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Monday, July 31, 2006
Fordham's new program in Elections & Campaign Management
Which strikes me as something to attract bright-eyed bushy-tailed folks with no hands-on experience, but maybe it could be good (if they are able to attract the right people, who just need an excuse to live in NYC for a year and make contacts).
Check it out.
Our Political Science dept. is in pretty bad shape... due to departmental battles, the PhD program died a few years back (there are still a couple PhD folk around, grandfathered in), and they've lost a lot of their good faculty. So I think this is a way of trying to remain viable.
What do y'all think? Would this MA be worth the paper it's printed on? Would it be worth the money? (I doubt these folk would be funded)
(Just want to also say that I'm curious also as to the viability & desirability of these types of programs in general... there's a similar discussion over at LiveJournal, but I don't want to post about the Fordham program over there...)
jane 9:58 PM [+]
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Spinoza!
Op-Ed piece in the NY Times about good old Spinoza in the context of religious intolerance (hmm!). Spinoza’s reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him was to try to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happened to have been born. Self-aggrandizement can be the invisible scaffolding of religion, politics or ideology.
Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving false entailments that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more cosmically important than we truly are, that we have had bestowed upon us — whether Jew or Christian or Muslim — a privileged position in the narrative of the world’s unfolding.
Spinoza’s system is a long deductive argument for a conclusion as radical in our day as it was in his, namely that to the extent that we are rational, we each partake in exactly the same identity.
Spinoza’s faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state, is neither a rational nor an ethical option. I notice she doesn't say much about how we're not actually free, in Spinoza's metaphysics, but... well, whatever. Go Baruch.
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EDIT: SPINOZA AND FREEDOM.
After Paul's reply, I wasn't sure anymore, so I looked it up.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:Spinoza engages in such a detailed analysis of the composition of the human being because it is essential to his goal of showing how the human being is a part of Nature, existing within the same causal nexuses as other extended and mental beings. This has serious ethical implications. First, it implies that a human being is not endowed with freedom, at least in the ordinary sense of that term. Because our minds and the events in our minds are simply ideas that exist within the causal series of ideas that follows from God's attribute Thought, our actions and volitions are as necessarily determined as any other natural events. "In the Mind there is no absolute, or free, will, but the Mind is determined to will this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity."
What is true of the will (and, of course, of our bodies) is true of all the phenomena of our psychological lives. Spinoza believes that this is something that has not been sufficiently understood by previous thinkers, who seem to have wanted to place the human being on a pedestal outside of (or above) nature.
Most of those who have written about the Affects, and men's way of living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of nature, but of things that are outside nature. Indeed they seem to conceive man in nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself. (III, Preface)
Descartes, for example, believed that if the freedom of the human being is to be preserved, the soul must be exempt from the kind of deterministic laws that rule over the material universe.
Spinoza's aim in Parts Three and Four is, as he says in his Preface to Part Three, to restore the human being and his volitional and emotional life into their proper place in nature. For nothing stands outside of nature, not even the human mind.
Nature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere one and the same, i.e., the laws and rules of nature, according to which all things happen, and change from one form to another, are always and everywhere the same. So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, viz. through the universal laws and rules of nature.
Our affects -- our love, anger, hate, envy, pride, jealousy, etc. -- "follow from the same necessity and force of nature as the other singular things". Spinoza, therefore, explains these emotions -- as determined in their occurrence as are a body in motion and the properties of a mathematical figure -- just as he would explain any other things in nature. "I shall treat the nature and power of the Affects, and the power of the Mind over them, by the same Method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the Mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies."
Our affects are divided into actions and passions. When the cause of an event lies in our own nature -- more particularly, our knowledge or adequate ideas -- then it is a case of the mind acting. On the other hand, when something happens in us the cause of which lies outside of our nature, then we are passive and being acted upon. Usually what takes place, both when we are acting and when we are being acted upon, is some change in our mental or physical capacities, what Spinoza calls "an increase or decrease in our power of acting" or in our "power to persevere in being". All beings are naturally endowed with such a power or striving. This conatus, a kind of existential inertia, constitutes the "essence" of any being. "Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being." An affect just is any change in this power, for better or for worse. Affects that are actions are changes in this power that have their source (or "adequate cause") in our nature alone; affects that are passions are those changes in this power that originate outside of us.
What we should strive for is to be free from the passions -- or, since this is not absolutely possible, at least to learn how to moderate and restrain them -- and become active, autonomous beings. If we can acheive this, then we will be "free" to the extent that whatever happens to us will result not from our relations with things outside us, but from our own nature (as that follows from, and is ultimately and necessarily determined by the attributes of God of which our minds and bodies are modes). We will, consequently, be truly liberated from the troublesome emotional ups and downs of this life. The way to bring this about is to increase our knowledge, our store of adequate ideas, and eliminate as far as possible our inadequate ideas, which follow not from the nature of the mind alone but from its being an expresssion of how our body is affected by other bodies. In other words, we need to free ourselves from a reliance on the senses and the imagination, since a life of the senses and images is a life being affected and led by the objects around us, and rely as much as we can only on our rational faculties. So, if we try to cut down on what affects us (i.e., passions), we will be more autonomous. But not in the sense that the German idealists would recognize (they think humans certainly can have dominion over external things), and certainly not in the sense that any non-philosopher would recognize. Anyway, so, because of this metaphysical determinism, I've always been a little leery of his political theory. I'd like us to be free all the way down, and merely being ideas of God's isn't enough for me.
Paul said snarkily: We're free! You just don't understand that true freedom comes in submitting our will to the true understanding of the laws of god, etc, which really is the ultimate freedom. Clearly you haven't read the previous 200 pages of my book if you don't get that. It's in geometrical argument format so it should be clear. And then I denied that Spinoza said we were free. So, Paul's right in that Spinoza says we can attribute some sort of freedom to ourselves, but it's really not even a matter of submitting our wills to the understanding of the law of God. It's that our wills don't matter at all. Just submitting to the law of God would be easy (metaphysically).
Anyway. for Megan: I like bunnies too.
jane 5:37 PM [+]
NOOOOOOOOO!
eeww... I feel dirty. From an interview in Newsweek with Tim LaHaye co-(author of the Left Behind books --Q:You recently donated a whole lot of money for a hockey rink at Liberty University. If these are the end times, why make an investment like that?
A:[Laughs.] My strategy is that Canada and Northern America produces the bulk of hockey players. We use the ice rink to get the hockey players to come to Liberty University where many of them are exposed to accept Christ. Many of them come because they are Christians. They are challenged to go into the ministry, and we’ve already had some of the guys in the earlier classes that graduated, and they’re going home to Canada to start churches.
Q: Proselytism with a hockey puck?
A: “Evangelism with a hockey puck” would be better. No! Evil!
*sigh* A few pages earlier:Q: [Laughs.] But my understanding is that current biblical scholarship reads some of the apocalyptic scenes in the Bible as metaphorically addressing events that were taking place as the Bible was being written.
A: These are usually liberal theologians that don’t believe the Bible literally.
Q: So the Revelation should not be interpreted, for example, as a polemic against Rome?
A: That’s what they say. We believe that the Bible should be understood literally whenever possible. The next big event is the second coming of Christ. That’s preceded by a number of signs. And some of those signs could be could be stage-setting right now. They’re not going to come out of nowhere. For example, the Bible predicts when the antichrist comes and sits at his kingdom after the Rapture, he’s going to have one world economy and one world government and one world religion. We’re already moving rapidly in the direction of those very things.
Q: Really? It seems we’re a ways off from one world religion.
A: That’s the least developed, but there are many particularly liberal theologians that just think that "Oh, if we could just get everybody together of all beliefs ..." If you don’t have a strong belief system, you’re willing to compromise your beliefs with other religions.
Q: You’ve written about the threat of secular humanism.
A: Part of the opposition to our position is from the secular humanists, but part of it is from the liberal people of theology that reject the Bible. I don’t see a great deal of difference between them. Their basic conclusions are often the same. Ah yes... the reason that I'm becoming Catholic, as a liberal, is that I reject the Bible. That would explain why I've been reading it so much lately, eh? And thanks for writing off the whole ecumenical and interfaith movement as being a rejection of those faiths. Yes. Of course. Because obviously those unbelievers are just TOTALLY WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING. Yes. Clearly. And we can totally take the Bible literally because it was assembled piecemeal and bits were included & taken out based on voting for them, and the Church Fathers disagreed with each other about what should be included because clearly MOST of them were liberal theologians who didn't take any of it seriously anyway.
By "basic conclusions" of secular humanists and liberal theologians, I assume he means "treating everyone with respect, love, and mercy." Liberal theologians are clearly entirely wrong since they pay more attention to the two principle commandments of the New Testament (Love God, Love your neighbour) and the cautions against wealth and greed (you know, the ones in the Gospels), than to bashing Muslims or ranting about sex. Obviously.
Point to me the line in the Bible about turning off your brain? Oh wait -- there isn't one. Rather, there are cautions to carefully appraise spirits & messages, to make sure they're genuine. Tim LaHaye: not so genuine.
Pfah.
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EDIT: In the NY Times, this piece about conservative evangelicals who want to separate themselves from the Religious Right qua political establishment. “There is a lot of discontent brewing,” said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the “emerging church,” which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.
“More and more people are saying this has gone too far — the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right,” Mr. McLaren said. “You cannot say the word ‘Jesus’ in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can’t say the word ‘Christian,’ and you certainly can’t say the word ‘evangelical’ without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people.
“Because people think, ‘Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about ‘activist judges.’ ”
jane 3:04 PM [+]
Thursday, July 27, 2006
is this true?
Man!
| Slow and Steady | 
Your friends see you as painstaking and fussy.
They see you as very cautious, extremely careful, a slow and steady plodder.
It'd really surprise them if you ever did something impulsively or on the spur of the moment.
They expect you to examine everything carefully from every angle and then usually decide against it. |
jane 9:23 PM [+]
More stuff to aid Megan's procrastination
| You Passed 8th Grade Math | 
Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct! |
| You Are 16% American | 
You're as American as Key Lime Tofu Pie
Otherwise known as un-American!
You belong in Cairo or Paris...
Get out fast - before you end up in Gitmo! |
| You Are Heineken | 
You appreciate a good beer, but you're not a snob about it.
You like your beer mild and easy to drink, so you can concentrate on being drunk.
Overall, you're a friendly drunk who's likely to buy a whole round for your friends... many times.
Sometimes you can be a bit boring when you drink. You may be prone to go on about topics no one cares about. |
(This last one was kind of embarrassing... besides, it's lately been said of me that it's hard to tell when I'm drunk. Probably because I'm drunk even when sober.)
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Edit -- I like this one most --
| You Are 32% Evil | 
A bit of evil lurks in your heart, but you hide it well.
In some ways, you are the most dangerous kind of evil. |
jane 9:09 PM [+]
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
For Megan to play with
the Wit
(52% dark, 26% spontaneous, 15% vulgar) |
your humor style:
CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK
You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat.
I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer.
Your sense of humor takes the most thought to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion.
You probably loved the Office. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check it out here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/.
PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais
The 3-Variable Funny Test!
- it rules -
If you're interested, try my best friend's best test: The Genghis Khan Genetic Fitness Masterpiece |
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My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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You scored higher than 52% on darkness |
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You scored higher than 4% on spontaneity |
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You scored higher than 5% on vulgarity |
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Enjoy!
jane 10:46 PM [+]
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Less depressing than war... Death!
I assume I'm the last Canadian to have seen the show but I just watched the first three episodes of Slings & Arrows last night and it's as fantastic as I'd hoped. (Even a tiny brief cameo for Tom McCamus in third episode! And Don McKellar & Paul Gross duelling! *sigh* *heart*)
So good. So fantastically good.
Megan, I particularly thought of you when the evil corporate types (mmmm, evil mark mckinney) walk out of "Mamma Mia," saying that THIS was the theatre they love. And when the stage manager drunkenly blows up at the actors. "FUCKERS! WHINERS!" so good.
If there are any of you reading this who have NOT seen this, they must. Man. So good.
so good. mmmmmm.
jane 4:44 PM [+]
Monday, July 17, 2006
Reptile-hearted man
Some editorializing in the reporting in the CP on Harper's stance on Lebanon: Throughout the trip, Harper has distanced himself from reporters. Since leaving Ottawa last Wednesday, he has spoken to media travelling with him only three times, including a brief encounter on the plane.
It appears that his handlers consider every media encounter an element of their larger political "strategy," not as a way of keeping Canadians informed about the government's actions. I'd be curious how official that strategy is. Whether the handlers would admit to it openly. But I don't necessarily disagree. Earlier in the article: Harper's seeming lack of nuance, empathy and people skills are making his week-long diplomatic foray, which included a visit to Britain before attending his first G8 meeting, an excruciating exercise. His whole PM-ship is, I think, an excruciating exercise.
jane 6:36 PM [+]
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Some other blogs for your reading pleasure...
Recently featured on LiveJournal's 'feature' spot, barmaidblog is a well written account of being a barmaid in Manhattan. It's only been around since June or so, but it looks like it'll continue to be a good read.
An established classic, Waiter Rant is not exactly what it sounds like. Again, well-written, with good stories. But also just a really thoughtful human being, writing about people. And goodness. Excellent blog.
And courtesy of a barmaidblog post, people may find the Rejection Line helpful. I've added it to my cellphone just in case. :) There's no copycat line for Toronto or Ottawa yet, but if you end up travelling, here are the other cities with similar services.
Emily moved out, sadly, but left a bottle of Talisker. I'm in internet browsin' & scotch drinkin' heaven.
jane 9:30 PM [+]
Friday, July 07, 2006
In case I didn't have enough procrastination around...
I applied to, and got into, Theory Is Hot Crew, a closed discussion livejournal community.
Paul, you'd dig these folks. My application thread was here.
Sigh. Always something else to do that's not work.... on the upside, Baur said he got the draft I sent him, along with the book review, and we're going to meet in early August. So, 'til then, nothing to do but teach, prepare for the grad student orientation, and get three conference papers ready. No sweat.
Oh, and my roommate moved out today. i have a new one lined up, but Emily will be a pretty tough act to follow...
jane 11:37 PM [+]
Saturday, July 01, 2006
just mailed draft off to advisor!
Well, the Fichte chapter might be quasi-almost-in-a-really-draft-way done-ish. It depends -- there's a chunk that I haven't written yet, that I'd intended on including in this chapter, that I might move to its own chapter. It also depends on how many revisions I need to make. But it's 38 pages of Fichte-y goodness. So that's got to be worth something, right?
jane 4:19 PM [+]
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