12/24/07- Wisdom from Bill Gates
Be nice to nerds; you'll end up working for one.
12/19/07- Wisdom from Arthur C. Clarke
No one worried except a few philosophers.
12/18/07- Wisdom from Anne Applebaum
A Saudi court sentenced a woman who had been gang raped to six months in jail and 200 lashes.
True,
this extraordinary case, in which a rape victim was condemned for
associating with a man who was not a relative, did create a small
international echo. Hillary Clinton led a chorus of Democrats condemning the ruling, and a few editorials criticized it. It wasn't much, but it mattered: Thanks to international pressure, the Saudi king has now "pardoned"
the woman. And now? In Saudi Arabia, women still can't vote, can't
drive, can't leave the house without a male relative. No campaign of
the kind once directed at South Africa has ever been mounted in their
defense.
This comparison of Saudi and South African apartheid,
and the different Western attitudes to both, has been made before.
Recently, journalist Mona Eltahawy argued
that while oil is a factor, the real reason Saudi teams aren't kicked
out of the Olympics is that "Saudis have succeeded in pulling a fast
one on the world by claiming their religion is the reason they treat
women so badly." Islam, she points out, does take other forms—in
Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, and elsewhere. But Saudi propaganda, plus
our own timidity about foreign customs, has blinded us to the fact that
the systematic, wholesale Saudi oppression of women isn't dictated by
religion at all, but rather by the culture of the Saudi ruling class.
12/15/07- Wisdom from V.S. Naipaul
Hate oppression; fear the oppressed.
12/15/07- Wisdom from Timothy Burke
The issue for you should not be “what politics does that professor have”? It should be, “Is that guy both a professional and a mensch
in the way he acts as a professor?” Left-wing or right-wing or none of
the above, if the answer to the second question is a good one, then
there’s no problem. If we’re living within “best practices”, modeling a
commitment to intellectual diversity, thinking in an exploratory
manner, being generous in our scholarly lives, there’s no problem,
regardless of our convictions.
This is one reason I keep after some of you guys so much on these
issues. The way you approach these things, I don’t think you’re
modeling any kind of improvement to the temperment of academic life.
You’re not being exploratory, not trying to set up a big tent.
I’ll give a concrete example. I had a graduate professor who was
strongly anti-leftist. I don’t think he was particularly conservative,
just against most varieties of left-influenced work. One of the things
he used to ask some of us, if we used particular words (like
“proletarianization”) was, “Do you want to be tarred with that brush?”
Now, there’s a proper “teaching” way for him to express that
skepticism. He could say, “Look, that word is associated with a fairly
complex body of Marxist historiography. I just want you to be sure that
you’re using it on purpose, and to hear you tell me why you think it’s
the best term.” But for him to ask that question, he would have had to
know more about a body of thought that he disliked. He would have had
to accept that a student might purposefully want to use that word, and
accept that this was a legitimate choice. Instead, he was more or less
saying, “Don’t use it, and I’m not even going to say why”.
The problem there is with pedagogy, with professionalism, with
living in a scholarly community, with valuing intellectual diversity,
with a failure to take an exploratory approach to historiography. It’s
not with the politics.
When I read some of the critics complaining about the left-wing
ideologues, all I can see is another group of ideologues who would
reproduce the institutional behaviors they complain about, people who
would glumly poke their students and say, “Do you want to be tarred
with that brush?”
So the point is to focus on the deeper institutional sociology,
because that’s what produces the behavior, “political” and otherwise,
that makes academia less than it can be and should be.
12/10/07- Wisdom from Steve Chapman
As he [Romney] sees it, any American who doesn't worship at least one god is
eating away at our democratic structure like a hungry termite. He
quoted John Adams: "Our constitution was made for a moral and religious
people." Romney went further: "Freedom requires religion just as
religion requires freedom. . . . Freedom and religion endure together,
or perish alone."
He ignores evidence that the framers thought
otherwise. The Constitution they so painstakingly drafted contains not
a single mention of the Almighty -- unlike the Articles of
Confederation, which it replaced. A 1796 treaty, signed by that very
same John Adams and ratified by the Senate, stipulated that the U.S.
government "is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
If
the founders thought religion was indispensable to a free republic, why
does the national charter say "no religious test shall ever be required
as a qualification to any office"? Wouldn't it have made more sense to
include a religious test?
Romney's theory that faith is
essential to liberty suggests he has yet to visit the modern world. He
doesn't try to explain countries like Germany, France and Norway—free
democracies where most people no longer believe in God. Religion is not
exactly synonymous with personal freedom in, say, the Muslim world.
Organized Christianity once coexisted comfortably with, and often
sponsored, oppression in Europe and elsewhere.
The former
Massachusetts governor makes equally imaginative claims about those who
champion church-state separation. He believes they "are intent on
establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism." Oh?
You would look long and hard to find any secularist or civil
libertarian who thinks the government should officially espouse atheism
or encourage Americans to abandon religion.
Believers insist on
keeping "In God We Trust" on our currency. Where are the nonbelievers
who want to replace it with "There Is No God"? Secularists don't expect
the government to take their side—only to practice neutrality. They
think 1) all Americans should be free to practice the religion they
choose and 2) none should have the active assistance of the government.
But neutrality between belief and nonbelief is something Romney can't
abide. He thinks the government must be firmly and vocally on the side
of religion. Only when it comes to Mormonism versus other religions
does he recognize the value of neutrality as a principle. Isn't that
convenient?
In the end, though, Romney accomplished what he set
out to do in this speech. Henceforth, no one can possibly justify
voting against him because he's a Mormon. Not when he's provided so
many other good reasons.
12/8/07- Wisdom from Christopher Hitchens
According to the admittedly very contradictory scriptures of the New
Testament, Jesus of Nazareth warned his disciples and followers that
they should expect to be ridiculed and mocked for their faith. After
all, how likely was it that God had decided to reveal himself to only a
few illiterate peasants in a barbarous backwater? Those who elected to
believe this stuff were quite rightly told to expect a hard time, and
the expression "fool for God" or "fool for Christ" has been with us
ever since. That concept has some dignity and nobility. Entirely
lacking in dignity or nobility (or average integrity) is the
well-heeled son of a gold-plated church who wants to assume the pained
look of martyrdom only when he is asked if he actually believes what he
says. A long time ago, Romney took the decision to be a fool for Joseph
Smith, a convicted fraud and serial practitioner of statutory rape who
at times made war on the United States and whose cult has been made to
amend itself several times in order to be considered American at all.
We do not require pious lectures on the American founding from such a
man, and we are still waiting for some straight answers from him.
12/03/07- Wisdom from Dean Baker
The central thrust of Social Security enemies was the claim the program
was on the edge of bankruptcy due to the country's shifting
demographics and could not survive on its current course. They also
promised workers a much better deal by putting their money in the stock
market through private accounts. Social Security faced its gravest
danger on this front in the 90s when the nonsense about the baby boomer
time bomb was in its heyday and irrational exuberance led tens of
millions of otherwise sane people to think of the stock market as a
cash machine.
The 2000-2002 crashes helped to clear people's thoughts about the
stock market. With progressives rallying to defeat President Bush's
privatization plan in 2005, we are now on the cusp of the baby boomers'
retirement. The rolls of people dependent on Social Security will rise
rapidly in the years ahead, making the prospect of serious cuts in the
program far more difficult. We have also benefited from the massive
public education campaign that took place in 2005. Far fewer people
today accept the nonsense about Social Security facing a demographic
disaster.
Time has also proved to be on the side of the defenders of the European
welfare state. In the mid-nineties, there was a concerted effort to
weaken European unions and rollback worker protections like generous
unemployment benefits, restrictions on layoffs and mandated vacations
and paid leave. Exhibit A in arguing this case was the boom the US
economy experienced in the late 90s, contrasted with the relatively
stagnant and high unemployment economies of Western Europe.
With the 90s boom long over, the facts on the ground have changed.
European unemployment is no longer much higher than in the United
States; and some of the countries with the most generous welfare
states, such as Denmark and Austria, actually enjoy lower unemployment
rates than the United States. The Organization for Economic and
Cooperation and Development (OECD), one of the key actors in the 90s
drive for rolling back European welfare states, has recently
acknowledged there is not necessarily a link between a generous welfare
state and poor economic performance. In its 2006 Jobs Strategy report,
the OECD explicitly noted the success of the Nordic model in which
strong welfare state protections for workers have facilitated solid
economic growth and low rates of unemployment.
Why is it so damn hard to open recently purchased items these days? Anything packaged in hard plastic is hellish to get open now; the plastic coverings are welded together so seamlessly that I've now injured myself twice opening consumer goods. I realize that I'm clumsy, but other people can't like this either.
The music for my song about zombies, written while reading big chunks of The Conscious Mind, is 
There's an interesting thread 
Eltahaway's claim in the previous post is actually almost certainly false. The cybaritic, corrupt Saudi elite spend as much time as possible in other countries where women have equal rights, as do their wives. They are not pushing their morality down the throat of the country. Rather, like demagogues everywhere they are exploiting what is worst in human nature. That they can get away with this says nothing about the morality of the Saudi people either; the only reason the scam works is because of vast Western support (we put these jerks in charge, pay enormous sums of money to them, and fight their wars) combined with oil wealth.
It is neither naive nor conspiratorial to suspect that having an executive branch full of members in financial in thrall to the oil industry is partially responsible for this, what is already the greatest and most perverse foreign policy debacle of our lifetime (just like Northern Alliance support was the only way to take down the Taliban, Iranian support would have been the only way to take down the Baathists, who (unless we do ally with Iran) I predict will again have their boots on the Iraq's Shiite majority's neck within the next decade). It is not conspiratorial to suspect that oil money corruption is more than anything else responsible for the execrable fact that Saudi Arabia is not treated like the Apartheid state it is. Nor since September 11 is it even remotely McCarthyist to call the actions of Bush Republicans what they so manifestly are, treason.
Have I defined my terms correctly? Is it out of line to wonder about this? Help me here. I think I'll be a better teacher if I get insight into this, even if it's just that I'm mistaken.
