Stanley Fish In The NY Times: More Colorado Follies

Full post here.

“The University of Colorado is considering a $9 million program to bring high-profile conservatives to teach on the left-leaning Boulder campus.”

Bad idea says Fish. Put scholarship and learning above any political considerations.

He also distinguishes between conservative thought and conservative aesthetics:

A course in conservative thought might run from:

“…Plato and Aristotle and hitting the highlights including Hooker, Hobbes, Adam Smith, Burke, Schmitt, Wyndham Lewis, Oakeshott, Strauss, Kirk, Bork…”

and conservative aesthetics:

“…Plato and Aristotle [sic} including Dante, Puttenham, Swift, Pope, Bergson, Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbitt, Eliot, Pound and Allan Bloom…”

So would liberal aesthetics include the Romantics, Santayana, modern lyrical poetry etc…? What about Nietzsche?

Certainly Plato isn’t merely conservative?


by carpe icthus

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Tornadoes! Some Links

With so many deadly tornadoes in the news lately, I thought I’d post a few links:

Here’s a link to the How Stuff Works tornado page.

The Tornado Project Online. (Affiliated with How Stuff Works, lots of top-ten lists etc…)

-How to make a tornado box for a science fair.

-Is it a vortex of rising, warm and moist air or cool air dropping downward?   Good models here.  A horizontal column of rotating air that gets lifted with the rising air in the formation of a storm?

-The Red Cross Tornado Preparedness Page.

-You’ve got to check out Tornadovideos.net.

A swedish guy has a small tornado drop down in front of his car (1:15 or so, cool video)A dust-devil here.  If you have time and are a real weather geek, the formation of a supercell here.

See Also: The Greensburg Tornado on Doppler Radar


by Extreme WX Photographer

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Another Take On J.S. Mill From “Liberal England”

Full post here

Why have so many people promoting gender and racial equality been allowed to pass as mainstream liberals…and not have to answer for the inherent threat their ideas can pose to our liberal democracy and the institutions that support it?

It’s a good question.  

Key quote:

“More recently Richard Rorty made an attractive attempt to reconcile the most avant-garde postmodern theory with a defence of the institutions of the Western liberal democracies, but the Mill of On Liberty still reigns supreme.”

See Also: What Can Liberalism Be? Much More Than It Is Now.

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Steven Pinker From The New Republic: The Stupidity Of Dignity

Full essay here.

Pinker attacks “dignity” arguments put foward by the President’s Council On Bio-Ethics in Human Dignity And Bioethics.

He’s not impressed with the set of largely conservative ideas he finds there, a few of which are rooted in Catholic doctrine.  Who’s putting them foward?

“…a group of intellectual activists, many of whom had jumped from the radical left to the radical right, has urged that we rethink the Enlightenment roots of the American social order. The recognition of a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the mandate of government to secure these rights are too tepid, they argue, for a morally worthy society.”

A group grimly attaching its interests to politics and enfringing upon our cherished enlightenment values as enshrined in the Constitution.

So is Pinker trying to define himself as closer to national goals?  His concept of “dignity” is:

“…a phenomenon of human perception…

…Just as the smell of baking bread triggers a desire to eat it, and the sight of a baby’s face triggers a desire to protect it, the appearance of dignity triggers a desire to esteem and respect the dignified person…”

“…This explains why dignity is morally significant: We should not ignore a phenomenon that causes one person to respect the rights and interests of another. But it also explains why dignity is relative, fungible, and often harmful. Dignity is skin-deep:”

In this view, “dignity” is not a deep enough argument upon which to base the kind of moralism that will end up restricting progress.  Instead, Pinker is seeking to define and create more freedom for this progress to occur where biology, medicine and technology meet.

In fact:

“Even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos (to say nothing of the threat of criminal prosecution), millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die. And that would be the biggest affront to human dignity of all.”

These people are morally responsible to all the sick people that would have been helped had they not gotten in the way!

That seems a little extreme.  I’m glad that neither Pinker nor the “dignity” crowd is the final word on any of this, nor solely responsible for our moral thinking.

See Also:  Ross Douthat has more here at Pinker vs. Humanism, Ann Althouse has more here.

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David Sloan Wilson At The Huffington Post: Atheism As a Stealth Religion

Here’s his first post and here’s the second.

From the first:

“The new atheists hate religion for causing between-group conflict and especially for its wanton disregard of the canons of rational thought. Yet, both of these problems extend far more widely than religion”

Agreed.  Also…

“The new atheists will need to display a virtue typically associated with religion–humility–if they wish to join this enterprise.”

Yes, they will, if they wish to honor the free thinking that helped create the intellectual roots of their atheism….but what enterprise would that be?

“…the circle of cooperation…”

Is there something about evolutionary biology that appeals to liberalism?  liberals to evo-biology? liberals to less objective fields of science?  Karl Popper seemed to think evolution wasn’t a science, but why were Popper and the Vienna Circle so interested in a radical empiricism in the first place?

Or does politics have nothing to do with science unless we insist that it does?

See Also: The Economist on Moral Thinking: David Sloan Wilson’s Research, A Sympathetic View Of Noam ChomskyFrom New York Magazine: If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?

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Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty: Pascal Dangin And Aesthetics


Selva-Real women in Hong Kong?

“Real” beauty in Dove’s opinion is distorted by commercial advertising and high-end fashion magazines.  Most models are already known for their ideal looks, but after the photo shoots, people like Pascal Dangin re-touch, cut-out, stylize, and alter them.

This kind of thing, Dove claims, presents an impossibly narrow ideal.  It creates “self-limiting” norm for impressionable young girls. They’ve even created a self-esteem fund.

In the New Yorker, Dangin admits to having worked for Dove, applying some of his techniques (with heavy use of mathematics and computer graphics) to touch-up their photos.  You know the kind.

Another Dove photo here.

Regardless of his motives, Dangin considers himself an artist and what he does a pursuit of aesthetics.

It’s surprising why he wasn’t an architect or software designer…some field where the pursuit of beauty through mathematical form isn’t directly applied to fashion, or a woman’s desire to be beautiful…

Is it a French thing?

See Also: More On Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty

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From The Boston Globe: Literature Needs To Embrace Science

Full article here.

The patient is etherised upon a table…or so suggests our author. It’s now time:

“…[to] spur a process whereby not just literature, but the larger field of the humanities recover some of the intellectual momentum and “market share” they have lost to the sciences.”

Copy “science” and regain “market share?”

“So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.”

Well, this should come as no surprise. Shakespeare and Melville were artists. Studying them gives pleasure, enhancing linguistic expression and understanding within the scope of their creative imaginations. I suspect most literature students want to be great artists as well.

The scientists are…well…doing science.

As Camille Paglia has pointed out, many literature departments have gone the way of cultural relativism.  Too often do they confuse literature with politics and current thinking.  As a result, they’re particularly aimless right now…

…with consequences for all of us.

Market-share?

See Also: How To Study Literature: M.H. Abrams In The Chronicle Of Higher EdShould You Bother To Get A Liberal Arts Education? Allan Bloom, Camille Paglia and Anthony Kronman.


by kinkazzo  Poor Old Harold Bloom

Addition: Andrew Sullivan has more here with a link to Literary Kicks here

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J.S. Mill: A Review In The Chronicle Of Higher Ed


by jamesinger 

Full review here.

“Liberalism today possesses agreed-upon principles that can be applied to contemporary issues like economic justice or racial equality.”

As has been pointed out, maybe Mill can provide a source of reason, temperance and deeper thought to modern liberalism. 

High-end analytic skills and a commitment to womens’ suffrage?

Just a thought: Sometimes support for the far and dangerous right is put forth by the artist just giving up his art…or the ideas behind it…

Here’s the 1st chapter of On Liberty…

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Charles Murray In The New Criterion: The Age Of Educational Romanticism

Full post here.  (updated)

A few key quotes:

“The first strand in explaining educational romanticism is a mythic image of the good old days when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three R’s.”

When I was your age we walked uphill both ways…” Is that going anywhere?

“The second strand in explaining educational romanticism is the periodic discovery of magic bullets for raising classroom performance.

and…

“The third and probably most powerful strand for explaining educational romanticism in the last quarter-century has been Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, introduced in Frames of Mind (1983).”

Gardner’s book here.

On the positive side: Charles Murray has stood for the IQ test actually measuring something and reminding us that the black/white achievement gap is statistically valid…He has become an active and important educational reformer, wresting it away from people and ideas who can do more harm than good.

On the negative side: I would question whether or not Murray achieves this criticism by adhering to certain libertarian political principles…sometimes even adhering to current political thinking. As an active reformer, what is the endgame? Politics? Education?

Addition: The best thing to do, I think, is to look at Murray’s data, and his fidelity to it.  I already agree that the claims for most social programs success are dubious.

See Also: Race and IQ: Malcolm Gladwell On The Flynn Effect and since when did romanticism become a bad word?: Roger Sandall: Marveling At The Aborigines, But Not Really Helping?


 by rsmoffat

From The Literary Review–An Appeal To Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming

Full review here.

It’s tough to provide a sceptical, yet non-scientific take on global warming in such a political and social “climate.”

Does Nigel Lawson’s book pull it off?

Quite apart from the science (which is clearly the best place to start), it’s so often the interpretation of the science and the media presentation of global warming as an inevitability…which is not always reasonable.

See Also: The Weather Channel’s Green Blog: A Little Too Green? The National Geographic-Marching To The Eco-Drumbeat


by Juampe López

An Inconvenient Truth:  Where science is used to serve a genuine moral concern, but largely to unify people around a moral concern which happens to correspond nicely with a set of political ideas…er…which could eventually serve Al Gore’s political career. 

See Also: The Spiked Review Of Books has more.

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