Adjunct Faculty members can have no shame in promoting themselves, and indeed I do not.  The newest issue of The Good Society, with a symposium on Visions for and Against Epistemic Proceduralism put together Joshua Miller and adorable me.  Featuring contributions by James Bohman, Corey Brettschneider, Noelle McAfee, and Robert Talisse and Michael Harbour.

I am looking forward to reading former classmate Marie Fritz’s piece when I get the chance.  Those with access to Project Muse - enjoy!

I just watched David Keith’s talk on geoengineering on TED.   He mentions at the end of the talk an interesting problem with global politics that is probably going to be more and more prevalent this century.  The problem is this: let’s say that the United States is against shooting sulfur into the atmosphere to cool temperatures.  There are already individuals wealthy enough to conceivably pull it off.  More to the point, there are other governments besides our own, and any industrialized country who deems that the moral hazard of geo-engineering as well as the environmental trade-offs are absolutely acceptable, who is going to stop them?

Rather than pontificate on an environmental plan that I understand only on an extremely abstract level, let me instead pull your focus to how this is increasingly true for any endeavor, be it stem cell research, terrorism, or humanitarian action.  The scale of human enterprise is radically shifting so that it requires fewer people to do things that make massive differences, and they can accomplish these things as both decentralized and unitary actors.  Decentralized inasmuch as no one legal entity may shut them down and unitary inasmuch as they need not ask the permission of others to carry out their plans on a world that we then all have to live with.

The liberal democratic industrialized world and the Westphalian nation-state system are not particularly well-suited to address problems of this sort.  I’m not suggesting they be discarded, but we are seeing an evolving situation in politics that are going to test what our modern political systems are capable, not only of doing, but also what they are capable of stopping.

From the NYT the other day:

In short, some psychologists say, the findings support the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s observation that time “persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it.”

If both nations fail to achieve a modicum of political stability and success against extremism and economic growth, the world will be faced with an expansion of Islamic extremism, doubts about the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and major questions about US prestige and power as it withdraws from Afghanistan.

Read the rest of it here.

Imagine that you were hoping that Al Qaeda would bring down Western Civilization.  So, you go to Al Qaeda and ask them, “how’s bringing down Western Civilization going?”

Their answer: We almost sort-of brought down a civilian airplane and we also almost murdered a Danish cartoonist.  Both agents have been neutralized and the Yemeni government has apparently declined to accomodate us anymore.

So let me ask you this:  If this was the side you were on, would YOU be happy with how things were going?

Who new that Minnesota state politics would have been such a treasure-trove for a democratic theorist?  First we had the 2008 (9) Senate Race.  We have also had the saga of Governor Pawlenty’s use of a power called unallotment.

What is an unallotment?  Well, here’s the memo that was sent around the Minnesota State Legislature on the subject.  The Governor essentially has the power to personally re-balance the budget if it is decided that there is an emergency change in budget expectations that was unforeseen while the legislature was in session.

Last year, our esteemed governor used the power as a way of driving a hard bargain with the legislature.  Arguing that he could leave the negotiating table and the legislature could not because if talks stalemate, he would just invoke this power, which he did.

Now, some might think that using a power designed for unforeseen changes in budget expectations cannot possibly be legitimate if you are broadcasting using the emergency power before the time window in which the unforeseen emergency is to take place.  This is the budget equivalent of a governor declaring that he has scheduled a state of emergency for the first week of July.

Beyond this, one might notice that there could not be a worse situation from a standpoint of governance than giving the executive an exit option with far superior strength to the legislature’s exit option.  For one thing, it is unclear why ANY governor would be likely to negotiate a budget with an opposition legislature.

The other problem with divesting the power of budget disproportionately in the hands of the governor as opposed to the legislature comes from the very problem we see now. Governor’s are a single individual who holds the position on a state level that most likely leads to the important jobs in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Whereas the legislature is a state institution whose continuity is dependent on satisfying the interests of the state, the career interests of governors are more likely to wander towards satisfying those who might be the source of their next job.

One final note: the courts have been lambasted by politicians in both the Minnesota Senate race controversy and the unallotment controversy.  A final note on Governor Pawlenty’s recent reaction, as reported in the Star Tribune,

Ramsey County District Court Judge Kathleen Gearin “has inserted herself into a political dispute,” Pawlenty said at a news conference. “That degree of involvement by the court is concerning, to say the least. We believe the judge misapplied and misinterpreted the statute in significant ways.”

This is simply an outlandish mischaracterization.  Pawlenty was sued by groups denied money by unallotment. The courts did not choose to get involved at all. Once someone files a suit, the court system IS involved.  That’s what filing a suit DOES.  He may not have wanted to be involved in the suit, but, not surprisingly, NO ONE who is ever sued wants the Court to get involved because before they were sued, they were presumably getting away with what they did without punishment or inconvenience.

What Pawlenty is really saying is that he does not like the decision, which, as the losing party in the decision, is again not surprising.  Most people who lose a court case don’t think they deserve to lose, which some would say is the point of court.  The whole point of a court is that we do not let defendants or plaintiffs decide for themselves whether or not they are right - we already KNOW that they think that they are right.

If you are not reading David Brooks anyway, you should be.  I highly recommend his latest piece.  Brooks’ evaluation of the most recent foiled terror plot and what it reveals about our relationship to our governing institutions is instructive.

For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

Harvey C. Mansfield once wrote something to the effect that Liberals think the state can do anything and Conservatives think it can do nothing.  Both views are childish and retreat from reality.  More and more centralized institutions are likely near-unavoidable in our future.  The more that we start looking at and deliberating about the consequences of this trend, the more we can craft more sophisticated solutions to the problems the centralization will inevitably generate.

Reflecting on a decade of where new scholarship has taken me, I give you ten of the most important works for where my head is now in terms of democratic theory.

In no particular order:

• Democracy After Liberalism, Robert B. Talisse. Vanderbilt University.
• Democratic Authority, David Estlund. Brown University.
• World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge.  Yale University.
• Tocqueville Between Worlds, Sheldon Wolin. Princeton University.
• Reconstructing the Commercial Republic, Stephen Elkin. University of Maryland.
• Women and Human Development, Martha C. Nussbaum. University of Chicago Law School.
• Hearing the Other Side, Diana C. Mutz. University of Pennsylvania.
• Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality, Brian Leiter. University of Chicago School of Law.
• Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam. Harvard University.
• Diversity and Distrust, Stephen Macedo. Princeton University.

Did American sports journalism all collective take crazy pills on the same day?

Texas Tech University fired head coach Mike Leach for locking a player who had suffered a concussion in a dark shed during practice as some sort of punishment for getting head trauma while playing a full contact sport.  He was suspended for his actions.  He threatened to take legal action to challenge the suspension.  He was fired.

I’m no medical expert, but if locking a person with a concussion in a shed is a medically negligent thing to do, then it seems hard to imagine how anyone could say that Coach Leach deserves to keep his job.

According to the sports world, I missing several key facts in the case:

• The kid who was puished is the son of ESPN analyst Craig James.  Who is depending on who you listen to: a helicopter dad, a haughty jerk, or famous enough to have an influence that other parents don’t have.
• The kid, according to some emails obtained by some people somewhere, claim that the kid who was punished was frequently lazy at practice.
• Mike Leach works at the same school that hired Bobby Knight, so there’s hypocrisy.
• Texas Tech fired Leach to avoid paying his salary.
• Leach doesn’t lock everyone in the wood shed, just players with helicopter dads, who don’t give their all in practice and have concussions.  As if it would be a defense in court, “Your Honor, think about all the people my client didn’t assault that night.  That’s gotta count for something!”

While all of these make interesting subplots to the story, none of them seem in any way to contradict that Mike Leach put a university student with a concussion in a shed… and left him there.

Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t see how the fact that the Adam James is lazy, the son of Craig James, or an in era where student-athletes aren’t like they used to be, even if any of these allegations about Adam James are true, means that he somehow deserves to be locked in a shed.  Nor do I see how the fact that Coach Leach is a “mad genius,” or “unconventional,” somehow changes his obligations of medical responsibility towards his players (who are still students) or the facts that what he did was in fact, a medically irresponsible action.

Out steps the sports entertainment establishment to the rescue.  They want to talk about anything with this case accept for the most obviously relevant question: “is the allegation true?”  They keep insisting there are “two sides to this story.”  Really?  What’s Mike Leach’s side?  They were recreating the Stanford Prison Experiment?

Of all of the opinions on the matter, it should surprise no one that the worst take on the matter comes from The Washington Post’s own New York correspondent, Sally Jenkins.  For those not familiar, the Sally Jenkins routine is to argue sanctimoniously from an ethics of solidarity for the underdog against the rich, greedy jerks of the world.  This lends itself nicely to newspaper journalism because it allows the journalist to portray people as good and bad with all the depth of a Brother’s Grimm fairytale, and it allows people to pick allegiances without justification.  Jenkins journalistic style is primarily dependent on name calling, and since it is possible to call anyone a disparaging name, one can simply pick any side they want.

In the Texas Tech case, the coach is a misunderstood genius whose only crime is being successful against the evil, rich, and powerful kids at the University of Texas, where miraculously, everyone is evil regardless of whether they are administrators, coaches or student-athletes. Whereas at Texas Tech both the student-athletes and the administrators are evil and need to be straightened out by our dear hero, even if he sometimes does so clumsily, like when he intentionally locks people with concussions in sheds. At Texas Christian, however, everyone is good because they are all underdogs, even though everyone operates on the inside of the system of college football, which is evil.  This is the universe according to Sally Jenkins, and it makes no sense.

What we have learned from all of this beyond a shadow of a doubt is this: none of these people have any business being anywhere near a university.  For all the pageantry and emotional attachment of people to college football — if it did not exist and someone proposed creating it — no sane person could possibly endorse it as a good idea.

With each passing year that more research is done on the physical damage of the sport, the exposure of unethical behavior by athletic programs, the constant offer as a means of advancement for underprivileged areas and the defense of such behavior as the way it has always been, the more college football starts to look like the moral equivalent of organ theft to raise money for good ol’ alma mater.

As for Mike Leach, I will gladly say that he was wronged… if someone can show me that he did not, in fact, lock a kid with a concussion in a shed.  Otherwise, don’t expect me to weep for the man just because he got what he deserved in a world where one gets what they deserved arbitrarily.

GK - Brad Friedel FB - Steve Cherundolo FB - Frankie Hejduk CB - Carlos Bocanegra CB - Alexi Lalas MF - Landon Donovan MF - Claudio Reyna MF - John Harkes MF - Eddie Lewis FW - Clint Dempsey FW - Brian McBride

Manager - Bruce Arena

Only three-ish (who know with Cherundolo) players on this list are active members of the national team.  That’s probably better than England is doing, but when your country is claiming great progress and has a history that for all intents and purposes dates back to fielding an amateur team in 19 years ago, is not quite the same thing.  Eddie Lewis and Frakie Hejduk not only were underrated in their prime, they were both competitive RECENTLY for spots on the national team even late on in their careers.  Taking Friedel over Keller has to do with their domestic careers, and the 2002 World Cup - Tim Howard doesn’t have enough of his career behind him to compete with two legitimately world class players at their position, though he would be the best keeper most countries in the world had ever produced already.  Brian McBride is the best outfield player in US history.  Period.  Everyone hated to play him, everyone respected him, and everyone liked him.  He would go anywhere and do anything, and he was actually one of the best at his craft (the target man) of his generation.  If Europe had any degree of the American scouting they have now, he would have started his career in Europe early enough to be truly appreciated for how great he was.  But perhaps the best testimony as to his being the best outfield player in American history is the look on the face of any Portugese defender in ‘02.  They read as clear as day: “Who the $%^ is this guy?”