Make sure you tune in to Robert Talisse’s guest appearance on “Philosophy Bites.”

Sybil and I are in the current issue of the Saint John’s University Law Review.  ”Justice is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping!: Trading Justice for Efficiency Under the New Aggregate Settlement Regime.” PDF.

I haven’t really read any of his stuff since Underworld, but there’s a nice piece on Don Dellilo in today’s New York Times.

A PUBLICLY FUNDED FOOTBALL STADIUM????  This from a Governor who is apparently so principled on the budget that it is worth violating his Constitutional prerogative to cut funding for things.

Don’t worry though, they have a perfectly responsible means to pay for this new stadium: they are going to encourage more people to engage in state-sponsored gambling!

Here are the many ways in which one’s head ought to explode if they want to pretend this idea makes sense.

1. Having people gamble more doesn’t have social costs, does it?  Luckily, the social problems of poor health, low education and and poor social environment are not problems that my tax dollars already go to combat, so if the Vikings make those problems worse, I won’t be the one paying… oh.
2. We obviously have nothing else that the state needs to pay for in its budget, like, for example, police officers.  I certainly don’t live on a street with 4 inches of snow even as I get letter from the city threatening to fine me if I don’t shovel my sidewalk within 30 seconds of the most recent snowfall
3. Also, those potholes all around the TC are probably just my imagination… of course, everyone knows that a professional football team generate more revenue than an effective daily transportation system that more effectively delivers workers and goods acros the state more efficiently.
4. If there is to be increased revenues from the lottery, one of two things has to happen: Either MORE people GAMBLE MORE, or people STOP buying lottery tickets that support OTHER state projects and buy these tickets instead.  In which case, our budgetary priorities are being scheduled by which scratch-off game is most popular at the gas station.
5. Since the state is essentially involved in what could be a private industry for the purposes of raising revenues, why don’t they take over the drug trade, banking, and the restaurant industries as well? Then the Vikings could have a new stadium and be competitive when revenue sharing disappears.
6. Not to nit-pick, but are we really going to do this before the league has a horrible labor dispute?  What happens if the NFL becomes the NHL?
7. Here’s a novel thought: if the state wants to raise revenues for itself through the lottery, WHY NOT LOWER TAXES???

In short, the idea that conservatives think that they can be either a) For the STATE TO RUN A GAMBLING INDUSTRY b) For a gambling industry, that subsidizes the capital investment for ANOTHER private industry and still call themselves a principled conservative escapes human comprehension.

If the Tea-Partiers want to meet in Saint Paul for this one, I’ll meet you there.  However, since your movement is owned by people who have interests rather than principles, I’m guessing I won’t see you.

As the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saint prepare to play a near-incomprehensible sporting match against one another, the rest of us prepare for a descent into hell.  As if sitting through the sport with so many rules, replay challenges, and mind-numbing length that only the world’s most litigious civilization could love was not hell enough, this year’s Super Bowl ads promise to get us to the anti-promised land by night’s end.

If you know anything of either football or political outrage, middle class America’s two favorite past times, then you have likely heard about Heisman Trophy emeritus Tim Tebow’s anti-abortion advertisement that CBS has agreed to air.  Outrage has been expressed that many Americans might be outraged by the advertisement given the near 50-50 split in this country regarding views on legalizing abortions… to say nothing of the confused and angry emotions American may feel by having a quarterback who is not named Manning or Favre selling them something on a national tv broadcast.

If you wish to be appalled by something besides hearing about abortion while waiting to find out if Reggie Wayne did or did not trap that relatively inconsequential 8 yard pass against the ground, worry not.  Electronic Arts wants to send you to hell, Dante-style.  Well, that is, if Dante was a one-man killing machine. According to what game designers told The New York Times, they thought Dante needed sprucing up to be a good action game, because he was too poetic and philosophical.  Did they really say, “We had to take the bold step of saying, ‘How do we make this guy an action hero?’” Oh yes they did. If you are as unfortunate as I am, you have had to endure someone trying to convince you that video games are art. If thats so, Inferno is like “Ghandi II” from UHF, except not a parody.

In case you thought that this might be a quick thirty seconds of hell you might avoid by going to the bathroom, Electronic Arts has made the brilliant move of forcing you to avoid the bookstore if you truly want to avoid their insipid use of borrowed cultural capital.  There you will find a “special edition” of the epic poem published by Electronic Arts.  Just like Greedo in Star Wars Special Edition, Dante now shoots first.

Oh, if  Dante could have lived  to see his culminating place in our culture. How could he ever imagine that he, little ol’ Dante Alighieri, could be responsible for, as the Electronic Arts special edition proclaims atop is cover, “the classic that inspired the epic video game from Electronic Arts?”  Or that the video game that he inspired would be deemed so important as to be advertised during the Super Bowl?  Welcome to the club, Dante. Nietzsche’s apparently wondering what took you so long.

In the spirit of the American pageant around which all of this is taking place, the only truly patriotic thing to do in a situation like this is to take some time and consider, “who can we blame for all of this?”  I suggest mulling this over in advance so that you will have a good head start on all the morning talk shows and 24 hour news networks for the week after, as they are sure to be all over this question.  Hell in our popular culture, it turns out, is a tricky place to escape.

If Theodore Lowi is correct that the Republican Era died in the 1990’s, last week’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee was the equivalent of digging up the corpse and adding further humiliation to a long dead body.

A quick survey of James Madison’s Federalist #10, which presumably every college educated American has been exposed to at one point or another, reveals that factions are to be controlled, not forming iron triangles that shape the people’s business.  In the less read, but more erudite Federalist #9 (tip of the hat to anotherpanacea for the reminder), Alexander Hamilton writes,

The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients. The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election: these are wholly new discoveries, or have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times. They are means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided.

To be a “republican” is to be for a “republic” in precisely this way.  It should be quite obvious that neither political party is for a republic in this manner.  It further should be obvious that neither party is for a republic in this way because of the influence of interest groups in the democratic process, which has led not to free competition, but a series of private fiefdoms of resource distribution that are both free from regulation and free to undermine the civil associations of the American republic at will. The failure of the state’s attempt to wrest control of public policy on health care from private fiefdom follows the same pattern as the failed attempts to address energy or agricultural policy for the last 50 years.

Theodore Roosevelt once remarked that the day we abandon the inherent value of life in our republic in exchange for “ill-gotten wealth”, and “ignoble prosperity” will markt he first day that we will “perish, as we will deserve to perish from the earth.”

The sign of how far we have fallen is that this decision is a disaster for self-governance. Not because of the principles of the decision itself, but because of its effects.  The reason the effects are so outrageous is that we live in a majority tyranny, and the judiciary has now unshackled corporate interest entirely so as to give them an unfettered advantage in flattering the tyrant.

Hamilton wrote,

From the disorders that disfigure the annals of those republics the advocates of despotism have drawn arguments, not only against the forms of republican government, but against the very principles of civil liberty. They have decried all free government as inconsistent with the order of society, and have indulged themselves in malicious exultation over its friends and partisans.

Friends of democratic despotism have carefully disassembled all the modern institutions that make civil liberty possible.  They have peddled a view of liberty that claims liberty exists independent of order, and once order is gone, some will scratch their heads at the decisions of the new despotism (libertarians) because they will not be liberal, only arbitrary, while others will be revealed to have wanted nothing but despotism from the start.

What we are watching has been done before.  Not for the first time is a revolution being carried out in the name of the proletariat promising liberty, and equality, and ending with something much worse.  Perhaps a commercial republic cannot exist in today’s world anymore, but such predictions have come from those who are, as Hannah Arendt once wrote, “like the person who says ‘Mrs. Smith is dead’ and then kills her.”

Today the Supreme Court has decided are republic is wel and truly dead, they  have not kiled it, but five of them stand over an already dead carcass, holding five smoking guns meant to ensure that there will be no rise from the dead by the American Republic.

A couple of interesting posts up today, one is a paper by Professor Brian Croxall entitled “The Absent Presence: Today’s Faculty.” (The link comes via Brian Leiter, via a tip off from an old friend, or at least someone with the same name) Professor Croxall cites the ratio of students now taught by adjunct faculty members, notes the cost adjuncts have to pay (usually personally) for professional development with regards to conference attendance and job interviews.  He neglects to mention lack of access to departmental decision-making, programmatic involvement in college administration and advising and access to general grant and research funding, which are also all major development barriers. He concludes that model is not sustainable because who could want to become an English Professor under these conditions if they continue to worsen.

I also read this post on adjuncts and accreditation.  It essentially concludes that the ratio of adjuncts to tenure-track faculty should be an accreditation standard.  First off, I was under the impression that in some places it is a standard.  Secondly, this usually is solved by pushing out adjuncts rather than making more people tenure track, I’m not sure this is ideal.

More to the point, what the second piece misses, and is linked to the barriers adjuncts find in the first piece, is that the dirty little secret in the academy is this: there are a vast number of adjuncts who are far well qualified than a substantial percentage of tenured faculty.

Let me illustrate the point this way: I’m fairly positive that a university made up entirely of people who are either currently adjuncts or graduate students on their way to becoming adjuncts could easily perform at the level of a second-tier university in both research and teaching.

Since there are, according to Google, 2,363 4-year degree-granting colleges in the United States, this probably shouldn’t be possible from a labor pool that I am going to guess makes on average lesst han $20,000 a year, have no health coverage, and are asked to sign contracts that allow them to be terminated if your presence is inconvenient to the budgeting of others who have little to no extra productive value, but have been promised employment for life.

This is the crux of the problem, that no one wants to say but needs to be said.  Given the labor pool in academia, at least in the humanities, there are some very valuable faculty members, there are some valuable faculty members, and then there are the bulk of faculty in each discipline whose Value Over Replacement is either zero or next to zero, because at this point, the pool of replacements contain many people who are really good.

You see a lot of canceled searches or schools not refilling positions due to budget concerns these days. Part of those concerns come from the fact that while the talent gap may be small between adjunct faculty members and young tenure-track employees, the pay gap is enormous.  So why would you pay so much more for what could turn out to be potentially less production?

The root of the problem is that the american university’s interest’s are purely acquisitive and not educational.  Universities wish to acquire famous scholars, not their production. Universities wish to acquire higher numbers of application, so they pour money into college sports and lavish amenities for students. Universities want to create a satisfying experience for students and parents, so that they donate to the university over time, improving its ability to acquire other things, including prestige via the US News and World Reports rankings, to name just an example.

We live in an age where football gets subsidized at a school like MTSU even while they mull ELIMINATING the geosciences, physics, philosophy and criminal justice departments!  The labor crunch doesn’t pit tenure-track vs. non-tenure-track faculty members - they are trapped in a university system that is forcing them to cater to a certain pattern of resource allocation, which is putting as much pressure on tenure-track faculty as it is on adjuncts, not to mention administrators who are having more and more difficult choices imposed upon them as well.

The New York Times has a piece on how a liberal arts education that forces you to engage reading and analysis critically (surprise!) is good for the cognitive abilities of individuals regardless of profession.  And I thought I was wasting my time all this time…

The week of self-promotion continues.  I am writing a weekly column on Glorious Football.  My first post is on how the “Big Four” era in England faces a new environment, but that doesn’t guarantee that the Big Four won’t continue to dominate.  Please read and leave positive feedback on the site!

The thoughts and prayers of all the football community are in Angola today, where the Togolese national Football team was ambushed while in the country for the Africa Cup of Nations.  Africa has had a recent run of terrible footballing tragedies, and as it moves ever-closer to its first ever hosting of the World Cup, I think it is safe to say that the first reaction is to wish them safety and peace for the rest of the year.