Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

A Splinter in Philosophy or just some departments in flux?

In one of the comments threads, Brian Leiter gives voice to a view he has been promulgating for a while about the philosophical community in the United States. As he writes:

 

“there is "agreement over methodology and approach" within particular sub-communities of English-speaking philosophers (e.g., the Princeton-MIT-Rutgers-Arizona-ANU nexus, or the Berkeley-Chicago-Pittsburgh-Harvard nexus, etc.).”

 

“I have it on rather good authority that when members of the Rutgers Department voted several years ago on the philosopher who had had the worst influence on the field, every member of the faculty but one voted for Wittgenstein (one voted for Kant, for rather oddball reasons). Obviously the vote would have been different at Pittsburgh or Berkeley. This might suggest that precisely what there is NOT is "agreement on methodology and approach" among English-speaking philosophers.”

 

I take it Brian is claiming that there are divisions between kinds of philosophy emerging in the United States. I used to think that Brian’s claim was right, and even moderated a discussion about it last time I blogged here. There is, after all, some evidence for Brian’s claim. In areas outside of ethics, the universities that Rutgers competes for graduate students with are Princeton, NYU, MIT, and occasionally Michigan. We don’t compete with Berkeley, Chicago, Pittsburgh (except in phil science), or Harvard (or at least we certainly don’t lose prospective students to them). At an APA last year, I talked with a Harvard-related person who denounced “Rutgers-NYU mainstream metaphysics and epistemology” as shallow for hours. Late at night at APA parties, Pittsburgh graduates will tell MIT graduates that they’re not really deep, and ugly besides.

 

However, in past year, I have changed my mind (essentially coming around to the view that Alva Noe was urging last year). There is a lot of evidence against Brian’s claim. Try as you might, you’re not going to find any differences whatsoever in the kind of work done by Pittsburgh graduates in M&E such as John MacFarlane, Doug Patterson, and Ram Neta, Harvard graduates such as Michael Glanzberg and Stephen Gross, MIT graduates such as Delia Graff, myself, or Zoltan Szabo, and Chicago graduates such as Robin Jeshion. Harvard graduates such as Alva Noe and Chicago graduates such as Jesse Prinz are as naturalistic as Rutgers graduates. MIT graduates such as Richard Heck are as distinguished contributors to the literature on history of analytic philosophy as Ian Proops, the best and most successful of the Harvard history of analytic students. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find even Harvard professors maintaining that the most prominent Rutgers graduates, such as Michael Strevens, are shallow. There is a difference in the kind of personal connections we have to older senior figures, but that’s about it.

[Update: I've been convinced by the comments I've received that my speculations about the source of complaints of the shallowness of "mainstream" M&E were too speculative. So I've replaced them with the following paragraph, since the central purpose of my post was actually supposed to be that I don't see the big difference between two "nexuses" of philosophy among my peers in other departments.]

So what is the source of the so-called "splinter" idea? Well, I suspect it is because Berkeley and Harvard have suffered serious declines after losing so many distinguished faculty to retirement and death. That fact alone is bound to cause some ill-will towards departments that now occupy the status they once did. After all, once upon a time, "mainstream" meant Berkeley and Harvard, and now it doesn't.

Whatever grumbling there is about the evils of mainstream philosophy among certain faculty at those institutions, Berkeley and Harvard’s younger faculty are uniformly excellent mainstream philosophers, who are friends and regular interlocutors with their peers at the leading departments. The most likely scenario is therefore that the two departments will slowly recover past glory, and all this talk about different kinds of philosophy will be forgotten.

The comment thread on this post should be fun...

   
                                                                                        -Jason

Tenure economics

I was thinking about posting this anyway, but it's quite relevant to some of the things Jason says in the post below.   You see the occasional conservative argument that tenure is a corrupt institution designed to give cushy lifetime employment to soft left-wingers who don't want to deal with the rigors of competition.  But most labor economists I think view tenure as a pretty rational market adjustment to the particular circumstances of the academic labor market.  For a couple of reasons.

One is precisely the reason Jason discusses in the post below -- the mixed motives of senior faculty in hiring junior faculty.  Academia is a field where it is very difficult for outsiders to assess quality at the cutting edge, and where (partly for this reason) departments self-govern.  Concretely this means that it is generally senior faculty within a department who are deciding what junior faculty to hire in that department.  If there were no tenure, then senior faculty would in effect be hiring their direct competitors for future employment in the department.  There would be a very strong incentive not to hire people who you felt might become better than you and throw you out of a job.  Therefore tenure makes it possible for the senior faculty to manage the department.  Without that you would have to have some kind of cumbersome and difficult external review process for every new hire.  But note that the difference from Jason's discussion is that the problem is within-department; there's no need to assume that senior people want to blackball junior people within the entire profession.  Within-department is really where incentives for senior people to game the system would become pretty overwhelming without tenure.

There are a couple of other reasons tenure makes economic sense as well.  In most academic fields people are asked to devote many years to learning very specialized knowledge.  There is a very thin market for their services, with often only a few institutions in the world that would pay them for their specialization.  It's reasonable for people to ask for job security in exchange for devoting a lot of time to learning highly specialized knowledge; otherwise they'd essentially be screwed if they lost their jobs.   The alternative would be to pay people very high wages to compensate them for the risk they take in specializing so strongly.  Academic institutions probably couldn't afford the wage premium.  Think about the wages that would be necessary to attract people to spend five years in grad school followed by an uncertain job market if there wasn't the prize of tenure at the end.  Essentially, academic institutions are promising something they feel they can afford to give (freedom and security) in exchange for something many can't afford to give (lots of money). 

Ex ante then, tenure makes a lot of economic sense.  Ex post (once people have received tenure), there may be a moral hazard problem in the sense that some people slack off.  But those costs can well be worth it once you look at the utility of tenure for the institution over the overall academic career.  If tenure didn't exist, we'd probably have to invent it.

By the way, these arguments are strengthened to my mind by the fact that the most decentralized and competitive higher education market in the world (the U.S.) is also the one that makes the most universal use of tenure.

-- Marcus

Tenure and Academic Evaluation

[Full disclosure: I’ve benefited immensely from the current system of evaluating academics]

Evaluating philosophers is fun (indeed, stay tuned this week for my list of ‘top ten most overrated New York Area philosophers’). But I’m increasingly suspicious of the way philosophers are evaluated in the field, and I’m sure my concerns here hold for many other disciplines besides philosophy. Academic evaluation in philosophy (e.g. tenure review) is performed by the most senior members of our profession. The views of the most senior figures carry enormous weight. I guess the natural thought here is that the most senior figures in an area are the most likely reliable and fair minded judges of who among younger participants is doing the best work. But I think there are a lot of reasons to think this natural thought is incorrect.

First, and most obviously, conflict of interest. It is in the interest of the most senior members of the profession to support the careers of those younger scholars who share their views, or at the very least their conception of what is important in the field.  Supporting scholars who disagree with one’s views is dangerous; it may ensure a shorter lifespan for one’s work. Even more clearly, supporting scholars who have an alternative conception of the discipline is an even more reliable way to undermine one’s own interests. A system that expects senior scholars to make objective evaluations of younger scholars that obviously involve conflicts with the older statesperson’s public statements and stated views places an unfair burden on those senior scholars. Finally, and most worryingly, a number of academics possess what one might call “the limited attention space” conception of the field. They think that there is a limited amount of attention in the field, and any attention that is drawn to someone else is attention that is taken away from them. I myself am convinced that the limited attention space conception of the field is incorrect; my work has clearly been made better by engaging directly and openly with the work of many others. But whether it is right or wrong, the limited attention space conception of the field is widely assumed, often tacitly, and sometimes explicitly. If “the underlying dynamic is a struggle over intellectual territory of limited size”, as Randall Collins has maintained (p. 81 of his The Sociology of Philosophies), then the very fact that a younger scholar is particularly promising should lead a rational, self-interested senior figure to try to subvert her career, whether that younger scholar’s work conflicts with the senior figure’s work or not. A system that is predicated on the irrationality of its members is not a very good system.

Secondly (and I’m more hesitant here, since there are many exceptions) it is my experience that (generally) the more senior one becomes, the more one loses contact with (broadly speaking) the profession at large. My peers in the profession and their juniors have quite a good sense not only of what others around their career stage and younger are working on, but also have read a good deal of their work. When I meet a philosopher, if she has published a few articles in Metaphysics and Epistemology, broadly construed, I generally am aware of some paper she has written. But my sense is that this isn’t true of most very eminent philosophers over a certain age (I don’t hit the journals as much as I did three years ago, and I’m just 36). I don’t know what accounts for this, and certainly there are notable exceptions. But by and large, I encounter a lot of very distinguished philosophers who have only a dim sense at one is happening outside their sub-disciplines. Yet these are the people many administrations rely upon to give them a sense of “what is happening” (e.g. it is the most senior philosophers who make up the constituency of visiting committees). In my experience, the best way to find out “what’s happening” in the profession is to ask advanced graduate students.

It seems to me that the system of having the most eminent and distinguished scholars be the gatekeepers for advancement has failed in Europe. In most European countries, a few grand eminences control distribution of the jobs in that country. This has been very good for American academia, because they often choose their students or followers for distinguished chairs rather than the younger scholars doing the most innovative work, and the latter migrate to us. My suspicion is that the American system thrives because it is so large, relative to the systems of individual European countries. If one publishes work that attracts a lot of attention, then even if some senior figures think you are “getting too much attention”, some department will hire you anyway. But that suggests that what is guides advancement in the long run is doing work that attracts a great deal of interest, and the system of evaluation by the most senior members of the profession is only an impediment.

Now, what can be done about it? Obviously, evaluation of philosophers isn’t a science. But I have never encountered people appealing to citation indices in discussing whether to hire someone, or any other kind of measure along that dimension. I am not suggesting that this sort of data should be relied upon in a definitive way. Nothing is a substitute for close reading of work (and for the reasons given above, certainly “getting more letters” from senior figures isn’t either!). But the fact that someone has published a good deal of work, and it has generated a substantive literature among people who are not personally connected to them is a measure of objective evidence of some kind. Since there are good independent reasons to think that high-status academics are going to be particularly resistant to promising younger scholars (whether knowingly or not), we probably should have such evidence available in contexts of evaluation. Of course, one concern here is that the aforementioned measures are not a reliable guide to future productivity, given the short tenure clock. Perhaps this is an argument for extending that clock, then.

                                                                    -Jason

USC offer to Byrne

Alex Byne has been offered a position at the rapidly improving Department of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. So now he has to decide between Boston, Princeton, and Los Angeles. Though I’d love to have him nearby, Alex has been a crucial figure in graduate education at MIT in the last decade, and I’m really pulling for my Alma Mater to retain him (realizing full well that Alex’s chances of getting a film cameo as a philosophy professor are slim to none if he stays in Boston).
                                                                                        -Jason

Catch-all Solutions to Philosophical Problems

I’m now entering my second decade as a professor, and feel like I have amassed enough experience to point out certain trends. I’m not sure if the trends I want to talk about are the “normal science” of philosophy, or if they’ve been particularly noticeable in recent years, as philosophy has gotten more professionalized. What I’ve noticed is that a certain methodology for addressing a philosophical problem will arise in one particular sub-literature, where by “methodology” I mean some kind of quasi-technical mechanism for resolving disputes in any area. Then, that strategy will start to replicate (much like a computer virus); people will apply it to all the other fields where it has not yet been applied. For example, at first fictionalism was advanced to treat the problem of negative existentials; then it was applied by Gideon Rosen to modal metaphysics. In the intervening years, fictionalists have appeared in every discipline (fictionalism about morality, fictionalism about abstract objects, etc.), and in the late 1990s, being on a job-search committee meant wading through endless stacks of papers advocating fictionalism about this or that. Contextualist solutions to philosophical problems arose in a more haphazard way; in philosophical logic, in application to the liar paradox and the sorites paradox, in epistemology to the problem of skepticism. Now, a contextualist solution is part of the standard tool-box of possibilities when faced with an apparent philosophical problem. Now, we’ve got relativism about truth, the idea that the truth of a proposition is relative to an evaluator, and no doubt serving on a junior job search committee will involve wading through stacks of papers applying relativism to this or that apparent dispute.

Over a year ago, Brian Weatherson declared that relativism was going to be a central topic in philosophy in the next decade:

 http://tar.weatherson.net/archives/002685.html

Brian has turned out to be correct. For example, at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in Portland next year (not the MLA!), there are two invited symposiums on Saturday on relative truth; you can spend all day listening to philosophers dispute the topic. It's like fictionalism five years ago.

Over the years, I’ve written papers or chapters of books criticizing fictionalism, contextualism, and relativism. At each point, I thought there were specific features of the methodology and its applications to which I was reacting (and certainly, each strategy raises different issues). But I’ve realized that I have a uniformly negative reaction to methodologies application of which would resolve a host of apparently distinct philosophical problems. I think there are two sources for this. First, I think the philosophical problems are sufficiently distinct from one another that I’m immediately suspicious of any attempt to resolve several of them by appeal to one mechanism (be it covert fictions, context-sensitivity, or relativism). I could be convinced (though I haven’t been so far) that some traditional philosophical problem (be it future contingents, or skepticism, or the problem of abstracta) is due to our failure to recognize context-sensitivity, or truth-relativity, or that we’ve stumbled unknowingly into a fiction. But I think it is prima facie pretty unlikely that the right account of the sorites paradox will have much to do with the right account of skepticism. Secondly, since the methodologies are usually awfully easy to apply, I worry about how to constrain them. In short, each methodology seems to make philosophy too easy. I’m certainly not saying these worries can’t be answered by advocates of catch-all methodologies. Many of the profession’s very best and most careful philosophers are attracted to them. But I do think there is a special burden, when advocating a catch-all methodological solution to a philosophical problem, to respond to these two worries. 

                                                                                                     -Jason

Waynflete Professorship

My colleague John Hawthorne has been offered the Waynflete Professorship of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford. This culminates a series of high-profile offers in recent years that John has declined to stay at Rutgers, including Princeton and Yale. John is from England, so we all realize this will be sorely tempting for him, as will of course the opportunity to join Timothy Williamson as a colleague.

I've known John since 1996, and have followed his work and his career with great interest. I'm certain there are jobs John didn't get basically because his PhD was from Syracuse. So the arc of John's career is a big victory for the possibility of advancement on the basis of merit in philosophy (John started out at the University of New South Wales, then went to Arizona State, then back to Syracuse, then was hired at Rutgers as part of the 'big three' hiring of Hawthorne, Sider, and Zimmerman, and now I guess is contemplating a step down to Oxford). I wonder if there are similar cases of rapid advancement to the top of the profession from a mid-rank graduate program in (say) economics?
                                                                     -Jason

Analytic and Continental

As everyone knows, there is supposed to be a large difference between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. The problem is of course that nobody has any clear idea of what analytic philosophy and continental philosophy are. We’re all very good at spotting clear instances of analytic philosophy (e.g. anything by David Lewis) and continental philosophy (e.g. anything by Lacan). But it’s very hard to spot any distinction of content between analytic and continental philosophy. For almost every doctrine espoused by continental philosophers, there is some analytic philosopher who has given mind-numbingly dull step-by-step arguments for that conclusion.

Two examples from the most recent literature in philosophy are pragmatic encroachment into knowledge and relativism about truth. According to advocates of pragmatic encroachment (such as myself, John Hawthorne, and Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath), what distinguishes knowledge from true belief is not just a matter of traditionally epistemic factors. One needs to take into account the putative knower’s practical situation as well; I think a similar thesis is true about other epistemic notions. The idea that ordinary epistemic notions are “impure” in this way does not seem like a traditionally analytic conclusion. According to relativists about truth, two people can disagree, and both be correct, since the truth of certain kinds of claims is relative to an evaluator. Both of these theses are ones that are usually associated with figures in the continental tradition (the former perhaps somewhat more Germanic, and the latter somewhat more French). An example from classic literature is skepticism about meaning facts. Different arguments for skepticism about determinate meaning-facts are central to both traditions (e.g. compare Derrida’s Of Grammatology with Chapter 2 of Quine’s Word and Object).

 So if the conclusions don’t distinguish clear instances of analytic philosophy from clear instances of continental philosophy, what does? I am certainly no scholar of continental philosophy. But one hypothesis worth entertaining is that it’s the style in which the philosophy is done which distinguishes it from analytic philosophy, or more precisely, the kind of considerations that are provided (often for very similar conclusions). While an analytic philosopher might give certain arguments for relativism about truth, or the social dimension of rationality, she will do so in such a way as to make vivid her commitment to an inter-subjective standard of rationality or truth according to which her arguments can be judged. In contrast, perhaps continental philosophers (as Marcus suggested to me last night) intend the literary style in which they make their arguments to underscore their view that there is only a spurious distinction between allegedly epistemically pure, truth-tracking disciplines, on the one hand, and literature, on the other.

 
-Jason

The point of my blogging...

Last time we blogged, I was asked by a few people somewhat bemused by what I wrote what message I was trying to communicate by my blogging. I don’t have a message to communicate by my blogging. I’m certainly not blogging because I think I have any brilliant insights (if I think I have a brilliant insight, I try to write a paper or a book). It should be obvious, but I'll say it anyhow: the point of my blogging is to entertain people who are procrastinating.

-Jason

Reminder: the Brothers Stanley...

...philosopher Jason and economist Marcus will be guest-blogging Nov. 28 through Dec. 4!  I'll be back on Dec. 5. 

Enjoy!

Perry on Philosophy and Philosophers

Charming, short essay by John Perry (Philosophy, Stanford); a taste:

[A] thought about this wonderful and interesting group of people, my philosophical colleagues. I have a very distinct memory of arriving at the Eastern Meetings of the American Philosophical Association some years back, when they were held at a hotel in Baltimore. The meetings began just after a National Football League playoff game had been played in that city, and the previous occupants of the hotel seemed to be mainly people connected with this game. Since I was flying from the west coast, and had to attend some meeting or other in the early afternoon of the first day, I arrived the night before most of the other participants. I was able to watch the amazing transformation that took place as the football crowd checked out and the philosophy crowd checked in. The NFL people were large, some very large, most quite good-looking, confident, well-dressed, big-tipping, successful-looking folk; the epitome of what Americans should be, I suppose, according to the dominant ethos. We philosophers were mostly average-sized, mostly clearly identifiable as shabby pedagogues, clutching our luggage to avoid falling into unnecessary tipping situations. We included many bearded men--- some elegant, some scruffy--- all sorts of interesting intellectual looking women; none of the philosophers, not even the big ones and the beautiful ones, were likely to be mistaken for the football players, cheerleaders, sportscasters and others who were checking out. The looks from the hotel staff members, who clearly sensed that they were in for a few days of less expansive tipping and more modest bar-tabs, were a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. The talk, as philosophers recognized each other and struck up conversations, was unlike anything that ever had been or would be heard in that hotel lobby: whether there are alternative concrete possible worlds; whether there is anything in Heidegger not better said already by Husserl; whether animals should be eaten; not to mention topics that aroused truly deep passions, mostly related to proper names.

What a wonderful group of people, I thought, and how wonderful, and lucky, that the world has managed to find a niche for us. Even if philosophy had no real intellectual content at all --- was as silly as astrology or numerology certainly are, or as I suspect, in dark moments, that certain other parts of the university are--- it would still be wonderful that it existed, simply to keep these people occupied. Especially me. What would I be doing without this wonderful institution? Helping people in some small town in Nebraska with their taxes and small legal problems, I suppose, and probably not doing it very well.

Friday poem: "I Am Knocking"

I Am Knocking

I am knocking on doors
soliciting knowledge
how elegant English
greets me in silence

I am dancing with words
amazed at my power
wonder of language
I speak only nonsense

I am probing the depths
my limits to fathom
magical voice says
no bottom to bottom

I am wearing a suit
not to be noticed
blessing of charity
anyway naked

I am staying inside
prisoner of conscience
kindly my neighbors
board up the door

I am facing the mirror
to see who I am
munificent fortune
cancels the light

8/24-11/12/96

Copyright 1996 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Oliver Kamm, Marko Attila Hoare, and the Importance of Being Able to Read

All schoolchildren take note:  one reason it is really important to learn how to read well is because if you don't, you might grow up and make a real ass of yourself in public, and do so repeatedly, all because of inadequate reading skills.  Of course, learning how to read well is no protection against pathological dishonesty.  As to what explains Oliver Kamm--that he can't read or he's a pathological liar--it is really hard to know.

To recap:  The Guardian published a smear piece on Noam Chomsky by a juvenile journalist, one Emma Brockes, which intentionally misrepresented his positions and views; the reader's editor for the publication agreed, apologized to Professor Chomsky, and withdrew the entire interview from the web site, thus acknowledging it for the piece of tabloid trash that it was.  (Will Ms. Brockes drop it from her resume, one wonders?  Or perhaps she'll list it with a parenthetical afterwards explaining "withdrawn by The Guardian because dishonest and incompetent"?)

This has created a conundrum for professional Chomsky-hater Oliver Kamm, who had defended the original smear, and so was suitably humiliated by the fact that the publication in question acknowledged the correctness of the complaints, going so far as to take the remarkable step of removing the interview from its web site.  Mr. Kamm's "response" to this turn of events reads almost as a parody of someone who can't respond on the merits, and so can only flail and posture:

I have devoted much time over the last few days to assessing The Guardian’s correction to Emma Brockes’s interview with Noam Chomsky, and the newspaper's withdrawal of that interview from its site. I’m sorry not to have written more speedily, but necessarily this has been a painstaking exercise. The inquiries are now complete and the evidence is in place. This, in broad terms, is my conclusion.

Instead of stating his conclusion, however, he proceeds to the following:

I have been reading Chomsky for around 25 years, and in that time have read, I believe, every political book he has ever written or (as many of them comprise undemanding ‘interviews’) otherwise produced. I wrote the ‘anti' piece for Prospect magazine’s coverage of its poll for top global intellectual last month...

Curiously, no one had contested Mr. Kamm's credentials as a Chomsky-hater.

But, while counting myself well-informed on his works...

At least Mr. Kamm has one strong supporter!

...I had still not fully appreciated till this past weekend how insubstantial are his objections to the Guardian interview, how tawdry were his interventions on the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and how excessively generous has been my previous assessment of his position.

Still nothing of substance, just an increase in the rhetorical volume.

At this stage, I shall not be setting down in detail the conclusions that I, working with two other writers who have experience of Chomsky’s methods, have come to.  The reason is that we hope our evidence will generate a correction – a real one this time – to The Guardian’s ‘correction’, and the proper course in making that case is to present it in private rather than publish it beforehand.

One plausible translation of this odd display would be as follows:  "Having been publically humiliated by the Guardian's decision, and unable to respond on the merits, I'm hoping enough time will pass so that enough of the public will forget what an untrustworthy buffoon I am and I can go back to smearing Chomsky as though I had some credibility."  Further evidence for this translation of Mr. Kamm's real meaning comes from the concluding line:

This is all I have to say on the matter now in public. Be assured that the case is being worked on in private, and minutely.

As one correspondent put it, this is "a lot of pretentious, pompous, pseudo-forensic windbag tripe."  It's actually not even grown-up:  qua rhetoric, it's an embarrassment.

If we peel away the sophomoric posturing about secret and on-going research etc., there are actually only two substantive points offered by Mr. Kamm, only one of which is actually his own.  The bulk of his substantive "reply" is given over to citing someone else's research, that of Dr. Marko Attila Hoare, a research fellow at Cambridge.  Dr. Hoare, to whom we'll turn in a moment, is also a bit heavy on rhetorical posturing, and also has some rather striking lapses in reading skills, but at least his response has some content (apparently Dr. Hoare was able to complete his secret research in time to share it with the public!).

Let us recall, first, the content of the Guardian's corrections and apologies:

The readers' editor has considered a number of complaints from Noam Chomsky concerning an interview with him by Emma Brockes published in G2, the second section of the Guardian, on October 31. He has found in favour of Professor Chomsky on three significant complaints.

Principal among these was a statement by Ms Brockes that in referring to atrocities committed at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war he had placed the word "massacre" in quotation marks. This suggested, particularly when taken with other comments by Ms Brockes, that Prof Chomsky considered the word inappropriate or that he had denied that there had been a massacre. Prof Chomsky has been obliged to point out that he has never said or believed any such thing. The Guardian has no evidence whatsoever to the contrary and retracts the statement with an unreserved apology to Prof Chomsky.

So, first issue:  Ms. Brockes suggested that Chomsky denied there were "massacres" in Srebrenica.  In fact, there is no evidence of such denials.  Neither Mr. Kamm nor Dr. Hoare produce any such evidence either, as we will see.  Thus, the correction and apology were, by their tacit admission, warranted.  The second major point:

The headline used on the interview, about which Prof Chomsky also complained, added to the misleading impression given by the treatment of the word massacre. It read: Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated? A: My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough.

No question in that form was put to Prof Chomsky. This part of the interview related to his support for Diana Johnstone (not Diane as it appeared in the published interview) over the withdrawal of a book in which she discussed the reporting of casualty figures in the war in former Yugoslavia. Both Prof Chomsky and Ms Johnstone, who has also written to the Guardian, have made it clear that Prof Chomsky's support for Ms Johnstone, made in the form of an open letter with other signatories, related entirely to her right to freedom of speech. The Guardian also accepts that and acknowledges that the headline was wrong and unjustified by the text.

So, second issue:  Chomsky never said he regretted not supporting more strongly "those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated."  He was never asked that question.  Printing answers to questions not asked is generally considered bad journalism.  Neither Mr. Kamm nor Dr. Hoare disputes any of this, and so they tacitly admit that the correction and apology were warranted here as well.

The entire dispute, then, boils down to the second part of the correction quoted above, and in particular The Guardian's statement that, "Both Prof Chomsky and Ms Johnstone, who has also written to the Guardian, have made it clear that Prof Chomsky's support for Ms Johnstone, made in the form of an open letter with other signatories, related entirely to her right to freedom of speech."  Here, now, Mr. Kamm's one substantive point of response to this part of The Guardian's correction:

The Guardian’s correction, written by its readers’ editor, Ian Mayes, states: “Both Prof Chomsky and Ms Johnstone… have made it clear that Prof Chomsky's support for Ms Johnstone, made in the form of an open letter with other signatories, related entirely to her right to freedom of speech.” Mayes states that The Guardian accepts this claim. Yet if you consult Chomsky’s ‘open letter’ to Ordfront in 2003 you find a diferent line. Referring to Serb war crimes, Chomsky states (emphasis added): "Johnstone argues -- and, in fact, clearly demonstrates -- that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication."

Notice, first, that the "open letter" Mr. Kamm references is not the "open letter" The Guardian references, which was a group letter with multiple signatories, not a statement by Chomsky.  The statement by Chomsky to which Mr. Kamm refers is not concerned mainly with Ms. Johnstone's freedom of expression, but with rather odd criticisms of her work (over which Mr. Kamm passes in silence).  That Chomsky believes that Johnstone "clearly demonstrates...that a good deal of what has been charged [with regard to Serbian atrocities] has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication" doesn't show that he denies that there were either war crimes or massacres; indeed, if one actually reads the statement Mr. Kamm cites, it acknowledges both, and expresses indirectly skepticism only about the charge of genocide (about which more, below).

So while The Guardian may have been correct that the open letter it referenced concerned a defense only of Ms. Johnstone's freedom of expression, the letter Mr. Kamm references shows that, elsewhere, Chomsky has defended Ms. Johnstone on the merits of some of her work.  None of this, quite obviously, has any bearing on the appropriateness of the Guardian's actual correction and apology for the fake question-and-answer.

Remarkably, then, despite all the huffing and puffing about teams of researchers, toiling away in secret, what Mr. Kamm offers up is, to put the matter gently, rather thin, and not actually relevant to the main errors which the Guardian acknowledged. 

In this regard, it was probably wise of Mr. Kamm to cite Dr. Hoare's intervention which, while also rhetorically high-handed, does after many paragraphs finally get to a point of substance:

The big question is, of course, does Chomsky really deny the Srebrenica massacre ? Or, if he does not deny it outright, does he put such a spin on it that he denies it to all intents and purposes ?

To his credit, Dr. Hoare, in his first question, identifies the actual issue.  Alas, his second question constitutes tacit admission as to what the actual answer to the first question is:  no, Chomsky does not "really deny the Srebrenica massacre"--for if he did, evidence of the denial would be quoted, instead of having to settle for the suspicious "all intents and purposes" denial--which, by the law of the excluded middle, isn't a denial.

It turns out, though, that Dr. Hoare can't even saddle Chomsky with the "all intents and purposes denial," so he quickly switches gears to pursue Ms. Johnstone; on this, he bears quoting at some length:

Johnstone, for her part, denies it [the massacre] to all intents and purposes. Her book, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (London: Pluto Press, 2002) puts the words ‘Srebrenica massacre’ in quotes (p. 106). She then goes on to argue: ‘In trying to understand what happened at Srebrenica, a number of factors should be taken into account.’ These are, she argues, that Srebrenica and other ‘safe areas’ had ‘served as Muslim military bases under UN protection’; that the ‘Muslim military force stationed in Srebrenica - some 5,000 men under the command of Naser Oric, had carried out murderous raids against nearby Serb villages’; that ‘[Bosnian President] Izetbegovic pulled Naser Oric out of Srebrenica prior to the anticipated Serb offensive, deliberately leaving the enclave undefended’; and that ‘Insofar as Muslims were actually executed following the fall of Srebrenica, such crimes bear all the signs of spontaneous acts of revenge rather than a project of ‘genocide’'. Furthermore: ‘Six years after the summer of 1995, ICTY forensic teams had exhumed 2,631 bodies in the region, and identified fewer than 50. In an area where fighting had raged for years, some of the bodies were certainly of Serbs as well as of Muslims. Of these bodies, 199 were found to have been bound or blindfolded, and must reasonably be presumed on the basis of the material evidence to have been executed.’ She concludes: ‘War crimes ? The Serbs themselves do not deny that crimes were committed. Part of a plan of genocide ? For this there is no evidence whatsoever.’ (pp. 109-118).

I have not read Ms. Johnstone's book, but for purposes of argument, I am willing to grant that Dr. Hoare's characterization of it through selected quotations is accurate.  Now look at how Dr. Hoare characterizes in his own words the material he has just quoted:

To sum up Johnstone’s position on Srebrenica: she blames everything that happened there on the Muslims; claims they provoked the Serb offensive in the first place; then deliberately engineered their own killing; and then exaggerated their own death-toll. She denies that thousands of Muslims were massacred; suggesting there is no evidence for a number higher than 199 - less than 2.5% of the accepted figure of eight thousand. And she eschews the word 'massacre' in favour of 'execution' - as if it were a question of criminals on Death Row, not of innocent civilians.

This is a quite extraordinary recasting of the claims actually quoted.  About the only bit of Dr. Hoare's reading that seems accurate on the evidence he himself adduces is that Ms. Johnstone "denies that thousands of Muslims were massacred":  this is not a denial of massacres, just a denial of their scale.  But even the denial of scale is nothing like Dr. Hoare's rendering:  the passage Dr. Hoare quotes has Ms. Johnstone claiming that 199 of more than 2,600 bodies found showed signs of execution; for no discernible reason, Dr. Hoare translates this to mean that Ms. Johnstone believes only 199 people were massacred, not 8,000.  But unless Ms. Johnstone's view is that only those blindfolded and tied were victims of massacre, and unless her view is that none of the other 2,400+ corpses were victims of massacres, then Dr. Hoare's translation has no merit.  No evidence, however, is adduced to support ascribing either of these views to Ms. Johnstone.  So, too, calling wartime killings by victors "executions" is a perfectly familiar usage (unjust and extralegal executions are still executions); the quotes do not show that Ms. Johnstone's blames "everything" (or even most things) on the Muslims; and so on.

Perhaps Ms. Johnstone's interpretation of events is woefully inadequate, but Dr. Hoare's selective quotation doesn't show Ms. Johnstone to be making the claims with which Dr. Hoare saddles her.  Presumably if she were making such claims, Dr. Hoare would have quoted clear evidence to that effect, instead of a string of quotes which require massive supplementation by Dr. Hoare to constitute the narrative he describes. 

What Dr. Hoare fails to mention is the most natural reading of the remarks he quotes (see especially the final quote from Johnstone):  namely, that Ms. Johnstone acknowledges war crimes by the Serbs, but denies that they constitute "genocide," a term that has an actual meaning in international law:

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:

• (a) Killing members of the group;
• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

So, again, going entirely on the material Dr. Hoare actually quotes, Ms. Johnstone's argument comes to this:  there were killings in Srebenica and Serbian war crimes, but they did not rise to the level of genocide because they were not "committed with intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such," that is, because of their nationality, ethnicity, race or religion.  None of this involves denying that there were massacres, since not every massacre is a case of genocide.  (Whether it was genocide matters, I take it, for other reasons, both pertaining to international law and to the justifications for military intervention given by the U.S. and NATO at the time.)

Dr. Hoare is a specialist in the history of Yugoslavia, and I am not; it is for him and other experts to assess whether Ms. Johnstone's hypothesis about the absence of genocide has any merit.  (The International Criminal Tribunal reached a different conclusion.  And for a different view of Ms. Johnstone's book, see this scholar's assessment, which, while critical, does not raise as objections the issues on which Dr. Hoare focuses, suggesting that he has, indeed, misrepresented the work.)  But he has not shown, in the materials he himself quotes, that she has denied that there were killings and war crimes; she admits that there were (at least based on what Dr. Hoare quotes), but denies they were genocide.

Since, on Dr. Hoare's correct rendering, the only relevant issue is denial--or "all intents and purposes denial"--of massacre (not genocide), then Dr. Hoare's evidence fails to support the charge as to Ms. Johnstone.

Since the rest of Dr. Hoare's "argument" (and now I use the term very loosely) is to show that Chomsky endorses Ms. Johnstone's denial of massacre--a denial which depends on Dr. Hoare's odd misreading of the evidence he quotes--the "argument," even if successful, would still be irrelevant to showing that Chomsky denies that there was a massacare in Srebenica, since Dr. Hoare's reading of Ms. Johnstone is not persuasive.  But even if Ms. Johnstone did deny the killings, Dr. Hoare's "argument" would still be dreadful.  Here is what Dr. Hoare writes:

An open letter to Ordfront, signed by Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and others, stated: 'We regard Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.' In his personal letter to Ordfront in defence of Johnstone, Chomsky wrote: ‘I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important.’ Chomsky makes no criticism here of Johnstone’s massacre denial, or indeed anywhere else - except in the Brockes interview, which he has repudiated. Indeed, he endorses her revisionism: in response to Mikael van Reis's claim that 'She [Johnstone] insists that Serb atrocities - ethnic cleansing, torture camps, mass executions - are western propaganda', Chomsky replies that 'Johnstone argues - and, in fact, clearly demonstrates - that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.'

Books can be "serious and important" and based on "fact and reason" without being correct in all particulars.  That Chomsky has a favorable opinion of Ms. Johnstone's book would not show that he denied a Srebenica massacre, even if Ms. Johnstone's book defended that thesis.  The juxtaposition of the Chomsky quote, to which Mr. Kamm also called attention, with van Reis's claim is Dr. Hoare's doing (read the Chomsky statement yourself--the two quotes are paragraphs apart).  What we said above remains the case:  that Chomsky believes that Johnstone "clearly demonstrates...that a good deal of what has been charged [with regard to Serbian atrocities] has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication" doesn't show that he denies that there were either war crimes or massacres:  much can be fabrication, while some remains absolutely true.  Indeed, if one actually reads Chomsky's statement, it acknowledges both war crimes and massacres, and expresses indirectly skepticism only about the charge of genocide (as apparently Ms. Johnstone does directly).

Rest assured, dear readers, that I do not intend to pursue this matter further.  Mr. Kamm and Dr. Hoare are interesting only as symptoms of certain kinds of intellectual corruption, of which responses to Noam Chomsky (though not only him) often partake.  As I said in an earlier posting on the subject of Chomsky-haters:

Here's what puzzles me about all this. There's plenty to quarrel with Chomsky about (though at least he's worth quarreling with!). One could reasonably say, "I think Chomsky is wrong about X," or "The evidence really doesn't support Chomsky's claim about Y," and so on. But...Chomsky haters...aren't content with engaging Chomsky in argument: they have to establish that he is beyond the pale, that he is intellectually corrupt and dishonest, that it is no longer necessary to take him seriously.

Don't get me wrong--there are plenty of folks who are beyond the pale and intellectually corrupt and dishonest: Donald Luskin, David Horowitz, legions of right-wing dopes in the blogosphere, almost anyone at the Discovery [sic] Institute, all come to mind. Chomsky just isn't one of them, indeed, isn't even close, isn't even on the same planet as these pathological liars and noxious mediocrities.

Why would an intelligent person, even one who disagrees with Chomsky, believe otherwise?

In the case of Mr. Kamm, of course, the answer may be simple:  he may just be dumb.  (There is, I fear, not much on his web site to dissuade one from that interpretation.)  In the case of more learned people, such as Dr. Hoare, one suspects the explanation becomes more complex:  disciplinary territoriality; personal and emotional investment in the issues; ulterior political agendas--all these, and perhaps more, may play some role.

I'll end on an amusing note, by quoting an e-mail from one Andrew Anthony, who apparently is a devoted reader of Mr. Kamm; Mr. Anthony responded to my earlier posting as follows:

Just to check. When you say that you hope Emma Brockes 'will now find a new profession, where she can conduct herself honourably', I take it that you are not satisfied with the results of the campaign against her. Apparently, it's not enough that Chomsky's supporters have gained an apology and retraction and removal of the piece from the website.  For daring to suggest there may be flaws in Chomsky's methodology – and, let's be honest, Chomsky did not just support Diana Johnstone's right to freedom of speech, he wrote 'Johnstone argues -- and, in fact, clearly demonstrates -- that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication' – she should also lose her job. Fair enough,  but please spare us the self-righteous guff about defending the freedom of expression. Chomsky had received pretty close to unbroken and unquestioning approval from the Guardian over
many  years. A journalist breaks ranks with orthodoxy and so she should pay with her career? Oh please! Stop pretending that you care about freedom of speech. Diana Johnstone downgraded Europe's greatest massacre in 50 years to just another wartime incident much like any other, whereas Emma Brockes embarrassed an anti-capitalist into admitting that he had a share portfolio (which his wife takes care of!). The former demands your support in the name of freedom of speech, while the latter deserves to lose her job. Give me a break.

My initial thought was that this somewhat arational ramble must be from a personal friend of Ms. Brockes--and thus strong emotions explained the incoherence--though Mr. Anthony denied that.  My original posting said nothing about Ms. Johnstone; nothing about freedom of expression; nothing about firing Ms. Brockes (she ought to find an honest line of work, to be sure, but that's her decision):  talk about inability to read!  (And the relevance of Chomsky having a retirement portfolio is....?)  The Guardian withdrew Ms. Brockes's "interview" because it was a shoddy and dishonest piece of work; we have now explained at some length why it was, indeed, a shoddy and dishonest piece of work, notwithstanding the sommersaults of the Chomsky-haters.  Perhaps Ms. Brockes, having now been publically humiliated with the total repudiation of her work in this case, will do better in the future; or perhaps she will find a different profession, where she can conduct herself more honorably.  As to Mr. Anthony:  bonne chance!

UPDATE:  Pablo Stafforini tells me he sent the following apt e-mail to Dr. Hoare:

In your recent piece on Noam Chomsky (‘Chomsky’s Srebrenica’s Shame—and the Guardian’s’) you claim that you “have not yet discovered a single text on the internet in which Chomsky uses the word 'massacre' in relation to Srebrenica; if such a text exists, it is not as easy to find as Chomsky claims.” 

Here’s a relevant sample of Chomsky’s remarks on Srebrenica:

“[There was a] Dutch government inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre[.]”

‘Terror and Just Response’, ZNet, July 2, 2002; Radical Priorities, third edition, Oakland: AK Press, 2003, p. 312; Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003, p. 208 [emphasis added]

“[T]he U.S. also gave a green light to the Serb attack on Srebrenica, which lead to the slaughter of 7000 people, as part of a broader plan of population exchange. The US did “nothing to prevent” the attack though it was aware of Serb preparations for it, and then used Srebrenica massacre “to distract attention from the exodus of Krajina’s entire population which was then taking place.””

The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo, London: Pluto Press, 1999, p. 32 [emphasis added] 

“Consider […] Iranian offers to intervene in Bosnia to prevent massacres at a time when the West would not do so. These were dismissed with ridicule (in fact, generally ignored), even though they might well have protected Muslims from slaughter at Srebrenica and elsewhere.”

The New Military Humanism, p. 74 [emphasis added]

All these references can be found on the Internet, and easily so. They also “state categorically that the massacre occurred in the way that it is understood to have done: as a massacre of several thousand innocent Muslim civilians by Serb forces.” Are you, then, going to publicly retract your remarks? This, I presume, will be an easy thing to do, since yours is an online piece which, as such, can be readily corrected.

"The Fourth Circuit is a Constitution-free zone"

Jack Balkin (Law, Yale) on the government's decision to finally charge Jose Padilla--the American citizen spirited away to a military brig three years ago by order of the Dear Leader--is illuminating:

Today the U.S. government formally indicted Jose Padilla, an American citizen arrested in the United States who had been held as an enemy combatant for three years outside the reach of the criminal justice system.

Originally the Justice Department claimed that Padilla had planned to detonate a "dirty bomb" (i.e., one that would explode radioactive nuclear waste) in the United States. Later the Justice Department changed that to an allegation that he planned to set fire to (or blow up) an apartment building in Chicago. In today's indictment, the Justice Department alleges neither act; instead it claims that Padilla had traveled abroad to become "a violent jihadist" and that he had conspired to send "money, physical assets and new recruits" overseas to engage in acts of terrorism."

This is a pattern, of course, with these arrests:  spectacular charges are announced, but when real charges are filed, the spectacular allegations disappear.

The reason [for the criminal indictment after three years] is not difficult to discover. The Administration counted votes and figured that even with a replacement for Justice O'Connor, it would likely lose in the Supreme Court. (The four dissenters in Rumsfeld v. Padilla thought Padilla was unconstitutionally confined, while Justice Scalia, who joined the majority, made clear that the September 18, 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force did not justify detaining a U.S. citizen, because the AUMF was not a legitimate suspension of the writ of habeas corpus).

By indicting Padilla now, The Bush Administration moots Padilla's appeal to the Supreme Court. It also leaves standing the Fourth Circuit's decision in the Padilla case, which broadly upheld the President's power to detain U.S. citizens like Padilla as unlawful combatants. (See Marty Lederman's post here for an analysis).

That result is particularly worthy of note, for the Fourth Circuit opinion may yet come in handy if the Administration needs to hold another U.S. citizen within the geographical boundaries of that circuit. The Administration now knows that the Fourth Circuit is a Constitution-free zone. It can, if it needs to, declare someone an enemy combantant, thrown them into a military prison, and interrogate them at its leisure. It will take years for a citizen to exhaust his appeals and reach the Supreme Court; and when the citizen finally gets to the Supreme Court, the Administration has the option to indict and moot the case (as it did with Padilla) or, if the Court's personnel have changed sufficiently in the interim, risk an appeal to the Supremes.

You may recall that, following the Hamdi decision last year, the Administration decided not to give Yaser Hamdi a hearing, but instead released Hamdi to Saudi Arabia, extracting in return a surrender of Hamdi's U.S. Citizenship and a promise that he would not sue. Now it has indicted Padilla to avoid facing a simliar rebuff by the U.S. Supreme Court. In both cases, the Administration argued that that it was of the utmost necessity to detain them indefinitely and that it could not give these men the constitutional protections ordinarily afforded criminal defendants without severely damaging national security. These assertions now ring hollow-- Hamdi is free, and Padilla is in the criminal justice system.

The Padilla case is a sobering lesson in how much leeway the President has to imprison and detain people for long periods of time in violation of the Constitution.

He has this leeway, of course, only because of the combination of cowardice, dishonesty, and/or villainy on the part of some judges (all "conservatives" mind you) in some jurisdictions, most dramatically, in the Fourth Circuit, where, as we noted long ago, the rule of law does not exist at the most fundamental levels.

The fact that the government's story about why Padilla was a threat has changed so frequently should give us pause the next time the government asserts that we should trust it when it rounds up U.S. citizens and claims the right to hold them indefinitely for our protection. Padilla may well be a very bad fellow, but we have a method of dealing with such bad fellows. It is called the rule of law, and we should not surrender it so readily merely because the President desires it.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

The Coming War on Iran?

Let us hope this analysis is mistaken.  Alas, we've had to consider this topic before.

Goebbels Had Nothing on These Guys...or the Latest in Bush Rationalizations for War and Tyranny

I suppose I should comment on Bush's attempt last week to rationalize his war crimes and impeachable offenses, though it is hard to know what to say.  That people didn't burst into laughter while listening to this audacious tissue of lies, half-truths, and fantastic allegations is, itself, rather remarkable, and indicative of the extent to which people who are no doubt often "decent" in their daily lives can be coopted for world-historic malfeasance through some combination of ignorance and wishful thinking.  The Progressive Blog Digest has a useful round-up of commentary, most of it appropriately scathing.  You can't really get the full flavor, though, for how unhinged a large segment of the United States has become until you take a look at the laudatory remarks Bush's through-the-looking-glass speech also attracted.  The problem isn't just that Bush & his bestiary of madmen are liars and villains; it's that they win praise from tens of millions for being "honest" and "just."

I am particularly taken with the latest rhetorical ploy of Bush & co., namely, the use of the word "revisionism" to describe their opponents' version of events leading up to the aggression against Iraq.  This is perversely ironic on at least two levels:  first, of course, because this Administration doesn't just "revise" history, it invents it wholesale; and second, because real historical revionists are motivated by a concern for evidence and truth, whereas both Bush and his Democratic critics (especially all those Democrat war-mongers who voted for war and tyranny) are motivated by short-term strategic advantage.

By way of illustration of the generally unhinged condition of political discourse in America, I shall focus on just a few passages from Bush's speech.  Bush stated:

In the four years since September the 11th, the evil that reached our shores has reappeared on other days in other places -- in Mombasa and Casablanca and Riyadh and Jakarta and Istanbul and Madrid and Beslan and Taba and Netanya and Baghdad and elsewhere.

The central delusion that has gripped the American right since 9/11 is that captured in this litany of unrelated places:  it is the idea that every terrorist incident is related to every other one, that the grievances of Chechen separatists have something to do with the grievances of Palestinian suicide bombers which have something to do with Sunni resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq which has something to do with the murderous delusions of religious fundamentalists actually beholden to Osama bin Laden.  But these events have almost nothing to do with each other (as we have had occasion to remark previously), except that they serve the propaganda purposes of a decadent and amoral empire. One really can't repeat this often enough:  there is no "war on terror," not only because you can't wage war on a technique, but because there is no single agent of terrorism motivated by a unitary set of concerns.  The whole "war on terror" is a fraud, and anyone who speaks of such a fake war should be laughed out of serious society.  If America had not lost its collective mind after 9/11, there would now be only an international criminal manhunt for bin Laden and other perpetrators of crimes against civilians in New York and London and Madrid (etc.).

Bush admits, effectively, that the "enemy" here is a construct worthy of Tolkein when he states:

Islamic radicalism is more like a loose network with many branches than an army under a single command.

Just like the international Jewish banking conspiracy, apparently.

Yet these operatives fighting on scattered battlefields share a similar ideology and vision for our world.

In fact, of course, Chechen separatists, Palestinian suicide bombers, Iraqi Sunni rebels, and actual bin Laden loyalists do not share a similar ideology, but no matter, let the fiction continue:

First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace, and stand in the way of their ambitions.

It is true that some of the "extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East," but obviously not because the U.S. has supported "democracy and peace" in the region (I assume this was supposed to be a laugh line), but largely because it has supported compliant regimes, from the largely democratic (like Israel) to the largely totalitarian and fascist (like Saudi Arabia or Iraq in the 1980s), without any regard for human rights, democracy, or peace, as opposed to the strategic economic and military interests of the U.S.  (I say "largely" only because it seems equally clear that bin Laden is also, by his own admission, motivated by bizarre sectarian concerns, like the proximity of "infidels" to holy places in Saudi Arabia.)    

Secondly, the militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments.

This may accurately describe bin Laden's personal ambitions, but the delusions of men hiding in caves should not, generally, be a sound basis for foreign policy.

Third, these militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all modern governments in the region and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.

Bin Laden is a delusional religious fanatic, to be sure (surely Bush knows the "type"), but even he hasn't set his sights on Islamic revolution in Spain!  (Again:  perhaps this was meant as a laugh line.)

With the greater economic and military and political power they seek, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda -- to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people and to blackmail our government into isolation.

There is no doubt that there are hundreds of millions of people around the globe--most, to be sure, under the age of seven--who entertain fantasies of unlimited power over all their adversaries, from their parents to their neighbors to their distant enemies:  part of grown-up leadership is to assess which of these fantasies of power are actually realistic. 

Some might be tempted to dismiss these goals as fanatical or extreme. They are fanatical and extreme, but they should not be dismissed. Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi has vowed: We will either achieve victory over the human race or we will pass to the eternal life. And a civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history -- from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot -- consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history.

Where Tenure-Track Faculty at the Top 20 U.S. Departments 2005-06 Got Their PhD,

We haven't compiled this data in awhile.  For purposes of this list, the “top 20” graduate faculties surveyed were NYU, Princeton, Rutgers, Michigan, Pittsburgh (both philosophy and HPS), Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, Texas, Cornell, Berkeley, North Carolina, Notre Dame, Arizona, Brown, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, Chicago, and CUNY.  Bear in mind, of course, that today’s tenure-track faculty were choosing where to go to graduate school anywhere from six to fifteen years ago.

Here are the schools that produced the most graduates who landed tenure-stream jobs at top 20 graduate programs (those already denied tenure are excluded):

Princeton University (11 graduates placed at Arizona, Chicago, Michigan, MIT, North Carolina, Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, and Princeton)

Harvard University (8 graduates placed at Barnard/Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Stanford, UC Irvine, and UCLA)

Massachussetts Institute of Technology (7 graduates placed at Cornell, Harvard, Michigan, MIT, NYU, and Princeton)

University of Pittsburgh (Philosophy and HPS) (6 graduates placed at Chicago, Harvard, North Carolina, and UCLA)

Oxford University (5 graduates placed at Columbia, Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, Princeton, and UCLA)

Rutgers University, New Brunswick (3 graduates placed at Brown, Barnard/Columbia, and UC Irvine)

University of California, Berkeley (3 graduates placed at Berkeley and Chicago)

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (3 graduates placed at Princeton and Stanford)

Yale University (3 graduates placed at Chicago, Cornell, and Princeton)

Columbia University (2 graduates placed at Michigan and Notre Dame)

New York University (2 graduates placed at Brown and Texas)

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2 graduates placed at Arizona and Columbia)

There was one graduate each from the following PhD programs (with the name of the school where the graduate was placed following in the parentheses):

Brown University (Arizona)

Carnegie-Mellon University (Columbia)

Cornell University (Harvard)

King's College, London (Harvard)

Ohio State University (UCLA)

Stanford University (North Carolina)

University of Arizona (Michigan)

University of California, Irvine (Harvard)

University of California, Los Angeles (UC Irvine)

University of Chicago (Arizona)

University of Colorado, Boulder (UC Irvine)

University of Paris (Pittsburgh)

University of Texas, Austin (NYU)

University of Wisconsin, Madison (Berkeley)

Campaign to Save California Death Row Inmate Tookie Williams

Philosopher Philip Gasper has the pertinent details here and here.

Nietzsche Studies: Where the Action Is

When I last wrote about Nietzsche studies, it was to grouse about some unhappy developments; here I want to write more constructively and also to inaugurate an on-going series on different areas of philosophy, where I'll invite different philosophers to address "where the action is" in their subfield. 

Last week, I was talking with one of the University of London graduate students participating in the Gemes/Leiter "intercollegiate" seminar on Nietzsche about what kind of work was worth doing in Nietzsche studies.  Nietzsche studies in English-speaking philosophy have really flourished over the last 15 years (Clark's book, below, probably marks the turning point), and while there (alas!) continues to be an enormous amount of sophomoric garbage written about Nietzsche, there has emerged, for the first time, a secondary literature on Nietzsche that compares favorably in scholarly seriousness and philosophical quality, with the best work on Kant or Hegel or Marx.  While the complete "professionalization" of the discipline of philosophy means that there is now some demand for specialist work on just about any figure in the history of philosophy, quite independent of his merits, in the case of Nietzsche there is an increasing recognition, both inside and outside the realm of specialists in post-Kantian German philosophy, that Nietzsche may really be the philosophical thinker of significance after Kant, and certainly one with at least as much resonance to themes in English-speaking philosophy as Hegel or Heidegger.

So, to return to my discussion with the postgraduate student mentioned above, the question arises what should someone thinking of doing doctoral research on Nietzsche pursue?   Where, today, is the "action" in Nietzsche studies:  what needs to be done?  (A somewhat dated discussion of this topic is here.) 

It seems to me there are now three lively and fruitful areas of philosophical research and writing about Nietzsche:  (1) studies of the historical context in which Nietzsche was writing attending, in particular, to the historical influences operative on him--work that demands both command of Nietzsche and command of the relevant portions of the history of philosophy; (2) close, philosophically-minded readings of particulars books by Nietzsche; and (3) philosophical studies of particular topics or themes of significance in Nietzsche:  his moral philosophy, his theory of mind or action, his metaphysics or epistemology.  What has fallen very much out of favor, it seems to me, are the "global" studies of Nietzsche, which attempt to canvass all his famous (if not most important) themes, like will to power, the overman, and eternal recurrence--though, to be sure, there are honorable, and important, exceptions that discharge this ambitious task admirably, such as John Richardon's Nietzsche's System (Oxford, 1996) and Bernard Reginster's The Affirmation of Life:  Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Harvard, forthcoming).

Historical studies aim to illuminate Nietzsche's ideas and arguments by shedding light on the historical context in which he wrote:  the intellectual currents of his time, the particular authors he was reading, the philosophers who mattered most to him.  Examples of such studies in recent years include:  Christopher Janaway's edited collection on Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche's Educator (Oxford, 1998); Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge, 2002); Michael Green's Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition (Illinois, 2002); in some respects, John Richardson's Nietzsche's New Darwinism (Oxford, 2004) (though this also develops the ambitious, systematic account of Nietzsche's philosophy from his earlier book [UPDATE:  see Jessica Berry's illuminating review of the Richardson book]); Robin Small's Nietzsche and Ree:  A Start Friendship (Oxford, 2005); Lanier Anderson's and Nadeem Hussain's articles on the influence of NeoKantianism and positivism on Nietzsche; Jessica Berry's and Richard Bett's articles on Nietzsche and ancient skepticism; and, in more modest forms, the portions dealing with Schopenhauer of Reginster's The Affirmation of Life (Harvard, forthcoming); the portions dealing with Plato in Richardson's Nietzsche's System (Oxford, 1996); and Chapter 2 of my Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002) surveying the impact of the Presocratics, Schopenhauer, and German Materialism on Nietzsche.  This work, to be sure, varies a bit in its philosophical sophistication and competence, but even where this is obviously lacking (as in Moore's book), the historical erudition still provides rich material for the philosophically-minded reader of Nietzsche.

Textual studies aim to elucidate the philosophical structure and arguments of the books Nietzsche actually published.  These kinds of projects are probably least suitable for doctoral students, though they increasingly attract the attention of accomplished scholars, and some of the best studies of this kind are still to appear, such as Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick's book on Beyond Good and Evil and Christopher Janaway's book on On the Genealogy of Morality.  Earlier examples tend to focus mainly on the Genealogy, such as Mathias Risse's articles, and the relevant sections of my Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002) and Simon May's Nietzsche's Ethics and his 'War on Morality' (Oxford, 1999).

Philosophical/thematic studies treat Nietzsche as the philosopher he really is, and explore, and evaluate, his views with respect to particular issues in moral philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and action.  Such studies demand both knowledge of Nietzsche and knowledge of the relevant philosophy, and thus mark the most important respect in which Nietzsche has now joined the canon of important historical figures in the history of philosophy.  The watershed work was probably Maudemarie Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1990), which was followed by Lester Hunt's Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtues (Routledge, 1991), Peter Poellner's Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford, 1995); my own Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002); and many articles by Mathias Risse, Nadeem Hussain, Bernard Williams, Ken Gemes, Raymond Geuss, Paul Katsafanas, and others (European Journal of Philosophy has published many of these papers).  Neil Sinhababu and I have tried to collect a set of new papers of this kind in Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford, 2006) (with contributions by myself and Sinhababu, as well as Clark & Dudrick, Janaway, Risse, Hussain, Reginster, Poellner, Thomas Hurka, Simon Blackburn, Joshua Knobe, Jay Wallace, and Donald Rutherford).   Some of the most lively, recent philosophical debates have concerned, on the one hand, Nietzsche's moral psychology, and, on the other, his philosophy of mind and action (his critique of free will, his account of agency, his understanding of consciousness).

I'd be interested to hear how specialists and doctoral students perceive the field.  Comments are open; no anonymous postings and bear in mind that comments may take awhile to appear, so post only once!

Friday Poem: "Becalmed"

Becalmed

Night descends on whining knees
The reckless children roam below
Fearless as ants though less purposeful
Prolonging their giddy play in
An epiphany of youth and death

A purple wine upon the shallow hills
Historic Hudson nuzzling by the land
Becalmed in Tarrytown as I too am
Seeking music’s absolution for my silence
Bach’s thirty variations on a smile
My sole companions in retreat
I know my life is incomplete

Elsewhere when I choose to listen
The wounded howl the hungry moan
In tongues I dare not understand
I feel their plight but not their grief
Instead guilt nestles close at hand
I call it my inheritance
Here in my safe encampment
Powerless and exempt

What would it take to fire my blood
Now slow as doubt and coursing cold
How might I raise refusal to an art
And learn to cast denial out

But here the blinds are neatly shut
And I in fictive consolations bound
Nightly dally with my electric slut
Who strokes my twitching conscience

I have heard the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
Music for an age of discontent
Which spends its failing hours
Divining what the god of evil meant
I fear it is beyond my ken
Not how my last days are bent

Oh old young now then
Sad happy women men
Whom I must touch before I die
No music can redeem me

1/6-7/9/95, 12/15-12/16/95, 4/8/98, 6/11/98, 7/12/98, 8/9-8/10/98, 6/23/00

Copyright 1995, 1998, 2000 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

The Prerequisites for Tyranny: Torture and the Elimination fo Habeas Corpus

This makes the Republicans, of course, the party of tyranny:

Habeas corpus prevents authorities from detaining a person indefinitely without charges; the guarantee of habeas corpus ensures that no one can imprison you without a trial.

The Bush administration wants the power to detain indefinitely anyone it declares to be an enemy combatant or a terrorist without presenting the detainee in court with charges. In England the power to arrest people and to hold them indefinitely without charges was taken away from kings centuries ago. Bush apparently thinks he is the reincarnation of an absolute monarch.

[Bush's] puppet [Tony] Blair set to work. He soon discovered that at most he could try to pass a law that permitted the British government to hold a detainee for 90 days, a far cry from Bush's desire for indefinite detention. Blair took what he called his "anti-terror" legislation to Parliament and was handed his first-ever defeat as Prime Minister.

The British Parliament knew enough history to realize that Blair's "anti-terror" legislation was in fact the opposite. Parliamentarians perceived Blair's proposal as a police state trick that could be used by an unscrupulous government to terrorize Her Majesty's subjects by the use of imprisonment without charges. The British Parliament refused to put up with such injustice....

That happened on Wednesday November 9.

On Thursday November 10, the Republican controlled US Senate voted 49 to 42 to overturn the US Supreme Court's 2004 ruling that permits Guantanamo detainees to challenge their detentions....

The Labour Party dominated British Parliament will not allow 90 days detention without charges, but the Republican controlled US Congress favors indefinite detention without charges of whomever Bush wants to detain.

Nothing more effectively undercuts the image that Bush paints of America as the land of freedom, liberty and democracy than the Republican Party's destruction of habeas corpus.

Habeas corpus is essential to political opposition and the rise and maintenance of democracy. Without habeas corpus, a government can simply detain its opponents. Nothing is more conducive to one party rule than the suspension of habeas corpus....

The Bush administration has also resurrected that second great feature of tyranny--torture. We have the right to torture say President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Attorney General Gonzales.

What a hypocritical spectacle the Bush administration and the Republican Party have made of America. They boast of "freedom and democracy" while they destroy habeas corpus and practice torture....

According to the Washington Post (Nov. 11), there are 750 detainees at Guantanamo. These people have been held for 3 or 4 years. If the Bush administration had any evidence against them, it would be a simple matter to file charges.

But the Bush administration does not have any evidence against them. Most of the detainees are innocent travelers and Arab businessmen who who captured by warlords and armed gangs and sold to the Americans who offered payments for "terrorists."

The reason so many of them have been tortured is that the Bush administration has no evidence against them and is relying on pain and the hopelessness of indefinite detention to induce self-incrimination. The Bush administration is desperate to produce some "terrorists."

What has become of the American people that they permit the despicable practices of tyrants to be practiced in their name? The Bush administration is in violation of the US Constitution, the rule of law, the Geneva Convention, the Nuremberg Standard, and basic humanity. It is a gang of criminals. The Republican Party is so terrified of losing power that it supports a tyrannical administration that has brought shame not just to the Republican name but to all Americans.

Guardian Apologizes for Smearing Chomsky, and Removes the Offending Interview from Its Site: Will Emma Brockes and Oliver Kamm Be Able to Show Their Faces in Public Again?

It appears that the entirely correct protests against The Guardian's smearing of Noam Chomsky in an "interview" by journalist Emma Brockes (who one may hope will now find a new profession, where she can conduct herself honorably) have been successful: The Guardian has apologized and retracted the entire interview.

What will be interesting now is to see whether the various right-wingers who seized upon The Guardian smear will now also recant.  Keep an eye, especially, on that professional Chomsky-hater Oliver Kamm, who did somersaults defending Brockes and the smear, and who even went out of his way to attack Chomsky for protesting the smears.  He, of course, now looks ridiculous, in light of The Guardian's decision.  If there were any doubts as to Mr. Kamm being an untrustworthy buffoon, this turn of events should remove them.

And here, for contrast, is a recent and responsible interview with Chomsky.  (Thanks to reader Thomas Paine for this link, and the link to the Guardian retraction.)

UPDATE:  John McFaul from New York City has sent Mr. Kamm the following inquiry (and shared a copy with me, which he has kindly given me permission to post):

In your November 3 online post blasting Noam Chomsky, you write at the end:

"Well, then: Emma Brockes and Noam Chomsky; who is the more credible? You decide."

Evidently, The Guardian, Emma Brockes' own publisher, by publicly acknowledging at least 3 major factual errors in Brockes' article and interview, and then by subsequently withdrawing it from their website, seems to have made its own judgment on this question, and the winner does not appear to be their employee.

I await with curiosity your next post regarding this matter.

Mr. Kamm is one representative of a strange and, happily, marginal phenomenon on this side of the Atlantic:  folks who purport to be on the left and are ardent supporters of the criminal aggression against Iraq.  Others in this slightly childish clique include the journalist Nick Cohen (whom we've discussed previously) and the retired political theorist Norman Geras (whom I will deal with shortly).  Others in the clique aren't quite as dishonest and unreliable as Mr. Kamm (and certainly aren't as obsessed with Noam Chomsky), but they all argue at an intellectual and moral level that is, in many ways, worse than that of the right-wing war mongers, who at least wear their moral depravity and nationalist chauvinism on their sleeves.   

ONE MORE:  Mr. Kamm has shown his face; more here.

Philosopher Boghossian, Courted by Princeton, Will Stay at NYU

Paul Boghossian (philosophy of language and mind, epistemology), who has played a major role in building up the Department at New York University over the last decade, has decided not to accept the senior offer voted by the Princeton Department.

Is Bush Cracking Up?

These stories come from right-wing news sources, suggesting that the only people Bush talks to regularly now are "the women in his life."  Very odd.

Political Philosopher Josh Cohen from MIT to Stanford...

...with appointments in Political Science, Law and Philosophy.  More details here.

At Stanford, Cohen will join his former student, the political philosopher Debra Satz, which will certainly make Stanford a quite attractive choice for students of political philosophy.  Cohen's appointment, strengthening as it does Stanford's visibility in value theory (an area of relative weakness previously), may also push Stanford into the overall top five in the U.S. in next year's surveys. 

Professor Cohen tells me that he will continue to co-edit the stimulating Boston Review, which will also continue to be a Boston-based publication.

Science and Religious Orthodoxy

Apt remarks by Ruchira Paul:

The real conflict between science and religious orthodoxy through the ages has never been about truth. The ancient scientists understood their role as disseminators of rational empirical knowledge as a liberating force against the dangerous superstitions and politics of religion. Galileo, facing the humiliation and torture of an inquisition, famously asked the Pope to direct his energies towards getting his flock to spiritual heaven and leave it to the scientists to figure out the "nature of the heavens". The explosion in scientific knowledge in the last century and a half and its ready acceptance by society, have led modern scientists to believe that they no longer need to engage the fanatics in the public square because "the facts will speak for themselves". They are sadly mistaken in their complacency, of course. Every new disaster or disease opens another door for propaganda, false promises and religious mind control. Given the right political climate, religious obscurantism exerts its visible, long lasting, harmful influence in turning back the tide of progress. We are fighting a couple of costly wars to counter the effects of bigotry, we are told. Yet we take our own homegrown bigots in stride until their persistent meddling ends in spectacular harm or stupidity . Perhaps the recent circus about Intelligent Design will be a wake up call for the scientific community. Religious bigotry, as I said, has never been about knowledge, freedom of enquiry or truth, although its proponents always couch their challenges to science in that lofty language. Instead, it is about wielding power and control over the psyches and wallets of the credulous among us. When promises of eternal life, kingdom of heaven and other lures don't adequately capture the imagination of the audience, religious bullies use the sharpest arrow in their quiver - fear of death, destruction and damnation. And for bigots through centuries, the most fertile grounds for sowing the poisonous seeds of fear and revulsion have been women's bodies and their sexuality.

More here.

And on a related theme.

Advice for Academic Job Seekers

It's that time of year when students on the job market may want to check out the various threads archived under this category.  Now might also be an apt time to read this old post on "The Distribution of Philosophical Talent."

Best of luck to all job seekers! 

The Guardian Smears Chomsky...

MOVED TO THE FRONT from Nov. 11 (see ANOTHER UPDATE, below):

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

...and is called to task here.  Do compare, by the way, the treatment of this same event by Oliver Kamm, a professional and sanctimonious Chomsky-hater, with the foregoing.  Some folks here in England seem to have heard of Mr. Kamm, hence my linking to him.  It is possible Mr. Kamm has a day job; if not, he ought to secure one.

UPDATE:  Poor Brad DeLong (Economics, Berkeley), he's smeared Chomsky again, today.  The first two comments make the relevant points in rebuttal.  Unlike Mr. Kamm, at least Professor DeLong is worth reading on other topics.  (Thanks to Stephen Fromm for the pointer.)  (ADDENDUM:  Kudos to Pablo Stafforini for revealing the depths to which Chomsky-haters will sink.)

ANOTHER UPDATE (Nov. 14):  Chomsky has now responded to The Guardian smear here.

Warm thanks...

...to the more than 300 readers who shared a bit about themselves here and here, as well as to others who e-mailed me directly (I realize not everyone cares to volunteer information about themselves in a public forum).  It really was a fascinating and gratifying snapshot of many of the folks who are regular readers.  I appreciate your kind words about the blog, your suggestions, your informative self-descriptions, your amusing anecdotes, and your insight into what you especially value here.  I'll try my best to continue to be worthy of a bit of your time.

I was originally thinking of commenting on a few of your comments, but there turned out to be so many that piqued my interest, that this will have to wait until I have more time, hopefully in December.

I would, of course, welcome further postings, for those so inclined.  Again, my thanks.

The Brothers Stanley to Return the Week of Nov. 28

Mark your calendars:  that extraordinary blogging and fraternal duo, Jason and Marcus Stanley, will be returning as guest-bloggers here beginning Monday, November 28 through to Sunday, December 4.  I'm looking forward to the break and to enjoying the interesting commentaries of philosopher Jason (who teaches at Rutgers) and economist Marcus (who teaches at Case Western).

Meanwhile, some impending deadlines on papers and talks means that my own blogging will be a good bit lighter the next two weeks.

At last: A Scientific Evaluation of Aluminum Foil Helmets...

...here brings out the scary truth that "the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government." 

(Thanks to Matt Davidson for the pointer.)

A Lawyer Comments on His Experience with Judge Alito

Frank Menetrez writes:

Consider this hypothetical:  I am prosecuted for robbing a store.  I know that I'm innocent--I wasn't even at the scene of the crime--but I can't find any good evidence to support my story.  After I'm convicted, I learn that there is a videotape from a security camera that proves I wasn't there.  Fed. R. Crim. P. 33 permits me to bring a motion for new trial based on newly discovered evidence, so that is what I do.  The court denies my motion on the grounds that the videotape showing I wasn't at the scene is not newly discovered evidence, because I must have known all along that I wasn't at the scene.  So my conviction stands.

 

Is this a federal court or a Kafka novel?  It is the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in an opinion joined, but not authored, by the Hon. Samuel Alito.

 

 

The case is United States v. Jasin, 280 F.3d 355 (3d Cir. 2002).  The facts of the case are these:  Tom Jasin was accused of conspiring to violate the arms embargo on South Africa in the mid-1980s.  He was unable to obtain corroborating testimony from Clyde Ivy, one of the two central figures in the conspiracy, because Ivy was asserting his privilege against self-incrimination in defending against criminal charges at the same time that Jasin's case was proceeding.  After Jasin was convicted, and after Ivy entered a plea agreement and served his sentence, Ivy admitted that Jasin was not part of the conspiracy.  Jasin brought a motion for new trial based on newly discovered evidence, supported by Ivy's affidavit.  But the district court and the Third Circuit said that Ivy's affidavit was not newly discovered evidence, because Jasin must have known all along that he wasn't part of the conspiracy.  Motion denied.

 

 

The Third Circuit opinion discusses with approval a previous, unpublished Third Circuit decision, United States v. Evans, No. 98-1706 (3d Cir. Dec. 3, 1999), which makes the same error.  In that case, Evans was convicted of being the "masked robber" who had participated in the robbery of a credit union.  After his conviction, Evans learned that during plea negotiations, his co-defendant's lawyer had informed the prosecution that Evans was not the masked robber.  On that basis, Evans brought a motion for new trial based on newly discovered evidence, namely, his co-defendant's lawyer's statements, of which Evans was previously unaware.  The denial of the motion was affirmed on appeal.  The reason, in the words of the Third Circuit, was that "[b]ecause, logically, Evans had to have known at the time of trial that he was not the masked robber, that evidence is not 'newly discovered.'"

 

 

The technical howler here is obvious enough, no?  The court has confused a piece of evidence (e.g., a statement by a witness) with the fact which the evidence tends to prove (e.g., that Jasin was not in the conspiracy, or that Evans was not the masked robber).  In so doing, the court has made it impossible for a wrongly convicted criminal defendant to bring a new trial motion on the basis of newly discovered evidence.  No evidence will ever constitute newly discovered evidence of a defendant's innocence, because the defendant must have been aware all along of his or her innocence.  That is now the law in the Third Circuit.

 

 

Alito did not author United States v. Jasin.  But Alito did sign on to it, despite the fact that the egregious technical error at its core was pointed out, in a very diplomatic manner, in a separate opinion by Judge Ambro.  

 

Disclosure and further background:  I was one of several lawyers who represented Tom Jasin at various stages of his challenges to his conviction.  Although my name appears on the Third Circuit case, I actually did not participate in the briefing, and there was no oral argument.  We ultimately got Tom's conviction vacated on habeas, just weeks before he would have finished serving his sentence.  (United States v. Jasin, 215 F. Supp. 2d 552 (E.D. Pa. 2002).)  The government moved for reconsideration, lost (United States v. Jasin, 292 F. Supp. 2d 670 (E.D. Pa. 2003)), did not appeal, and chose not to retry him.

"Mr. Danger"

Interesting:

In references to the head of state, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez sometimes speaks of "Mr. Danger" instead of George W. Bush. New York Times South American correspondent Juan Forero in an October story from Caracas mentioned that Chávez has bestowed that nickname-which makes sense on its face--but he didn't explain what it means to people in the Spanish-speaking world....

Mr. Danger is a long-standing figure in Venezuelan life, a character in a 1929 work, many times republished, by the novelist Rómulo Gallegos, who was also Venezuela's first freely-elected president, brought down in a U.S.-backed 1948 military coup, ten months after he took office.

Gallegos introduced Mr. Danger in Doña Bárbara, a work that has been required reading in Venezuela's secondary schools for forty years, ever since the return of electoral rule. In Gallegos' novel, Danger is the exemplar of a type of American once common in rural Venezuela. A man of reddish complexion and deep blue eyes, he shows up in the ranch country of Venezuela's tropical plains, where he kills alligators and tigers for their skins. Before long, he carries out a series of schemes to "conquer badly defended lands," Gallegos wrote. In furtherance of his aims, Danger takes part in the murder and burial of an aged cattleman and his mount, but "for him, the scornful foreigner," Gallegos noted, "there wasn't much difference between Apolinar and the horse who accompanied him in his grave." Mr. Danger afterwards usurps the property of a declassed landowner and claims custody of the man's pubescent daughter, until a neighboring rancher-whom Danger had also defrauded--rescues both, Gallegos writes, "to liberate them from the humiliating tutelage of the foreigner."

Irresponsible Philosophy Faculty: How Widespread a Phenomenon?

A former graduate student in philosophy writes:

I am writing to you because you have appeared in the past--and in sharp contrast to many of your colleagues in the field-- to have at least some genuine concern for the well being of graduate students in philosophy. I have completed two masters degrees, a post-bac in classical studies and four years of doctoral work at a relatively well ranked program. I have been enrolled in four different graduate programs, one of them in [Europe], and have taken classes at eight different colleges or universities since I graduated from college. My point is  that I have been around and I know what to expect and what not to expect. And by and large my experiences have been very good. However, the last couple of years have not been so good. I have had professors simply neglect to hand back papers, much less offer any substantive comments, even after repeated requests for them. I have had professors ask me to do some research on a topic and write up short reports or essays for them only to have them drop the the project and move on to a different university without even an email to let me know that they at least were aware of the fact that I did this work. I have had a graduate adviser tell me that she cannot offer me any advice because she does not really know anything about me and has not seen my file--this after a month of just trying to get an appointment with her. She even commented that getting the file would be too much trouble.

There is obviously much more to this story.  But the short end is that I have since left the field of philosophy. I do not feel that I was singled out or the target of some clandestine prejudice. I think I was the victim of something systemic to the field itself.  I hope that faculty members realize that in most cases, however wrong this may seem, a faculty's feedback and respect for a graduate student is all a graduate student has to work with. A student afloat without any land in sight or beacons to guide them is either an Abraham or a doomed individual. I have had no opportunities to voice grievances at the university nor any other way to try and show those who consider themselves enlightened and critical thinkers just what the human consequences are of their reserved and subconsciously unsympathetic behavior.

What do others think? How common are these problems?  I know of one top PhD program where almost every graduate student signed an open letter to the faculty complaining about these kinds of problems.  But are these incidents anomalous or widespread?  Anyone who wishes to be specific about these problems (e.g., mentioning a particular program) must include their name and e-mail address.  All comments will be pre-screened, as always.

In Memoriam

John Yolton (1921-2005)

The distinguished Locke scholar was the founding member of the York University/Toronto Philosophy Department and joined the Rutgers faculty in 1978, teaching there until his retirement in 1992.  I will post a link to a memorial notice as soon as one is available.

UPDATE:  The York memorial is here.

Friday Poem: "Instant Lottery"

Instant Lottery

To begin the day’s long squander
She visits the lottery counter
And buys a moment’s wonder
Scratching the candied colors
Her instant gloss of loss

Perhaps another hour
There’ll be manna as nirvana
But now the dark clouds glower
And cloak this fading flower
In longing’s hungry power

Oh tomorrow tomorrow
Lift the pennies of her sorrow
From the clutter of her brow
And shower her with brightness
Deliver her from now

9/28-12/30/97, 1/14/98            

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Mullah Pat Attacks the People of Dover, Pennsylvania...

...for voting out the ignoramuses on their school board.  Ruchira Paul has the details.

UPDATE:  Keith DeRose (Philosophy, Yale) observes:  "Not an original insight (heard it on the radio), but worth repeating:  If ID really isn't about God, why would Robertson say that Dover is 'voting God out' of the city by voting to get ID out of the schools?'"

Speaking Engagements--the Final Schedule (I think)

Here's what is still on the calendar for the remainder of the term:

November 23 (Wed., 4 pm):  University of Manchester (Philosophy & Politics).  Topic: "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will."

December 8 (Thurs, 5 pm):  London School of Economics (Dept. of Philosophy, Logic & Scientific Method & Faculty of Law).  Topic:  "Philosophy of Law:  The Current State of Play."

December 15 (Thurs, 4 pm):  University of Newcastle (Political Philosophy Workshop).   Topic:  "The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology."

I'm also due to participate in the Gardner/Honore seminar on political philosophy at Oxford December 2 (I'll be talking about toleration) and the faculty/student reading group on Hart at the University of Reading on December 6, but neither of those will, I believe, be "public" lectures.

I really appreciate all the offers to speak, and very much regret that I couldn't arrange to accept them all...hopefully on my next visit to the U.K.!

On Gay Marriage

ORIGINALLY POSTED March 27, 2004; recent events in Texas, sadly, make it relevant again.

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

This is not bad from Bob Herbert in the New York Times:

In the [1967] Loving case a mixed-race married couple was charged with violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. The judge who sentenced the couple wrote: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangements there would be no cause for [interracial] marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

Now we're told that he doesn't want gays to marry. That there is something unnatural about the whole idea of men marrying men and women marrying women. That it's abhorrent to much of the population, just as interracial marriages were (and to many, still are) abhorrent.

This does get to the heart of the matter. There is no doubt that the idea of two men or two women being married seems strange and unfamiliar (well, it is unfamiliar, after all), that it is upsetting to many, that it provokes hard-to-articulate feelings of unease and, in some, revulsion. It is, in that regard, no different than the feelings very common fifty years ago, and still sometimes found today, regarding interracial marriage. In both cases, it is impossible for anyone to give a rational explanation for their opposition. (A good illustration are the postings at this conservative site.)

It seems to me there have been three general kinds of attempts to offer a rational basis for opposition to gay marriage: appeals to religion, tradition, and the "essential" nature of marriage. Assuming that religious faith can be rationally defended--I will assume, arguendo, that it can be--it's not at all clear that those defenses suffice to underwrite the rationality of claims about God's intentions on matters like gay marriage. Belief in God is one thing; claims to authoritative epistemic access to God's intentions is another. The rationality of claims of the latter sort has never been adequately defended.

Reliance on "tradition" is not rational in the absence of (a) a defense of the rationality of the tradition, or (b) a defense of the rationality of deference to tradition. Obviously if the rationality of the tradition could be defended there would be no need to appeal to the tradition in the first place. And the only defenses of the rationality of deference to tradition--assuming they're successful--establish, at best, that tradition is a defeasible guide to what we should do today, and thus can not themselves fully dodge the question of why tradition should not be defeated in this instance. (Again, I'm assuming, arguendo, that the "tradition" supports the claims of the opponents of gay marriage: for some pertinent doubts, see the interview with Sanford Levinson linked at the end of this posting.)

Finally, arguments based on claims about the essential nature of marriage--like those by John Finnis and Robert George--are, it is fair to say, generally recognized as reductios: the arguments are so tortured and so wrought with bizarre premises as to lead one agnostic on the subject to be highly suspicious. (A thinner version of these arguments from Doug Kmiec is here. Larry Solum [San Diego Law] comments on some of the peculiarities of the Kmiec argument here.)

More on the Philosophy Student Turned War Resister

Story here; an excerpt:

In Wiltshire, Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith faced a court martial after declaring that the Iraq war was illegal and refusing to return for his third tour of duty there, the Guardian reports.

He has been charged with four counts of "disobeying a lawful command." But Kendall-Smith, a decorated medical officer in the Royal Air Force, says that his study of the recently-emerged evidence about the lies, distortions and manipulations used to "justify" the invasion has convinced him that both the war and the occupation are "manifestly illegal." Thus any order arising from this criminal action is itself an "unlawful command," the Sunday Times reports. In fact, the RAF's own manual of law compels him to refuse such illegal orders, Kendall-Smith insists.

The flight lieutenant is no ordinary war protestor, and no shirker of combat--unlike, say, the pair of prissy cowards at the head of the Anglo-American "coalition." Kendall-Smith, who has dual New Zealand-British citizenship--and dual university degrees in medicine and Kantian moral philosophy--has served three tours at the front in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is not claiming any conscientious objections against war in general, nor do religious scruples play any part in his stance. It is based solely on the law.

Central to his case are the sinister backroom legal dealings between Washington and London in the last days before the invasion. Less than two weeks before the initial "Shock and Awe" bombings began slaughtering civilians across Iraq, Lord Goldsmith, the UK's attorney general, gave Prime Minister Tony Blair a detailed briefing full of doubts and equivocations about the legality of the coming war, adding that Britain's participation in an attack unsanctioned by the UN would "likely" lead to "close scrutiny" by the International Criminal Court for potential war crimes charges, the Observer reports.

But Blair and Goldsmith withheld this report from Parliament, the Cabinet and British military brass, who were demanding a clear-cut legal sanction for the impending action. Then, just three days before the bloodletting began, Goldsmith suddenly produced another paper, this time for public consumption: a brief, clear, unequivocal statement that the invasion would be legal. This statement was almost certainly crafted in Washington, where Goldsmith had recently been "tutored" by the Bush gang's consiglieres, including the legal advisers to Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.

Leading this pack of war-baying legal beagles was George W. Bush's top counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who had overseen the White House's own efforts to weasel out of potential war crimes charges by declaring--without any basis in Anglo-American jurisprudence or the U.S. Constitution--that Bush was not bound by any law whatsoever in any military action he undertook: a blank check for aggression, murder and torture that Bush has gleefully cashed over and over. Alberto and the boys leaned hard on Goldsmith, who finally caved in and replicated the Americans' contorted and specious legal arguments for launching the attack.

Of course, Kendall-Smith knew none of this during his first two tours in Iraq: Goldsmith's Bush-induced backflip was only divulged in April 2005. Nor did he know then of the "Downing Street Memos," the "smoking gun" minutes that record Blair's inner circle dutifully lining up behind Bush's hellbent drive for war--as far back as 2002--and their conspiracy with the Bush gang to manipulate their countries into war. The memos--which emerged in May 2005 and have never been denied or repudiated by the UK government--show Blair's slavish acquiescence in Bush's criminal scheme to "fix the facts and the intelligence around the policy" of unprovoked military aggression. Confronted with this newly revealed evidence--and the revelations about the mountain of doubts and caveats expressed by American intelligence before the invasion but deliberately ignored by the Bushist war party--Kendall-Smith took the only honorable course for a soldier who has been duped into serving an evil cause....

British brass are panicky about the Goldsmith revelations; indeed, the leader of the UK invasion force, Admiral Michael Boyce, said he now believes the British military does not have "the legal cover necessary to avoid prosecution for war crimes," the Observer reports. Boyce added that if he and his officers are eventually put on trial for waging aggressive war, he'll make sure that Blair and Goldsmith are in the dock beside them.

Bush, Blair and their minions have committed a monstrous crime, and they know it--hence all the convolutions, before the war and after, to inoculate themselves from prosecution. But with Kendall-Smith and Patrick Fitzgerald, the long-moribund figure of the law is re-awakening. It's weak, it's bleary, it certainly might fail. But now the conspirators will have to live cowering in its shadow for the rest of their days.

Book of Interviews with Practitioners of "Formal Philosophy"

An interesting collection, and the website has excerpts of interviews with many well-known philosophers and logicians.  The autobiographical remarks by Clark Glymour (Carnegie-Mellon) are especially entertaining, but also check out the excerpts from interviews with Dagfinn Follesdal (Stanford/Oslo) discussing the relationship between philosophy and other disciplines; Wolfgang Spohn (Konstanz) reflecting on, as it were, the political economy of the discipline of philosophy over the last 50 years; and Patrick Suppes (Stanford) and Timothy Williamson (Oxford) on "open problems" in philosophy.  I've opened comments, for those who care to comment on some of the issues raised, or comment, more generally, on formal philosophy and its significance (or lack of significance, as the case may be).  Non-anonymous comments will be strongly preferred.

Evidence of Chemical Weapons in Iraq

But they aren't Saddam's:

Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon.

   Ever since the assault, which went unreported by any Western journalists, rumours have swirled that the Americans used chemical weapons on the city.

   On 10 November last year, the Islam Online website wrote: "US troops are reportedly using chemical weapons and poisonous gas in its large-scale offensive on the Iraqi resistance bastion of Fallujah, a grim reminder of Saddam Hussein's alleged gassing of the Kurds in 1988."

   The website quoted insurgent sources as saying: "The US occupation troops are gassing resistance fighters and confronting them with internationally banned chemical weapons."

   In December the US government formally denied the reports, describing them as "widespread myths". "Some news accounts have claimed that US forces have used 'outlawed' phosphorus shells in Fallujah," the USinfo website said. "Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. US forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes.

   "They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters."

   But now new information has surfaced, including hideous photographs and videos and interviews with American soldiers who took part in the Fallujah attack, which provides graphic proof that phosphorus shells were widely deployed in the city as a weapon.

   In a documentary to be broadcast by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, this morning, a former American soldier who fought at Fallujah says: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete."

   "Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for."

   Photographs on the website of RaiTG24, the broadcaster's 24-hours news channel, www.rainews24.it, show exactly what the former soldier means. Provided by the Studies Centre of Human Rights in Fallujah, dozens of high-quality, colour close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised or turned the consistency of leather by the shells.

   A biologist in Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, interviewed for the film, says: "A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact."

   The documentary, entitled "Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre," also provides what it claims is clinching evidence that incendiary bombs known as Mark 77, a new, improved form of napalm, was used in the attack on Fallujah, in breach of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons of 1980, which only allows its use against military targets.

If international law were more than a rhetorical facade, the war criminals in Washington would currently be defending themselves in a court in Geneva, hoping to avoid the gallows for their crimes.

Keith Burgess-Jackson in His Own Words

[This post from October 14, 2005 contains most of the pertinent background about this disturbed individual.  The letter at the end from one of his former students--which was sent to Burgess-Jackson and cc'd to me, so he knows that it (unlike most of what he posts) is authentic--is especially telling.  Meanwhile, a prospective PhD student alerted me to this parody site which is, at least, good for a laugh about this otherwise pathetic saga.] 

On the Kansas School Board's decision to attack evolution:

Great news for Kansas schoolchildren. The state board of education has voted to require that they be exposed to the same debate that is taking place among philosophers and scientists.  This fight is not about imposing religion on schoolchildren. It is about keeping scientists from imposing their secularism on schoolchildren.

(Bear in mind that Burgess-Jackson was sliced and diced by the philosophers of biology [see esp. the link to Professor Millstein's comments] on this topic a few weeks back--but, as we have had occasion to note, this strange man is "uneducable.")

On the riots in France: 

Is it wrong of me to delight in France's destruction? Any idiot could have seen that allowing Muslims to immigrate would destroy French culture. France is a Christian country, with Christian traditions, Christian values, and Christian culture. Christians and Muslims will never live together peacefully.

As someone remarked, Burgess-Jackson is "a man who will say almost anything without regard for truth or decency."

Incompetent NY Times Journalist Miller "Retires"

Dadahead comments.

In Memoriam

Oswald Hanfling (1927-2005)

The Times obituary--warm, evocative, and informative--is here.

Readers: Who Are You, Part II?

MOVING TO THE FRONT from Nov. 8.  Many, many thanks to the roughly 275 readers who have posted so far.  I appreciate your sharing a bit about yourselves.  I invite still others to add a few words (there have been more than 6,000 visits to the site since I opened the first thread, so I suspect there's still a few out there who haven't posted!).

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

Fascinating responses to my first thread on this subject; my sincere thanks to all those who have posted so far.  It's gratifying, and a bit daunting, to have such an interesting, diversely and highly educated, and far-flung (geographically and otherwise) set of readers.  Since the last thread was getting a bit long, I thought I'd open a new one and encourage others to post a few words.  (I'm posting this at 10:15 am London time, 4:15 am Austin time.)  Every comment submitted has been posted, with the exception of one non-responsive and juvenile insult (not even directed at me).  Those who've been watching silently, I hope you'll post a few words (anonymously is fine). 

REMINDER:  Comments may take awhile to appear; please post your comment ONLY once (this is esp. important since Typepad has been moving very slowly this afternoon).

Pennsylvania Votes for the Enlightenment, Kansas Votes to be the Butt of Jokes Around the World, and Texas Votes for Mindless Bigotry

In Pennsylvania:

All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.

Among the losing incumbents on the Dover, Pa., board were two members who testified in favor of the intelligent design policy at a recently concluded federal trial on the Dover policy: the chairwoman, Sheila Harkins, and Alan Bonsell.

The election results were a repudiation of the first school district in the nation to order the introduction of intelligent design in a science class curriculum.

In Kansas:

The fiercely split Kansas Board of Education voted 6 to 4 on Tuesday to adopt new science standards that are the most far-reaching in the nation in challenging Darwin's theory of evolution in the classroom.

The standards move beyond the broad mandate for critical analysis of evolution that four other states [not Texas, happily] have established in recent years, by recommending that schools teach specific points that doubters of evolution use to undermine its primacy in science education.

Among the most controversial changes was a redefinition of science itself, so that it would not be explicitly limited to natural explanations.

And in Texas:

Voters tied the knot Tuesday with a constitutional amendment cementing marriage in Texas as being solely between a man and a woman and barring communities from legalizing same-sex unions.

With close to one in five voters turning out, Proposition 2 won approval by about a three-to-one ratio. Travis County [ed.-where Austin is located], home to a leading anti-amendment group, appeared to be the only county where passage wasn't assured, according to incomplete returns.

The Lone Star State becomes the 19th state in which voters have inserted a marriage definition into their state constitution. The amendment landed on the ballot after being approved by a two-thirds ratio in both the Texas House and the Senate in the spring.

Fourteen of those other states have added gay marriage bans since last year, with anywhere from 57 percent to 78 percent approval, in the wake of court and legislative actions in some states — including Vermont, Massachusetts and California — permitting gay couples to receive legal recognition of their pairings.

"That's overwhelming," said the amendment's author, Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa. "We could have gone home and sat down and still won," he said as he watched election returns with about 100 Propposition 2 supporters at Great Hills Baptist Church in Austin.

Let us recall that Rep. Chisum, a stalwart water boy for fascist theocracy, was aptly pegged by Rep. Thompson of Houston earlier this year:

"This amendment [banning gay marriage] is blowing smoke to fuel the hell-fire flames of bigotry," said Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston.

Thompson, 66, an African-American who grew up with segregation, said the legislation reminded her of the time when interracial marriages were illegal.

"When people of my color used to marry someone of Mr. Chisum's color (white), you'd often find people of my color hanging from a tree. That's what white people back then did to protect marriage," Thompson said.

And that's the state of democracy in America in the year 2005.

UPDATE:  More on mindless bigotry here.

Bush v. Chavez, round 23

An excerpt:

Bush waited until [Hugo Chavez] flew off to Brazil to levy a savage attack on the leader of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela: "Ensuring social justice for the Americas requires choosing between two competing visions," he proclaimed at a banquet. "One offers a vision of hope. It is founded on representative government, integration in the world community, and a faith in the transformative power of freedom in individual lives...the other seeks to roll back the democratic progress...by playing to fear, pitting neighbor against neighbor, and blaming others for their own failures to provide for their people."

This Orwellian declaration upended the realities of Chavez's Venezuela and Bush's America. Elected to the presidency in 1998, Chavez received 56 percent of the vote, while as the world knows Bush in the 2000 elections lost the popular vote to his Democratic opponent.

During Chavez' seven years in office, Venezuela has proved to be the most democratic government in the recent history of the Americas. Eight elections or referendums have taken place, including the election of a constituent assembly to draft a new Bolivarian constitution that established the principles for a participatory democracy. In each instance of voting, fifty-six to sixty percent of the participants have supported Chavez or his initiatives, including his reelection as president under the new constitution in 2000. Bush it should be noted in his reelection in 2004 received only 51% of the votes, the lowest for an incumbent since Woodrow Wilson in 1916. No international observers have uncovered fraud in any of the Venezuelan balloting, while in the United States there are still serious questions about the fairness and integrity of the 2000 and 2004 elections.

The Bush administration's most ignominious assault on the new democratic spirit in Venezuela occurred with a coup attempt in April 2002. After meeting with the coup conspirators in Washington for months before hand, the United States was the first and only government in the hemisphere to recognize the "golpistas" headed by Pedro Carmona, the president of the Venezuelan business association. Chavez was restored to power in 48 hours, thanks to a massive popular demonstration combined with military support, principally among junior officers and common soldiers.

As in the lead up to the Iraqi war, the US media, including the liberal press, proved to be a conveyor belt for the Bush line on Chavez. While the coup was in progress the New York Times editorialized: "Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator." The Times, also echoing the position of the Venezuelan elites, insisted that Chavez was a "demagogue."

Demagoguery is apparently a label imposed on any leader who attempts to mobilize and improve the lot of the popular classes at the expense of the wealthy. In a country of 25 million, illiteracy has been virtually eliminated as 1.4 million learned to read and write during the early years of Chavez' tenure. Three million adult Venezuelans previously outside the education system due to poverty enrolled in schooling programs.

When Chavez took office 80 percent of the population was largely excluded from the benefits of an oil rich economy. Few had access to even minimal health care. Today, thanks in large part to an "oil for doctors" program that has brought 20,000 Cuban doctors to Venezuela, seventy percent of the population enjoys access to free health care. Malnutrition and hunger have been eliminated as three-fifths of the population now receives subsidized food via cooperatives, special food programs and government distribution centers....

The ultimate hypocrisy in Bush's proclamation that he stands for improved international relations while Chavez opposes "freedom in individual lives" came at Bush's last stop in Panama. There in an effort to rebuff international criticism of the secret U.S. prison system abroad used to detain and torture alleged terrorism suspects, Bush stated he would continue to "aggressively pursue" terror suspects and insisted that "any activity we conduct" is "lawful." Small wonder Chavez labels the Bush regime a "terrorist administration" that is a "threat to humanity."

A hopeful electoral sign from America

Here: 

Lt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, a Democrat, won the race for governor [of Virginia] on Tuesday night, scoring a major political victory for his mentor, Gov. Mark Warner, and sending a powerful message that President Bush's political standing has fallen in this reliably Republican state.

One should have no illusions, to be sure, about the moral fortitude of these Democrats, but most of them are to be preferred to the craven villains and rapacious beasts now running the Republican party.  That a Democrat scores such a victory in a generally Republican state (that voted for Bush in both 2000 and 2004) is a hopeful sign that the mushy middle of the population that actually decides elections may have had enough.  (Of course, since they are mushy and are of such peculiar cognitive and emotional constitution that they are actually capable of finding merits in voting for Republicans some days, Democrats others, one can not be entirely confident whether this effect will last.)#

More commentary on the results from The New York Times:

After months of sagging poll ratings, scandal and general political unrest, the Republicans badly needed some good news in Tuesday's elections for governor. What they got instead was a clear-cut loss in a red state, and an expected but still painful defeat in a blue one.

The Republican loss in Virginia, which President Bush carried with 54 percent just a year ago, came after an 11th-hour campaign stop by Mr. Bush and the kind of all-out Republican effort to mobilize the vote that reaped rich rewards last year.

Republicans argued on Tuesday that Virginia was a local election driven by local events, with little long-term national significance. But the loss clearly stung, as did the double-digit defeat in New Jersey, a blue state that had seemed within reach for the Republicans.

Whatever their significance as predictors, the elections come at a sensitive time for both parties, as they scramble to raise money, recruit strong candidates for next year's Congressional elections and, equally important, minimize the number of retirements. Candidates and incumbents are often swayed by their sense of the national mood and the political landscape.

Democrats, already emboldened, hailed the results as the first shots in the battle of the 2006 midterm elections, when control of the House and Senate will be at stake.

"Our voters, going into the midterm elections, are mobilized and energized; theirs are despondent," said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Reflecting Democratic euphoria over what was perceived as a shifting electoral tide, Mr. Emanuel added, "Virginia is a bright, bright red state - shining red."

Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) Ranking of World Universities

My more detailed commentary on these rankings is here.  Because the focus there (at my law school site) is on U.S. universities, let me record here the peer evaluation of some non-US universities (why I'm only reporting the peer score is explained at the other site).  Here are the peer evaluations for  British and Irish universities:

1.  Cambridge University (96)

2.  Oxford University (93)

3.  Imperial College London (59)

4.  University of Edinburgh (48)

5.  University College London (46)

6.  London School of Economics (43)

6.  University of Manchester (43)

8.  Trinity College Dublin (31)

9. University of Warwick (30)

10. University of Bristol (28)

10. University of Sussex (28)

10. University of York (28)

13.  King's College, London (27)

13. University of Leeds (27)

15. Univeristy of Liverpool (25)

Allowing for the importance of strengths in medicine and the sciences in these rankings, these results seem fairly plausible for the U.K., at least based on what I can tell.

I have a less clear sense of research strengths elsewhere, but here are the top five in peer reputation for Australasia according to THES:

1.  University of Melbourne (66)

2.  Australian National University (64)

3.  Monash University (55)

4.  University of Sydney (53)

5.  University of New South Wales (50)

And the top five for Canada:

1.  McGill University (52)

2.  University of Toronto (51)

3.  University of British Columbia (47)

4.  University de Montreal (25)

5.  University of Alberta (24)

These results don't look bizarre to me, but I may be wrong (comments are open).  Outside the English-speaking world, I simply have no idea what is sensible, and what not.