Even more significant, the faculty is quite strong, but--and here's the underperformance--it's not as strong as it should be. Rice has top 25ish graduate faculties in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering, but can claim a similar status in almost none of the social sciences or humanities. Part of the difficulty is size: most departments are quite small. Take Rice's Philosophy Department, which has only a dozen-or-so faculty, yet has extremely high per capita quality, and an excellent track record of hiring, as indicated by the schools that have raided that department over the last half-dozen-or-so years: Keith DeRose went to Yale, Christopher Hitchcock to Cal Tech, Larry Temkin to Rutgers, Kenneth Waters to Minnesota, Nomy Arpaly to Brown. If Rice had held them all, it would surely be on the cusp of the top 25, as opposed to ranking around 40.

Rice should have the resources to move forward as a research university. Rice's gross endowment ranks 17th in the nation, just behind Duke, and ahead of Cornell, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Brown, NYU, and many others. More significant is that the value of its endowment per student is $640,569, making Rice the 12th wealthiest school in the country, and putting it well ahead of schools with larger gross endowments (like Emory University [359,169 per student] and Washington University in St. Louis [317,849 per student]), and even further ahead of schools like Duke which don't even rank in the top 30 for the per student value of the endowment. Now it is true that at Rice, unlike these other schools, the endowment is used, in part, to keep the tuition relatively low compared to peer schools. That is plainly an advantage in terms of maintaining an outstanding student body. But one imagines that some of this great wealth could also be utilized to strengthen the faculty in some target areas.

Finally, Rice is located in the 4th largest city in the United States (meaning ample professional opportunities for spouses)--and in the most attractive and appealing part of that city as well. Houston is a city much mocked, for its lack of zoning, its traffic problems, and its appalling summer heat. But the reality is that it has extraordinary cultural and culinary offerings, many of which are conveniently located near the Rice campus. There are many stronger universities in far less appealing locations. Rice's location should be a plus overall.

So will President Leebron pull it off? Some may remember that in the 1970s, Duke was not regarded as a major research university. Some of that transformation in perception was due to effective public relations, but some of it was due to utilizing wealth to mobilize certain departments in to top-flight units. (English was the best-known, and has since fallen apart.) Can Rice do the same? If I were President of Rice, I'd start with Philosophy and History, two central humanities disciplines in any serious university, and two that are relatively cheap to develop. Both are already rather good at Rice, despite their small size. Add a half-dozen faculty lines, say, to the Rice Philosophy Department, and there's no reason it shouldn't be a top 20ish PhD program.

New Book by Stich & Nichols

Stephen Stich (Rutgers) has been one of the most creative and important philosophers in the English-speaking world for three decades now, consistently breaking new ground and setting fruitful research agendas for others in the field. He is also, it appears, a great mentor, as evidenced by his many talented students, so many of whom he ends up co-authoring with. His latest book, with his former student Shaun Nichols (now at Utah), gets a glowing, and no doubt well-deserved, review here.

Northwestern Law School Doesn't Care About Its US News Rank...

...no sir, not one bit. That's why it's so odd that the first thing mentioned by the Dean in his letter welcoming students was this:

"First, I am pleased to inform you that Northwestern Law advanced two places in U.S. News & World Report's 2004 graduate school rankings to secure an overall 10th place for the first time since U.S. News began ranking law schools in 1989. More importantly the long-term trend is positive - we are up from 14th in 1996 to 10th this year."

Surely this can't be the "first" thing worth mentioning, can it? After all, Dean van Zandt has presided over the most astonishing exodus of top faculty talent in the United States (imagine the well-deserved scholarly rank of a school with Northwestern's "best and brightest," such as Thomas Merrill, Michael Perry, Daniel Polsby, Stephen Gardbaum, Annelise Riles, Paul Robinson, Henry Smith, Richard Brooks, Gary Lawson, Keith Hylton, and Tracey George--all faculty that departed during, and sometimes because of, Van Zandt's tenure); this is nothing to be proud of, and the mere fact that it is easy for a small private school to game the numbers , and move up in US News, is not something any serious Dean, as committed to scholarship as Van Zandt, would want to highlight.

So obviously this Dean's letter was drafted by an incompetent bureaucrat, not an academic.

On the other hand, I suppose it is true, as long time observers will remember, that Northwestern was the school that pioneered in such areas as hiring all unemployed graduates as research assistants in order to boost employment stats, as well as spending merit aid money with an eye to boosting the median LSAT, not recruiting the best students.

So could it really be that a serious Law School Dean thinks moving up two places in the fake US News rankings constitutes an accomplishment?

Nah, not possible.

"Cheney Backs Bestiality!"

Philosopher Tad Brennan at Northwestern writes:

"Cheney Backs Bestiality!
"Cheney Endorses Incest!
"GOP for Pederasty!

"Replace 'Cheney' with 'Kerry' and 'GOP' with 'Democrats', and you have exactly what Fox TV would be saying, and Limbaugh, and O'Reilly, and the rest of the right-wing yahoos, too, if Kerry had said what Cheney said the other day. Here's all Cheney said:

"'People ought to be able to free -- ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to.'

"Does that mean that he endorsed bestiality, incest, and pederasty? Well, I'm inclined to think it *does*, if interpreted without regard to context. Relationships between consenting adults and non-consenting rodents are certainly one "kind of relationship", and Cheney says people should be free to enter into *any* kind.

"On the other hand, we all know that the context of his comments meant that the 'any kind' quantifier was extremely restricted--he meant, relationships between one man and one woman, or one man and one man, or one woman and one woman, none of whom share a prohibited blood relationship. It would be ridiculous to interpret him as endorsing relationships between three men and a hedgehog (especially one within a prohibited degree of kinship)--ridiculous, irresponsible, mean-spirited, and grotesque.

"That's not that hard to figure out. But the right-wing campaign against gay marriage has repeatedly done the ridiculous, irresponsible, mean-spirited, and grotesque thing, here as on most issues. It has traded on a slippery-slope argument, which claims that if we allow even one leetle crack in the facade of traditional he-she marriage, why, good god, where will it stop? With the destruction of society, that's where! With chaos in the streets! If we say that gay marriage is okay, then there's no way to put any more limits on it, at all!

"But the day before yesterday, the slippery slope argument suddenly died--it just disappeared from the mouths of the anti-gay lobby.

"It's just more evidence of how thoroughly bankrupt the Bush regime is.
They used the amendment to betray gay Republicans when they thought it would gain them some political leverage. Now that they realize it backfired, they are flip-flopping--and they aren't getting called on that either. Why not? Surely not because anyone thinks that Bush and Cheney are going to pursue different policies--not when they have only one brain between them.

"No, the media is letting them get away with their flip-flop, letting them appear 'moderate' to the middle while they continue to pander to the extreme right-wing. Cheney's line got a lot of play, but the amendment is still part of the platform, and as Frist said today, that will live on after the spoken word is forgotten.

"God what scum--I'll be so glad when that pack of losers is gone, and Bush can get back to his first career as a lush."

=================================

(By the way, to see how one group of conservative Christians is reacting to the Cheney remarks, go here.)

Chomsky on Harvard

A propos the recent posting on "The Myth of Left-Wing Harvard," reader "Thomas Paine" calls my attention to this apt remark by Chomsky:

"For political dissidents, MIT is a far more friendly place. Virtually all the faculty peace activism in Cambridge, for example, has come from MIT, with some drifters occasionally from Harvard. My own experience is typical. If I walk into the Harvard Faculty Club, you can feel the chill settle, literally. It's inconceivable that I could be asked to give a talk at the Kennedy School of Government (ADA-style liberalism, in large measure), unless it's organized by some group they can't control (like the foreign press, which runs regular programs), in which case they grit their teeth and bear it. In contrast, I've had a very friendly and supportive environment at MIT, no matter what I've been doing." -- 18 Feb. 1993

Economics may not be much of a science...

...as I've remarked before, but surely it is rocket science by comparison to "international relations." Query: does the phrase "serious international relations scholars" (as used by George Washington Poli Sci Professor Farrell in the above link) even have cognitive content?

Kerry's Anti-War Statement before Congress in 1971

This is far better than any speech he's given since. It is, again, indicative of the twisted militarism of American culture today that the litany of war crimes he comments on, all common knowledge by the 1970s, are now held up as objections to his candidacy. But of course: a Presidential candidate who, once in his life, actually spoke truthfully about his nation's criminal butchery is clearly unqualified to hold office.

(Thanks to Matt Davidson for the pointer.)

UPDATE: More on this topic from philosopher Keith DeRose (Philosophy, Yale), whose father served in Vietnam.

In Praise of Trial Lawyers...or get ready for the Edwards smear to come

From Robert Kuttner:

"The corporate elite and the GOP have three grudges against 'trial lawyers.' First, damage awards cost business money when they uncover corporate practices that swindle, maim, or kill ordinary citizens. And as champions of the little guy, trial lawyers are among the few well-heeled professionals who donate more money to Democrats than Republicans. Break their rice bowl and there will be one less source of money for the opposition party.

"It further galls the right that some small fraction of trial lawyers actually get rich by helping injured people to collect. Notice that when some business mogul becomes a billionaire, the right insists that he earned that money by bettering mankind. But when a talented personal injury lawyer prospers by helping an injury victim, he's a parasitic shyster.

"So the business lobbies and the Republicans have been promoting what they call 'tort reform.' The idea is to make it harder for ordinary people to recover damages and to limit the amount they can collect. But what of the substance of the right's case? Isn't there a real problem here?

"Not really. For starters, the right can blame itself. As more of the economy becomes deregulated, the common-law remedy of going to court is often all that allows victims any redress. The right's war on health, safety, financial, and environmental regulation is substantially responsible for the litigation they now oppose as well.

"Regulation, in this respect, is the ounce of prevention. Litigation sorts out the mess afterwards when regulators could not police corporate conduct in advance, and lawsuits usefully bring ugly facts to light. If the tobacco industry didn't want lawsuits, it shouldn't have hidden evidence that smoking caused cancer....

"Take away the threat of a lawsuit, and unscrupulous businesses will be even freer to do damage....

"The attack on trial lawyers is an attack on the rights of ordinary Americans by the corporate elite. It will be useful to have that reality come to light."

No wonder the Republicans chose New York for the Convention

Details from Greg Palast:

[I couldn't make this up ... direct from the Republican National Committee website ....]

"NEXT WEEK, people who hate Republicans plan to release swarms of mice in New York City to terrorize delegates to the National Republican Convention.

"Republican-haters plan on dressing up as RNC volunteers, and giving false directions to little blue hair ladies from Kansas, sending them into the sectors of New York City that are unfit for human habitation.

"They plan on throwing pies and Lord knows what else at Republican visitors to the city. Prostitutes with AIDS plan to seduce Republican visitors, and discourage the use of condoms ...."

I do hope the RNC can stop these evil doings in the Big Apple: the idea of people dressing up as Republicans gives me the creeps. And denying Republicans condoms only encourages them to reproduce.

For GOP-gazers who want more pop-eyed paranoia in party hats, go to
/www.rnc.org/ rncresearch/
read.aspx?ID=4576 and click on "protesters supporting Kerry." [Alert! Thursday morning, the RNC took down the AIDS warning after thrill-seeking GregPalast-dot-commies cruised the Republican Party site. However, we kept a screen grab of it -- which we'll post today. And here's a link to the source of the Republican Mickey Mice attack info: a column in the New Hampshire Union-Leader: www.theunionleader.com
/Articles_show.html
?article=42692&archive=1

Meet some of the American dead

Courtesy of Jimmy Breslin, who also notes:

"Printing as many names and as often as possible is a gloomy task. These are the deaths that the president and his people try to sneak past the country. The dead were brave men. The president is craven. He buries the war, and the news reporters, indolent and in fear of authority, follow like cattle going into pens. For so long, the public believed the news it was given. Saddam Hussein was going to blow us up with an atom bomb! The Muslims of Iraq love us!"

From the mouth of the Fuhrer

This essay called my attention to this remarkable bit from Bob Woodward's hagiography of Bush:

"I'm the commander," [Bush] told journalist Bob Woodward for the book, Bush at War. "See, I don't need to explain -- I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

Molly Ivins on George Bush--as Seen from Down Under

Philosopher Alex Miller at Macquarie University in Sydney reviews Molly Ivins's most recent polemic against Bush. Those in the dogmatic slumber of American-liberal Bush hatred would do well to read it. An excerpt:

"It becomes clear very rapidly that, for all their invective against Bush, Ivins and Dubose are quite happy to support the economic system that spawned him. For example: 'The free market is a wonderful thing — but it functions well only within a nest of law and regulation.'

"They lament, 'All of us are responsible for our magnificent political heritage winding up in a system of legalized bribery'. Their political heroes are heroic defenders of the oppressed such as Democrat politicians Ted Kennedy and Clinton, and despite a few mild gestures of disapproval towards the latter, they think that US capitalism was basically AOK until Bush turned up.

"'Magnificent political heritage'? Trying telling this to the people of Argentina, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Chile, Korea, Columbia, Palestine and all the other countries that the USA or its agents plundered and raped long before George.W. sobered up and bought his way into the White House.

"Many of the facts that Ivins and Dubose turn up indicate that Bush is only a symptom of the disease that underlies the US political system, not, as they imply, the disease itself. For example, they point out that between 1996 and 1998 (when Clinton was president), the following big companies paid zero taxes: AT&T, Bristol-Myers Squib, Chase Manhattan, Enron, General Electric, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Philip Morris.

"Predictably, Jimmy Carter isn't portrayed as the sanctimonious hypocrite whose secret orders led to the Taliban taking power in Afghanistan, but rather as a president who 'based his public policy' on 'emphasising human rights'. If that isn't enough to make you weep, the advice that Ivins and Dubose give to [exploited manual laborer] Sherry Durst on how to change the system is: 'Lost your job? Need health insurance? Child care? Try voting!'. Unfortunately, those of us who are not US citizens don't have that option. But, fortunately, we do still have Marx and Engels."

Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy

My essay for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on this subject is now available here. Much of this will be familiar to readers of my book Nietzsche on Morality; the material in section 2 (on Nietzsche's positive ethics, and, in particular, his perfectionism) and 3.1 (on Nietzsche's moral anti-realism and why "will to power" is not his objective criterion of value) goes most beyond arguments in the book. Comments are welcome, since SEP is an on-line, regularly revised, resource.

Experimental Philosophy

A new term, time for a new approach to philosophy: visit the Experimental Philosophy blog. A good place to start is here.

"The Undecided Voter"

Here he is, in all his glory.

(Thanks to Ned Block for the pointer.)

The Myth of Left-Wing Harvard

It is true enough that the Harvard faculty is "liberal" in exactly the way The New York Times is "liberal," as its Public Editor recently informed us: namely, on a range of social issues, it ranges towards the more tolerant and libertarian, and away from the fearful, moralizing, and authoritarian.

Put aside this pleasant, tolerant "liberalism"--whose only real opposition comes from the Taliban, foreign and homegrown--and the suggestion that Harvard is a "left-wing" institution is laughable.

*Who is the most recent "star" appointment to the Harvard faculty to garner national media attention? Historian Niail "the U.S. really ought to kill more aggressively in Iraq" Ferguson. What was Harvard Government's main recruiting effort last year? To land conservative political theorist Thomas Pangle from the University of Toronto, heir to the Straussian throne (as it happens, he landed in Austin instead). A reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Ed called me recently for some background information on an impending announcement by Harvard Law School touting the hiring of two conservative legal scholars.

*Recently in the New York Times spotlight from Harvard is the apologist for torture and the Nazi doctrine of preventive war Michael Ignatieff--by the way, he directs a Center for Human Rights Policy at left-wing Harvard--who is so far to the right that even the rather conservative Ronald Steel justifiably concluded a recent review of Mr. Ignatieff's book as follows: "In concocting a formula for a little evil lite to combat the true evildoers, Michael Ignatieff has not provided, as his subtitle states, a code of 'political ethics in an age of terror' but rather an elegantly packaged manual of national self-justification." But that, of course, is a longstanding Harvard tradition, going back to all the bright Harvard boys who ran the invasion and subsequent slaughter in Vietnam during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, and continuing right to the present with Samuel Huntington, political "scientist," whose blood-soaked career of apologetics for imperialist violence (and, more recently, dire warnings about the Hispanic threat to America's way of life) led the National Academy of Sciences to balk at electing him to membership, usually a birthright for Harvard faculty. (It appears the real scientists noticed the difference between an empirical discipline and right-wing Lysenkoism.)

*The leftist economists from Harvard were purged more than a generation ago, and had to migrate to U Mass/Amherst, where they can no longer expect New York Times reporters to call them on a regular basis for their "expertise." ("Harvard," like "Yale" and "Princeton," and, to a lesser extent, "University of Chicago" and "Columbia," is an imprimatur of legitimacy in the New York Times, quite independent of whether the scholar in question is regarded by experts as a two-bit ass-kisser who belongs in the annals of legendary tenure mistakes, or is actually someone with a brain in his head.) Now the Harvard Economics Department supplies the Bush Administration with its chief apologist for its screwball economic policies, Gregory Mankiw, just as it supplied the Reagan Administration with its (Martin Feldstein).

*Harvard Law School has been home since the 1970s to the infantile, anti-Marxist leftism of the Critical Legal Studies movement (the folks who brought us the powerful political program, "Don't laugh at jokes by the Cravath partners") and, more recently, that quintessentially bourgeois political event, identity politics. Neither have amounted to anything beyond the legal academy, and even there, the first is moribund, the second marginalized. Far more influential have been HLS faculty member, Mary Ann Glendon, leading spokeswoman for social conservativism in the Catholic tradition; that stalwart apologist for Republican legal mischief, Charles Fried; and, of course, the "Professor of Torture," Alan Dershowitz (who also runs a side career as an extreme Zionist who might even make Ariel Sharon blush).

Many of the major figures in the largely right-wing law-and-economics movement are also based at Harvard Law School. Indeed, the "major" scholarly opus to emerge from HLS of late, Kaplow and Shavell's, Fairness versus Welfare (published, of course, by Harvard University Press), "argues" (this is only a very slight simplification) that fairness should never be a factor in social policy because sometimes doing what is fair would not be pareto optimal. (It will be a topic of future research by sociologists of economics to figure out how it is folks with high IQs could even think this is an argument.)

It would be wonderful, to be sure, if the nation's most prestigious institution of higher education were a real repository of critical thought. There are, to be sure, some genuine intellectuals of the left pursuing their work at Harvard, but the point is they are few and far between. Only in the reactionary public culture of the United States could one think that the dominance at Harvard of pleasant, tolerant liberalism, noted at the start, could mark Harvard as a "left-wing" institution. Alas, in no nation in the history of the world has it ever been the case that the centers of academic power were generally hospitable (except in isolated corners) to intellectual currents at odds with the needs of the real centers of political and economic power in that society. Harvard, in that respect, is no different, the myth of its leftism notwithstanding.

Muslim Scholar Denied Visa to Teach at Notre Dame

This is on a par with the mindless harassment of journalists under the guise of "security"--actually, it's worse, since the point is clearly to suppress political speech:

"Acting at the request of the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. government has revoked the work visa of a Muslim scholar who had been scheduled to teach at the University of Notre Dame this fall.

"Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen who has been criticized [Ed.-by whom exactly?] for links to Islamic militants and for remarks branded anti-Semitic, was supposed to begin teaching on Tuesday, the first day of the fall semester.

"State Department spokeswoman Kelly Shannon cited the Immigration and Nationality Act, part of which deals with aliens who have used a 'position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity.' Another section bars aliens whose entry may have 'potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.'

"Both sections were amended under the USA Patriot Act, passed after the September 11 attacks.

"Shannon did not immediately say whether either section applied to Ramadan's case.

"'We don't know a reason why either of those should apply to Tariq Ramadan,' said Matt Storin, a Notre Dame spokesman. 'He's a distinguished scholar. He's a voice for moderation in the Muslim world.'

"Shannon said the move came at the request of the Homeland Security Department.

"Notre Dame appointed Ramadan earlier this year to be its Henry B. Luce professor of religion, conflict and peacebuilding at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies....

"Ramadan has been teaching at the College of Geneva and the University of Fribourg, both in Switzerland, and has gained a popular following among European Muslims in showing how Islamic values are compatible with those of secular European society.

"'In many ways he has defined what it means to be a European Muslim,' said Muqtedar Khan, a political scientist at Adrian College in Michigan. 'He has essentially tried to bridge the culture gap.'"

(Thanks to readers Thom Brooks and Michael Cain for calling this story to my attention.)

UPDATE: I'm always impressed when alleged libertarian Eugene Volokh comes to the defense of government suppression of political speech. The point isn't that he's wrong about the law; the point is that his alleged libertarianism is without moral weight, since the question here is not what the law permits.

Three Cheers for the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals

Details here:

"[A] 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel showed no trepidation in declaring that key provisions of Pennsylvania's Pledge of Allegiance law violate the First Amendment....

"'It may be useful to note our belief that most citizens of the United States willingly recite the Pledge of Allegiance and proudly sing the national anthem,' Judge Dolores K. Sloviter wrote in The Circle School v. Pappert. 'But the rights embodied in the Constitution, most particularly in the First Amendment, protect the minority -- those persons who march to their own drummers. It is they who need the protection afforded by the Constitution and it is the responsibility of federal judges to ensure that protection....'

"Bringing suit in Circle School were a public high school student, two parents of private school students and several non-religious private schools, according to the opinion. At issue was the parental notification provision of Act 157, under which the parents of students who refrain from recitation are informed of what their children have done. The private school-plaintiffs also challenged the act as violating their right to free expressive association.

"The judges ruled that the parental notification provision of the act violated the student-plaintiff's First Amendment right to free speech while the act's remaining portions violated the school-plaintiffs' First Amendment right to free expressive association.

"The panel did not reach the parent-plaintiffs' argument that the act violates their fundamental liberty interest under the 14th Amendment.

"Under the act, according to the opinion, all teachers and officials in charge of public, private or parochial schools are to ensure that the U.S. flag is displayed in each classroom and that students either recite the Pledge of Allegiance or sing the national anthem at the start of each day. Students may decline, but the school is to notify their parents of such actions.

"The act offers an exemption to any private or parochial school for which displaying the flag or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance violates the school's religious convictions, according to the opinion.

"The opinion cites to a dialogue between Reps. Allan Egolf, R-Franklin and Perry Counties, and Greg S. Vitali, D-Delaware County, held on the floor of the state House prior to final passage of Act 157. During the exchange, Egolf, who sponsored and introduced the bill, confirms for Vitali that under the act, the only way a student -- even a high school senior -- could avoid reciting the Pledge of Allegiance would be if his or her parents gave their permission for their child to refrain.

"'While the opinion of a single legislator made in the course of legislative debates is not dispositive of a fundamental constitutional question,' Sloviter wrote in a footnote, 'the view of the legislator who introduced the bill sheds some light on its underlying motivation.'

"The judges devoted the bulk of their opinion to addressing the student-plaintiffs' objection to the parental notification clause of the act.

"In its 1943 decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the U.S. Supreme Court limned a 'careful balance' between students' First Amendment rights and the schools' obligation to abide by proper education standards and curricula, Sloviter wrote.

"'While the Barnette court concluded that government officials are forbidden under the Constitution to compel or coerce students to salute the national flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance, the court has subsequently found state and local regulations offering the Pledge of Allegiance, but permitting students to abstain from the recitation as consistent with [its] case law,' Sloviter wrote, citing to the high court's recent decision in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow....

"The judges concluded that the parental notification provision amounts to viewpoint discrimination, as the provision is only triggered when a student refrains from recitation and not when a student willingly participates in it.

"'As the district court correctly pointed out ... a parental notification clause that is limited only to parents of students who refuse to engage in such recitation may have been purposefully drafted to "chill speech by providing a disincentive to opting out of [the] Act,"' Sloviter wrote, quoting Kelly's July 2003 opinion.

"Turning to the private schools' First Amendment argument, the judges cited the Supreme Court's controlling analysis of the freedom of expressive association in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, the 2000 decision in which the justices held that the Boy Scouts could expel an assistant scoutmaster for being homosexual.

"'Here, the record supports the holding of the district court that the school-plaintiffs engage in expressive association, as required by Dale,' Sloviter wrote. 'By nature, educational institutions are highly expressive organizations, as their philosophy and values are directly inculcated in their students....'

"Frankel and plaintiffs' attorney Twersky called Act 157 the most restrictive Pledge of Allegiance-compelling statute in the country.

"'I would hope that [courts in] other states see what the 3rd Circuit has done and realize that you can't just make laws that restrict the constitutional rights of students,' Twersky said."
====================

Meanwhile, here in Texas, I'm still waiting for the sleepy Houston ACLU to bring a challenge to the unconstitutional moment-of-silence law enacted last year, at the same time as a Pledge of Allegiance requirement not quite as coercive as the Pennsylvania one, but arguably close. But more on the "moment of silence" shortly...

The Curmudgeonly Clerk Retires

His farewell here. That's a real loss for the conservative blogosphere, since the Clerk's postings were almost always carefully written and documented. I much enjoyed many of the postings, and they will be missed.

The Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom

Thanks to reader Stephen Frug for flagging this essay for me, which touches on topics dealt with here on prior occasions.

Philosophical logician Uzquiano from Rochester to Ohio State

Gabriel Uzquiano (logic, philosophical logic, metaphysics), an assistant professor at the University of Rochester, has accepted a tenured offer from Ohio State University, to start in fall 2005.

"The Challenge of Philosophical Naturalism"

Leave it to the blogosphere--in this case, the always informative "Legal Theory Blog" by Larry Solum--to alert me to the fact that a conference in which I'm participating now has a public website. As things stand, Stich and I will be carrying the flag for naturalism, with the Williamses and Zipursky representing the forces of retrograde philosophy! I'm looking forward to it.

UPDATE: More additions to the conference: Alvin Goldman, the preeminent figure in Anglophone epistemology, will be a speaker, and Jerry Fodor, the preeminent figure in Anglophone philosophy of mind, will deliver a keynote address. Both are members of the extraordinary Rutgers Philosophy Department. Both are also philosophical naturalists, though in somewhat different ways.

My Absolutely Final Post on the Kerry War Service Nonsense

John Kerry made his voluntary participation in a criminal and immoral war the centerpiece of his campaign; that invites scrutiny. But the scrutiny it is getting is a joke, typical of the pathological stupidity and dishonesty of both the Republican Party and the national media in this country. This article says all there is to say about the candidates and the Vietnam War:

"[N]ow we're having a debate about whether the man who did the honorable thing [and volunteered to serve in the army] may have embellished his record a little (although nothing in the documentary record suggests he did this), while we have two cowards who did everything they could to stay miles away from the place Kerry demanded he be sent. This is the fundamental truth. And while yes, Kerry has made his war service a centerpiece in a way that Bush and Cheney for obvious reasons did not, is it really Kerry who deserves scrutiny for how he behaved in 1968 and 1969? Why shouldn't the major media be doing comparisons of how Kerry, Bush, and Cheney passed those years? Why shouldn't The Washington Post be devoting 2,700 words to a comprehensive look at Cheney's deferments? Nichols identifies three young men from Casper who did die in Vietnam: Robert Cardenas, Walter Elmer Handy, and Douglas Tyrone Patrick. Did one of them die because Cheney had 'other priorities'?

"But The Washington Post won't do that, because there exists no Vietnam Veterans for the Truth About Deferments, financed by wealthy Democratic donors and out peddling its wares. Which is the moral of the story. Our media can sort through the facts in front of their nose and determine, at least some of the time, who's lying and who's not. But they are completely incapable of taking a step back and describing the larger reality. Doing that would require making judgments that are supposedly subjective rather than objective; but the larger reality here is clearer than clear. Just imagine if the situation were reversed: The same people now questioning Kerry's 'character' would have worked to establish Bush as a war hero long ago. They would have labeled Kerry a coward. If by chance a liberal-backed group came forward to question Bush's wartime actions, they would have been called traitors and worse. And the mainstream media would be following the agenda they set every step of the way."

The one happy thing to come out of this pathetic display is that attention has been finally called to John Kerry's role as critic of the Vietnam War, the role that was erased from the Democratic Convention. But, given the militaristic mindset of the country, his strong performance as a war critic--really his most honorable performance in public life--will no doubt prove a liability. But he deserves to be hoist by his own words on this score, since he disgracefully failed to acknowledge the dignity and moral correctness of his criticisms of the war during the Democratic Convention.

UPDATE: Turns out Paul Krugman is on a similar theme today.

What law firm partners want from new associates

This article includes some fairly sensible advice.

State Research Universities and Undergraduate Education

In commenting on the latest US News rankings of colleges, I noted that state research universities like Illinois and Texas are ranked with or below schools that have much weaker faculties. But I also noted that such schools are big, which often counts against the undergraduate experience. And then I posed the question whether their bigness really meant the undergraduate experience was inferior to schools with less distinguished faculties.

Illinois undergraduate Lucas Wiman writes in response with one perspective:

"I'm an Illinois mathematics student...I transferred from Illinois State University in fall 2003, and I've taken 10 classes here (4 of which were graduate courses). The graduate courses were wonderful and fascinating, and I learned quite a bit from them. Taking graduate courses was my goal in coming here, so the school has certainly improved my undergraduate education enormously. However, it did so by way of its excellent graduate program. The undergraduate
courses have been jokes. Enormous lecture halls, ridiculous assignments, easy tests. In an Asian literature course, I got a B without reading any of the assigned reading, and going to class 50% of the time. There have been 3 courses in which I only went to tests and got A's. I've heard that in CS courses, 60% is typically curved up to an A. That was indeed the case in one CS course that I took, and people still complained about how difficult the course was. One could even write 'I don't know' to any question and get 25% credit.

"The truth about this school is that the undergraduate program is little more than a bureaucratic requirement. The resources are certainly there--if you were to go to class regularly, do all the assigned readings, and work hard on your own, you could get a decent education. But that is true at all universities, including community colleges. Here there is nothing in grades which substantially reflects learning, and since most students don't care about anything but their grades, little learning actually takes place."

I've opened comments, and invite other perspectives, especially from undergraduate students or graduates of state research universities. (Faculty are, of course, welcome to comment as well.) Is Mr. Wiman's report typical of the undergraduate experience at places like Illinois? Please do not post anonymously and identify who you are (e.g., faculty member at Illinois, student at Wisconsin, etc.).

UPDATE: Many very interesting comments posted below--if you've read this far, do read the comments. Thanks to all who have posted as well.

The first "Philosopher's Carnival" is...

...here.

The language of "eternal fascism"

A fine essay by Henry Giroux (though the line, above, comes from Umberto Eco); an excerpt:

"One of the more significant marks of an authoritarian society is its willingness to distort the truth while simultaneously suppressing dissent. For instance, Umberto Eco argues that one element of proto-fascism is the rise of an Orwellian version of Newspeak, or what he labels as the language of 'eternal fascism,' whose purpose is to produce 'an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax [whose consequence is] to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.' Under the Bush administration, especially since the horrible events of September 11th, we have witnessed an extension of the concept of war to include not only traditional, strategic, defense-oriented objectives, but also to discipline civil society, reproduce all aspects of public life in the image of official power, and inject the ideology of militarism as the very foundation of politics. Accompanying this increasing form of discursive and material repression is an attempt to refashion the tools of language, sound, and image in an effort to diminish the capacity of the American public to think critically. As the critical power of language is reduced in official discourse to the simulacra of communication, it becomes more difficult for the American public to engage in critical debates, translate private considerations into public concerns, and recognize the distortions and lies that underlie much of the current government policies. What happens to critical language under the emergence of official Newspeak can be seen in the various ways in which the Bush administration and its official supporters both misrepresent by mis-naming government policies and simply engage in lying to cover up their own regressive politics and policies.

"Many people have pointed to Bush himself as a mangler of the English language, but this charge simply repeats the obvious while privatizing a much more important issue connecting language to power. Bush’s discursive ineptness may be fodder for late night comics, but such analyses miss the more strategic issue of how the Bush administration actually manipulates discourse. For instance, Bush describes himself as a 'reformer' while he promotes policies that expand corporate welfare, give tax benefits to the rich, and 'erode the financial capacity of the state to undertake any but the most minimal welfare functions....'

"Official Newspeak also trades in the rhetoric of fear in order to manipulate the public into state of servile political dependency and unquestioning ideological support. Fear and its attendant use of moral panics create not only a rhetorical umbrella to promote other agendas, but also a sense of helplessness and cynicism throughout the body politic. Hence, Bush’s increased dependency upon issuing terror and security alerts and panic-inducing references to 9/11 is almost always framed in Manichean language of absolute good and evil. Bush’s doublespeak also employs the discourse of evangelicalism, and its attendant suggestion that whatever wisdom Bush has results from his direct communion with God--a position not unlike that of Moses on Mount Sinai, and which, of course, cannot be challenged by mere mortals....

"While all governments sometimes resort to misrepresentations and lies, Bush’s doublespeak makes such action central to its maintenance of political power and its manipulation of the media and the public. Language is used in this context to say one thing, but to actually mean its opposite. This type of discourse mimics George Orwell’s dystopian world of 1984 where the Ministry of Truth actually produces lies and the Ministry of Love is actually used to torture people. Ruth Rosen points out that the Bush administration engages in a kind of doublespeak right out of Orwell’s novel. For instance, Bush’s Healthy Forest Initiative 'allows increased logging of protected wilderness. The ‘Clear Skies’ initiative permits greater industrial air pollution....'"

"Persons without conscience"

Kurt Vonnegut poses the question of the moment:

"What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?"

Fair and Balanced

Help me out here, readers: did Glenn "no bit of right-wing sliminess is beneath me" Reynolds devote this much space to the fact that Dick Cheney is a draft dodger and George Bush went AWOL? (At least the latter are facts!)

(Whenever I mention Professor Reynolds, I get some puzzled queries from readers in the real world: "Who is this non-entity? Why do you even mention this guy?" Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, so he is part of one of my professional universes. Among scholars, he is known for some well-regarded articles on the Second Amendment right to bear arms a decade or so ago. But his primary distinction is that he started blogging before everyone else, and so his right-wing news-and-link site Instapundit now gets about 150,000 hits per day. There are obviously lots of not-very-bright, right-wing shills working the blogosphere, including some who are also professors; but for the combination of impact, creepiness, and sometimes sheer dopiness, Professor Reynolds really is in a class by himself.)

Hugo Chavez's Crimes in Venezuela

Here's a useful catalogue, via Red Constantino:

"For many, the nature of the change that Chavez is driving has become the central reason behind the sustained attempts to undermine the Chavez government. The disparity of agendas is glaring. The opposition continues to promise, for instance, a return to free market economic policies, a platform welcomed by international financial leaders and institutions like the International Monetary Fund; Chavez is opposed to it.

"'We are building an economy at the service of human beings,' said Nora Castaneda, the president of Banca Mujer (Women's Development Bank), of the Chavez administration's goals, 'not human beings at the service of the economy.'

"For the first time in Venezuela's history, government authority has been established decisively over how the Venezuelan oil industry - the fifth largest exporter in the world - is to be run and for whose benefit. Oil money is now re-channeled towards financing immeasurable employment, health, education and literacy missions throughout the country for the destitute of Venezuela, specifically for women.

"At least 65 percent of Venezuelan households are headed by women and the Chavez government during the drafting of the 2000 constitution ensured that this fact was reflected in Venezuela's framing document. Among it's progressive provisions, the constitution recognizes women's unwaged caring work as economically productive, entitling housewives to social security.

"It was no surprise, Selma James noted, that in 2002 women of African and indigenous descent led the masses who descended from the hills to reverse the elite-sponsored and U.S.-backed putsch which briefly ousted Chavez, 'thereby saving their constitution, their president, their democracy, their revolution.'

"Over 250,000 children now have access to secondary education--children 'whose social status excluded them from this privilege during the ancien regime.' In poor districts, 11,000 neighborhood clinics have been established, the health budget has tripled and 10,000 Cuban doctors have been fielded to boost health care services in impoverished areas. There is also an ongoing campaign to provide citizenship to thousands of long-term immigrants....

"And yet, despite his belligerent attitude towards the Bush administration, despite his glaring differences with the U.S. government concerning Latin American hemispheric economic integration, despite his government's openly expressed dissenting position on geopolitical issues such as the war on Iraq, the U.S. government continues to do business with the Chavez government and import 14 percent of its oil - equivalent to 1.5 million barrels per day, which was the average even before the election of Chavez - from Venezuela....

"'Are we aiming in Venezuela today for the abolition of private property or a classless society?' Chavez continued. 'I don't think so. But if I'm told that because of that reality you can't do anything to help the poor . . . then I say "We part company". I will never accept that there can be no redistribution of wealth in society. Our upper classes don't even like paying taxes. That's one reason why they hate me. We said "You must pay your taxes". I believe it's better to die in battle, rather than hold aloft a very revolutionary and very pure banner, and do nothing . . . That position often strikes me as very convenient, a good excuse . . . Try and make your revolution, go into combat, advance a little, even if it's only a millimeter, in the right direction, instead of dreaming about utopias.'"

No wonder the U.S. Government hates him, and no wonder two-thirds of the people support him.

Your Definitive Set of Links on the Bushie Smear Campaign on John Kerry

Michael Froomkin (Law, Miami) has all the relevant links here.

UPDATE: This site wipes the floor with the "Smear Boat Veterans."

Yet more on Legal Realism...

...from the Curmudgeonly Clerk, who links to some earlier discussions as well.

"The Warlords of America"

John Pilger via Lew Rockwell; an excerpt:

"During the past 60 years, only once has Congress voted to limit the president's 'right' to terrorise other countries. This aberration, the Clark Amendment 1975, a product of the great anti-Vietnam war movement, was repealed in 1985 by Ronald Reagan.

"During Reagan's assaults on central America in the 1980s, liberal voices such as Tom Wicker of the New York Times, doyen of the 'doves,' seriously debated whether or not tiny, impoverished Nicaragua was a threat to the United States. These days, terrorism having replaced the red menace, another fake debate is under way....

"Supremacy is the essence of Americanism; only the veil changes or slips. In 1976, the Democrat Jimmy Carter announced 'a foreign policy that respects human rights.' In secret, he backed Indonesia's genocide in East Timor and established the mujahedin in Afghanistan as a terrorist organisation designed to overthrow the Soviet Union, and from which came the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It was the liberal Carter, not Reagan, who laid the ground for George W Bush. In the past year, I have interviewed Carter's principal foreign policy overlords – Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, and James Schlesinger, his defence secretary. No blueprint for the new imperialism is more respected than Brzezinski's. Invested with biblical authority by the Bush gang, his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives describes American priorities as the economic subjugation of the Soviet Union and the control of central Asia and the Middle East. His analysis says that 'local wars' are merely the beginning of a final conflict leading inexorably to world domination by the US. 'To put it in a terminology that harkens back to a more brutal age of ancient empires,' he writes, 'the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.'

"It may have been easy once to dismiss this as a message from the lunar right. But Brzezinski is mainstream....

"Cast an eye over the rest of the world. As Iraq has crowded the front pages, American moves into Africa have attracted little attention. Here, the Clinton and Bush policies are seamless. In the 1990s, Clinton's African Growth and Opportunity Act launched a new scramble for Africa. Humanitarian bombers wonder why Bush and Blair have not attacked Sudan and 'liberated' Darfur, or intervened in Zimbabwe or the Congo. The answer is that they have no interest in human distress and human rights, and are busy securing the same riches that led to the European scramble in the late 19th century by the traditional means of coercion and bribery, known as multilateralism.

"The Congo and Zambia possess 50 per cent of world cobalt reserves; 98 per cent of the world's chrome reserves are in Zimbabwe and South Africa. More importantly, there is oil and natural gas in Africa from Nigeria to Angola, and in Higleig, south-west Sudan. Under Clinton, the African Crisis Response Initiative (Acri) was set up in secret. This has allowed the US to establish 'military assistance programmes' in Senegal, Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Benin, Algeria, Niger, Mali and Chad. Acri is run by Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina, a Cuban exile who took part in the 1961 Bay of Pigs landing and went on to be a special forces officer in Vietnam and Laos, and who, under Reagan, helped lead the Contra invasion of Nicaragua. The pedigrees never change.

"None of this is discussed in a presidential campaign in which John Kerry strains to out-Bush Bush. The multilateralism or 'muscular internationalism' that Kerry offers in contrast to Bush's unilateralism is seen as hopeful by the terminally naive; in truth, it beckons even greater dangers. Having given the American elite its greatest disaster since Vietnam, writes the historian Gabriel Kolko, Bush 'is much more likely to continue the destruction of the alliance system that is so crucial to American power. One does not have to believe the worse the better, but we have to consider candidly the foreign policy consequences of a renewal of Bush's mandate . . . As dangerous as it is, Bush's re-election may be a lesser evil.' With Nato back in train under President Kerry, and the French and Germans compliant, American ambitions will proceed without the Napoleonic hindrances of the Bush gang....

"The campaign against Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is indicative [of the political and intellectual climate]. The film is not radical and makes no outlandish claims; what it does is push past those guarding the boundaries of 'respectable' dissent. That is why the public applauds it. It breaks the collusive codes of journalism, which it shames. It allows people to begin to deconstruct the nightly propaganda that passes for news: in which 'a sovereign Iraqi government pursues democracy' and those fighting in Najaf and Fallujah and Basra are always 'militants' and 'insurgents' or members of a 'private army,' never nationalists defending their homeland and whose resistance has probably forestalled attacks on Iran, Syria or North Korea.

"The real debate is neither Bush nor Kerry, but the system they exemplify; it is the decline of true democracy and the rise of the American 'national security state' in Britain and other countries claiming to be democracies, in which people are sent to prison and the key thrown away and whose leaders commit capital crimes in faraway places, unhindered, and then, like the ruthless Blair, invite the thug they install to address the Labour Party conference. The real debate is the subjugation of national economies to a system which divides humanity as never before and sustains the deaths, every day, of 24,000 hungry people. The real debate is the subversion of political language and of debate itself and perhaps, in the end, our self-respect."

Another friend of fascism takes a beating

Eric Muller (North Carolina, Law) has usefully collected a quite devastating set of critical comments on a recent book by right-wing pretty-girl pundit Michelle Malkin defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. (Professor Muller himself has written a scholarly book on the subject.) Ms. Malkin's primary qualifications, other than being a mindless right-winger and photogenic, are that (you guessed it) she's a journalist. Mr. Kraus?

UPDATE: More on Malkin and the right-wing propaganda machine here.