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    Month: September 2014

    • In praise of anti-anti-ableism

      Increasingly, when I see someone accused of "ableism" because of some inartful (or perfectly fine) turn of expression, I become angry. It just strikes me as Forrest Gumpism. Everything is really peachy, as long as we confine our discourse to positive platitudes (and attacking those who don't so confine themselves).* But all else being equal,…

    • Salaita and the Accreditors

      Following a suggestion from a friend that some of what’s come to light about the roles of the administration and the board in the Salaita affair might not be consistent with accrediting principles regarding shared governance, I decided to check out the specific rules that UIUC is supposed to be operating under.   The upshot…

    • Steven Salaita And The Anger Of The Subjugated

      In response to my post yesterday, a couple of readers wondered about the analogy I had drawn between Professor F and Steven Salaita‘s cases. Reader Meir Alon suggested my comparison was ‘very wrong’, Darius Jedburgh said my comparison of Salaita was, indeed, ‘slanderous’, and yet another worthy wondered what the point of it all was.…

    • The scariest thing about Stephen King’s 11/22/63

      There's not much new that one can currently do to add to the variety of possible time travel metaphysics explored in literature. Try-to-improve-stuff-make-other-stuff-much-worse is a pretty reliable trope by this point. Stephen King's 11/22/63 (in addition to being a great novel) is still philosophically interesting though.  What 11/22/63 makes distressingly clear is that in King's…

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: the last one

      After more than 3,5 years of weekly Brazilian music posts, I decided to discontinue the weekly regularity. For a number of reasons, it had become increasingly difficult for me to keep up with the rhythm (and NOT due to paucity of good Brazilian music!). I may still occasionally post when I come across or am…

    • The Ferguson Lesson: Another Way to “Take Up Arms”

      As someone who has spent the better part of her career researching, analyzing and teaching not only about the structure and nature of oppressive power regimes, but also better and worse ways to resist or transform such regimes, I've nevertheless been unable to settle in my own mind, to my own satisfaction, my position with…

    • Steven Salaita And The Feminist Professor Who Praised Valerie Solanas

      Here is a story of a professor, whose tweets got her into trouble. The professor in question is a feminist, Professor F, sometimes termed ‘radical’ by her friends, colleagues, and academic foes for her uncompromisingly feminist scholarship and her vigorous, no-nonsense rhetorical style, which is well-versed in the demolition of putative rebuttals to feminist theory and keenly…

    • A ‘mathematical’ approach to the usefulness of blogs

      I expect many readers to be following the ongoing debate, prompted by a poll run by Leiter last week, on the (presumed) effects that blogs have had for professional philosophy, both at the level of content and at the level of ‘issues in the profession’. (Roberta Millistein weights in at NewAPPS, and I agree with…

    • Cassandro’s Big Fight (hat tip Andrew Sullivan)

      Fantastic New Yorker article here about gay luchador Cassandro, with an explanation of the exótico wrestling arechetype and how it fits into lucha libre. The video at right is great too.

    • Philosophy Is Incredibly White — but This Does Not Make It Unusual Among the Humanities

      Tina Fernandes Botts and colleagues have recently posted a fascinating analysis of the shockingly low numbers of black- or African-American- identified philosophers in the United States. According to their data, 1.3% of U.S. philosophers self-identify as black (compared to 13% in the general U.S. population). Now I was all set today to work up some…