Blank Check

One year ago today, the House and Senate voted to give President Bush blank check authority to use military force against Iraq. In infamous Harper's Index fashion, the Dean for America campaign gives us the last year by the numbers. It's not a pretty picture, and it's not getting any better. Is Bush PR spinning right out of orbit? Um, yeah, that happened several years ago, but finally people are starting to notice.

In the race to decide who's going to replace Bush, the Kerry campaign is rumored to be having troubles, and the trouble in the Clark campaign is more than a rumor. Those links come from Scripting News, where Dave Winer is trying to get the campaigns to blog. I think it's a great idea.

Posted 06:17 AM | Comments (1) | election 2004 general politics

R.I.P. Neil Postman

Farewell to Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death (among other things). The book has been sitting on my shelf for years; I bought it simply because it had such an incredible title and because I'd seen it mentioned in so many other books. Judging from the Forward, now might be a very good time to dig it out. Comparing Aldus Huxley's Brave New World to Orwell's 1984, Postman wrote:

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Postman claimed Amusing Ourselves to Death was "about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right." It's definitely a thesis worth re-examining in light of, oh, I don't know, the events of the last 50 years or so.

UPDATE: Another Postman tribute.

Posted 05:54 AM | Comments (2) | life generally

The Recall's Silver Lining

So yeah, California now has a governator, or something. And in a lot of ways it seems like this cannot be a good thing. However, the folks at Bush Recall.org are letting the Republican logic for the recall speak for itself. Their statement on the recall results (which I got in email) is terrific:

"California voters wanted a change. They were tired of surpluses being turned into deficits, a weak economy shedding jobs, working families losing their health insurance, and skyrocketing energy prices. And they held their state's chief executive accountable.

"We were opposed to the recall process being used for such blatant political ends. We have grave doubts about Schwarzenegger's ability to solve California's problems. And we know that governors all across the nation, Republican and Democrat, are faced with severe budget and economic problems caused by the poor national economy. But the voters have decisively sent a message that they aren't happy with poor results from their elected officials.

"Even though they won this election, Republicans should be very nervous today, because all of the problems voters rebelled against in California have been produced in abundance by President Bush. And the results will be the same in November 2004. Voters will rebel against yawning deficits, a bad economy, and out of control energy and health insurance prices. Voters will kick the chief executive out for his failures in 2004, just like they did yesterday."

Here's hoping they're right. It's looking better all the time. The next Democratic party debate is tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on CNN. Invite your friends and play the Democratic Debate Drinking Game! (Who says politics is no fun?)

Posted 10:44 AM | election 2004

Illusions of Choice

This might seem totally out of context, but: For the past couple of weeks we've been reading about rape in CrimLaw. I understand it's somewhat unusual for an introductory CrimLaw course to spend so much time on rape, but our prof is doing a great job bringing out the hidden assumptions that underpin our rape laws. So far he's focusing mostly on assumptions about gender and race, but there are plenty of class issues involved, as well. Anyway, we keep reading cases where courts have a hard time deciding whether the sex was consensual, and I keep hearing my classmates say stuff like, "She still had a choice, she should have fought harder, she's responsible for her actions," etc. And all I keep thinking is how often what we call "choice" is but an illusion of choice. Then, while searching for some responses to Katie Roiphe (we're reading "Date Rape's Other Victim," which Roiphe wrote in 1993) I stumbled on this:

'The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.' - Karl Marx

It doesn't get much more concise than that. (If anyone can identify the source of this quotation, I'd be, as they say out West, much obliged.)

Part of what Roiphe's arguing for is that we should give up some of our illusions about sex and gender, namely that women are fragile and need protection from the predation of lascivious men. She claims this led to Newsweek calling her "the Clarence Thomas of women," whatever that means. Her arguments carry obvious dangers—they could easily be appropriated by anyone who wants to maintain the status quo which seems to let men off the hook for "behaving badly." See, for example, the story of California's new governor. As a society, we too often seem to give men a free pass to grope and fondle, and I'm convinced too many men go unpunished for doing much worse. Hence the question of when choice becomes mere illusion. It sounds nice to say that women should just stop believing they're fragile and start standing up for themselves instead, but if it were really that simple, the world would be a much simpler place, wouldn't it?

Posted 06:01 AM | Comments (3) | law school

ADR

It appears my partner and I stumbled into a degree of success in the ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) contest in which we participated last Sunday. As I mentioned last week, I was a little less than excited by this competition, primarily because it seemed to require "formal business attire," a.k.a. a uniform.
But after ranting against the monkey suit, I gave into the inevitable and, $252 later (thanks to a big sale at Filene's Basement), I had the full uniform (socks and shoes included). And yesterday, we got the call saying, "Congratulations, you made the ADR Board." Yay!

The competition was actually pretty fun. Briefly, it worked like this: Each team of two got a fact pattern describing a dispute between a fictional collegiate athletic association and one of its member schools accused of rule violations. In addition, each team got some "confidential information" about what their client wanted out of the negotiation. The actual contest was a 20-minute negotiation session in which the two teams came together to see if they could reach an agreement. It turned out the confidential info on both sides gave us plenty of room for meeting in the middle, which we quickly did.

Like I said, it was fun, and it's always nice to get positive feedback for the things you do. Still, I feel a little silly about making the board; I mean, after listening to one of its reps lecture me about clothes for 20 minutes, I was convinced ADR was the last thing in law school for me. What's more, I don't really know what role ADR plays in the legal world or what it means to be "on the board." (Can anyone fill me in?) Yet, the idea of ADR seems like a good one; it's supposed to be a friendly thing, as opposed to the adversarial nature of a court proceeding. How can that be bad? I guess we'll see...

Posted 06:16 AM | law school

Academic English Craziness

Yesterday Brian Leiter pointed to "Critical Mass," a blog written by Erin O'Connor, who is apparently a tenured English professor at the University of Pennsylvania. I don't have time to say all I'd like to about O'Connor's blog, but suffice to say it's a very scary thing. And then there's the Erin O'Connor Watch, which I've got to think will only make things worse.

If you're currently in English academia, you might recognize what's going on here from your own experience or from things you've seen or heard about. The bottom line is that making a profession of English at the university level requires very different types of thinking than most people will have experienced elsewhere. That thinking is not necessarily "liberal" or "conservative," it's critical. If you're unwilling to engage in critical thinking, you're likely to be shunned. O'Connor obviously exhibits an ability to think critically; some of the letters she posts from former grad students and undergrads—not so much critical thinking.

I think all academics should have blogs; if "Critical Mass" was but one among many, readers could easily evaluate its claims about academia. As it is, "Critical Mass" is like a squeaky wheel, and academics might want to take care that it doesn't get the grease.

Posted 05:18 AM | life generally

A note on notetaking

Now fully 6 weeks into law school, I've figured out a handy trick to taking notes in Torts. Our torts casebook presents tons of little note-cases, cases mentioned briefly in the notes following the "main" cases that get fuller treatment in the textbook. Since it's often difficult to say whether ProfTorts is going to think any of these note-cases is important, I'm always hesitant to spend much time outlining them. Yet, several times, either the prof or someone in class will throw out the name of a case and I'll vaguely recall reading it, but I'll have to frantically page through the book to find it (sometimes even resorting to the index of cases at the back of the book). The solution I've found to this little problem is this: I simply type the name and page number of every note-case into my notes following my brief of the "main" case. That way, I won't waste time briefing note-cases that don't turn out to be important to the class discussion, but at the same time, if someone mentions "River Wear Commissioners v. Adamson" in class, I can just do a quick find for "River" in my notes and that will point me straight to the page I need.

It's working well so far. YMMV.

Posted 09:16 AM | law school