The Clarion-Ledger reports that the IHL board is meeting behind closed doors today, one day after IHL university presidents met in a closed-door session with USM president Shelby Thames:

Citing “potential litigation at USM,” Mississippi College Board members today went into closed-door session at about 8:50 a.m. as dozens of faculty and students from the University of Southern Mississippi campus milled about the board’s offices off Ridgewood Road.

Both supporters and detractors of USM President Shelby Thames made the trip to Jackson as the board that oversees the state’s universities discussed Thames’ decision to oust tenured professors Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer and the resulting campus uproar.

More from Ralph Luker, who continues his browbeating of OxBlogger David Adesnik (whose ignorance of Mississippi geography is forgiveable, coming from someone who’s studying in the fens of East Anglia on the banks of the River Cam*) for his inattention to matters that might be of concern of a future Ph.D., even one coming from such high stations as Yale and Oxford and who might not deign to accept a job in the primitive backcountry that is 21st century Mississippi.

Scott has a roundup of Tuesday’s developments at his blog, including an extended discussion of the C.V. of Angie Dvorak, one of the peripheral issues in the situation.

Also of note: Clarion-Ledger columnist Eric Stringfellow thinks Shelby Thames is in over his head as USM president, and the Hattiesburg American wants an open hearing for Glamser and Stringer, rather than the closed hearing their attorney has requested.

• 3/4 lb. firm tofu, cut into 1 inch cubes
• 1 1/4 cups peanut oil

• 1 oz. roasted peanuts
• 3 tbsp. peanut butter
• 1 tbsp. sugar
• 2 tbsp. water
• 2 tsp. rice vinegar
• 1 tbsp. finely chopped cilantro
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. chili oil
• Sriracha chili sauce

I’m now starting to accumulate rejection letters at a not unreasonable pace.

Mark Kleiman wondered a few days ago why countries don’t try to muck around with internal politics to pursue their preferred policies (except, of course, when they do—most notably, during the steel tarriffs flap, the European Union was on the verge of imposing sanctions against the U.S. that were conveniently targeted at “battleground” states that George Bush needs for reelection).

The ongoing kerfuffle over John Kerry’s backdoor endorsements by foreign leaders suggests a reason why: if public, such endorsements are often counterproductive. I trust that the news that incoming Spanish prime minister Zapatero favors the election of Kerry won’t be prominently featured in Kerry’s advertising for that very reason. Even if you presume that Zapatero’s comments were made purely for domestic consumption by the Bush-hating European masses, he might have done well to consider that Bush—unlike Bill Clinton—is into the “personal loyalty” approach and doesn’t stand for the traditional left-wing European game of trying to have it both ways in a relationship with the United States (something that Tony Blair rather wisely figured out on his own, yet somehow this lesson is lost on Blair’s continental counterparts.)

Both Steven Taylor and Eric Lindholm note that John Kerry was on both sides of the supplemental appropriations bill for Iraqi and Afghan reconstruction. In particular, Eric notes this rather curious position by Kerry:

Mr. Kerry has indicated that he might have voted [in favor of final passage of the bill] had his vote been decisive.

Now, it is arguably rational for voters to behave differently when their vote is decisive (or pivotal) than when it isn’t; voting is both a symbolic act and part of a decision-making process. The normative question is: given that most votes are not inherently pivotal, should citizens nonetheless expect sincere voting behavior from their representatives, rather than the symbolic behavior that Kerry essentially admits he demonstrated? Given that representatives are supposed to be accountable for their votes—hence the use of non-secret ballots—my gut feeling is that citizens should expect sincere voting by the legislators they are represented by, whether we’re discussing procedural motions or votes on final passage.

Vance of Begging to Differ points out evidence that Bush administration officials deliberately hid the full cost of the recent Medicare bill from Congress until after the bill’s passage.

I just walked out to put something in the mail, and saw fire trucks down the street; the house two doors down is on fire (or, was on fire; it’s out now, as best as I can tell). It looks like the house was pretty well gutted, considering I can see inside the rafters where the flames burned through.

Amazingly, I wouldn’t have known this had I not gone outside to put something else in the mailbox (I didn’t hear the fire truck siren, though I did hear it when it pulled up). An hour ago, when I put a couple of other things in the mail, all was perfectly tranquil.

I thought I’d make myself useful today by filling out the paperwork to move the contributions I made was forced to make to Mississippi’s state retirement plan to my personal IRA. This is not an easy task:

• One form (Form 5) needs to be witnessed by two different people, in addition to me, then approved by the University of Mississippi HR department, then shipped off to Jackson for paperwork pushing.
• A separate form (Form 5C) does not require witnesses; however, I have to get the custodians of my existing IRA to approve the rollover, then have the form shipped off to Jackson for additional paperwork pushing. This would seem to be a relatively trivial exercise, except the closest branch of the credit union I have my IRA with is in lovely Picayune, Mississippi (best known as “the place all the signs on I-59 say you’re going when you’re actually headed to New Orleans”), which is about 6 hours from here.

I have thus decided the sensible course of action is to defer further action until I find out whether I’ll end up being a state employee again in the fall—the odds of that are rather slim, but one more year of state employment would be sufficient for partial vesting in the plan, thus making this entire exercise financially counterproductive.

Eugene Volokh writes, regarding the prosecution of two Unitarian minister in New Paltz, NY for marrying same-sex couples:

Some readers suggest that the clergy may be being prosecuted for signing their names to some government document attesting to the marriage. This might indeed be more punishable as an offense, partly because it’s more likely to be seen as a false statement of fact—a clerk might indeed not realize on a quick glance that this is a same-sex marriage, and be confused into thinking that the marriage was valid. But that’s not what I understood “solemnizing” to mean under New York law; as I understand it, solemnizing means performing the marriage, not signing a document.

This prompted me to dig up my New York marriage certificate from August, 1995. There’s a signature on it by the town clerk who issued it, but no place on the certificate for the signature of the person who performed the ceremony. (The town clerk happened to be the person who performed the ceremony, but if someone else had, there’s no place on the certificate for that person to sign.) For that matter, there’s no place on the certificate for the couple to sign, and I seem to recall signing something at some point. The wording on the certificate alludes to a “duly registered license … on file in this office.” Perhaps the person who performs the ceremony has to sign the duly registered license.

Tim Sandefur points out that James Madison would be 253 today. Although the term “political scientist” wouldn’t be coined until much later, Madison was among the first American political theorists. Of course, he also managed to provoke the British into kicking our asses in the War of 1812, New Orleans notwithstanding . Still, when compared to the other “political scientist” president that we can claim as our own—the not-quite-as-infamous-as-he-should-be racist Woodrow Wilson, whose hopeless idealism in some matters of international relations has earned him a free bigotry pass in the history books—Madison is vastly preferable using virtually any metric.

Oddly enough, as they say, I was born in the now-no-longer (thanks to the newfangled abomination that is Nashville-Davidson County) town of Madison, Tennessee.

Steven Taylor claims the following today:

The hardest part [of academia] is everything you have to do to get the job in the academy in the first place, and those are quite rare.

In the meantime, I’m happy to report some good job news. A good friend, who’s ABD in sociology, applied for exactly one job this year, got exactly one interview, and was offered, and accepted, exactly one tenure-track job at a well-respected liberal arts college within two hours of the Grande Onze university where she is finishing her Ph.D.

What? You were expecting good job news from me? Surely you jest…

I’m taking Glenn’s advice and blogging outdoors this afternoon; it’s just a wee bit chilly where I am (on the north side of Weir Hall on the Ole Miss campus in Oxford), since it’s in the shade, but there isn’t a lot of choice—the alleged wireless network in these parts is nowhere to be found, so I’m sitting in a patio area that has wired 100 Mb/s Ethernet and power outlets. But, as they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words…

Don’t ask how much work it was to get that photo from my SprintPCS camera phone onto the blog. I guess I need to work on making that easier.

A lot has been said about the political effects (or lack thereof) of the Madrid bombings on the Spanish elections this week; I won’t try to sum it all up here. In general, though, I have to agree with those such as Robert Garcia Tagorda, Jacob Levy, and Steven Taylor, and disagree with those (who will go unlinked, but you can find them easily enough) who ascribe the Spanish electorate’s behavior to being cowed by terror. Rather, I think much of the blame for the Popular Party’s loss has to be laid at the foot of prime minister Aznar’s hasty connection of ETA, the Basque separatist terror group, to the bombings, and the perception that he was “playing politics” with the situation at the U.N. Security Council.

There are two other worthwhile data points to mention. Post-Franco, Spain’s governments have generally been center-left coalitions led by the Socialists, in part because of the lingering association of the political right with the Franco dictatorship. The Popular Party victory in 1996 was very much against the long run trend of Spanish voting behavior, and probably should not have been expected to persist.

Secondly, the Mediterranean ex-dictatorships—Greece, Portugal, and Spain—have had a (not entirely unjustified) dislike of U.S. foreign policy, in large part due to the realpolitik decision that America made in supporting those countries’ former unelected governments as a bulwark against Soviet expansion. In the cases of Portugal and Spain, the United States was essentially confronted with faites accompli: the Salazar and Franco dictatorships were consolidated during the interwar period in which the U.S. retreated from European affairs, although arguably the United States—and Britain and France—should have continued the war against the Axis to eliminate Hitler and Mussolini’s Iberian fellow travellers. (Greece is a far less forgivable case.)

As a practical matter, it is still an open question whether an accommodation can be worked out with the incoming Socialist government on keeping its forces in Iraq, perhaps in a different command structure under the authority of the soon-to-be-sovereign Iraqi interim government. It remains to be seen whether, as David Brooks alleges today, in the pages of the New York Times, “Al Qaeda has now induced one nation to abandon the Iraqi people.”

This is my entry in today’s OTB Traffic Jam.

I’m enjoying massive shoulder pain today, so blogging isn’t exactly at the top of my list of priorities. Thankfully, Scott has the rundown of events as of this morning.

Amanda Doerty, arguing for the intrisic immorality of theft, asks:

If, in any situation, we find it justifiable for any person or group to take the property of any other person without the consent of the other (whether by force, or threats of jail, etc.), we cannot argue that there is anything intrinsically wrong with that act. On what, then, do we base our objections to theft?

She dismisses the utilitarian answer thus:

Pure utilitarianism is of course impossible—you can’t know what serves the ‘greater good’ unless you have some conception of what that greater good is, and it obviously won’t work out too well if every single person gets to decide what he or she thinks the greater good is. ‘Happiness’ is often proposed, or ‘life,’ or something similarly vague. The difficulty of deciding how one would measure such things is problematic enough for the utilitarian route, and there is always the question of why a certain criteria should be used. Not only that, but for those people who do not personally benefit from serving the greater good, there is no compelling reason to do it anyway.

In any case, you can’t really hold on to a utilitarian ideal if you believe that individuals have certain unalienable personal rights, since those rights will likely be often violated if every one always acts for the ‘greater good.’ For those of us who want to hold on to the idea of individual rights, that is probably enough reason to stay away from utilitarianism.

As a card-carrying utilitarian, I feel compelled to respond.

First, a purely definitional matter. Classical utilitarianism, a la Bentham, certainly does have a “conception of what the greater good is”: pleasure is the good, and pain is the bad. Nothing vague about that. Some contemporary utilitarians define utility in terms of preference satisfaction, which comes close to “every single person gets to decide.”

Hard to measure? Yes. But do we have any reason to think that figuring out the right thing to do will always be easy? As for “the question of why a certain criteria should be used,” I don’t see how natural rights theories fare much better in this regard. The Kantians claim to have an answer, but that's responding to the Kantians is beyond the scope of this blog post.

And the only ethical theory that can provide a compelling reason for everyone to follow it is ethical egoism. As nice as it would be to have the ethical coextensive with the rational, I can’t see any reason to think that it must be.

Amanda is correct, though, that pure utilitarianism is incompatible with “inalienable rights.” But even if people do have “inalienable rights,” it doesn’t follow that the utilitarian answer isn't the correct explanation of the wrongness of theft. It seems to me that the strongest candidates for inalienable rights are rights to control one’s own body: the right not to be killed, the right get a tattoo, the right to injest whatever sort of intoxicating substance one pleases. There’s a big leap from those to general property rights. So perhaps a rights-based explanation is the correct explanation for the wrongness of murder, but a utilitarian explanation is the right explanation for the wrongness of theft.

I bought a Hamilton Beach ShortCut food processor at Target on Saturday. My wife took it out of the box today, only to discover the following warning, in English, French, and Spanish, on the plastic bag enclosing it:

IMPORTANT: REMOVE BAG BEFORE USE

For those who are willing to look, there is at least one salient difference between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry: Bush “doesn’t nuance,” while Kerry, er, does. David Brooks captures the essence of Kerry quite well in his Saturday Times op-ed. Here’s the lede:

The 1990’s were a confusing decade. The certainties of the cold war were gone and new threats appeared. It fell to one man, John Kerry, the Human Nebula, to bring fog out of the darkness, opacity out of the confusion, bewilderment out of the void.

Actually, Kerry is just applying the lessons of the great social scientists; after all, we methodologists always say it’s a bad idea to dichotomize continuous variables. Kerry just extends this sound methodological advice to matters of public policy…

Ralph Luker has the latest, saving me the effort of having to sum it up myself.

However, there are some bits Luker overlooked: Thames is now going after the Mississippi chapter of ACLU for its decision to provide counsel to aid the appeals of Glamser and Stringer, and the USM faculty senate will consider a resolution calling on Thames to resign at its next meeting.

Stephen Karlson notes plans by the Chicago Transit Authority to create a new station in downtown Chicago that will finally link the State and Dearborn subways, and provide express service to both O’Hare and Midway airports. Speaking as someone who once made the mistake of trying to use the “L” to get from O’Hare to a hotel on the Magnificent Mile, which required changing from the Blue (Dearborn) to Red (State) lines, such a project can come none-too-soon.

These days, with the colossal pain in the ass that flying has become, I just drive to Chicago. It’s cheaper, even after paying to park downtown, and the extra time involved is only a couple of hours, if you compare flying direct on Northwest or American—going via another airline, such as Delta, will certainly kill any time savings of flying. (Amtrak usually costs more than flying.) The downside is that you have to drive both the most boring 250 miles of interstate highway in the eastern United States (roughly, I-57 from I-64 to I-80) and the second-most-boring stretch (I-55 and I-57 through Arkansas and Missouri)—really the only interesting parts are in the hills in southern Illinois and when you get to metropolitian Chicago.

Wow, finally a Democrat has figured out why most libertarian-leaning Republicans won’t defect to the Democrats:

The fact that this bullshit upping the fines for “indecent” radio broadcasts passed 391–22 shows a good deal of what’s wrong with today’s Democrats. The Democrats are never going to convince anyone that they’re really the better anti-“fuck”, anti-fag party. At the same time, by refusing to ever stand up for liberal principles whenever doing so might be mildly unpopular, they manage not to gain any votes from folks disenchanted with conservative frumpery.

It’s amazing how the Democrats only seem to act like an opposition party when it comes to either abortion or taxes… highfalutin’ rhetoric to the contrary.

Update: Matt Yglesias has more here, in response to Jim Henley; Will Baude also wistfully hopes for Democrats who are serious about their professed liberalism.

This week’s PoliBlog Toast-O-Meter has arrived, for those who want to remember this completely forgettable week of primaries and campaigning.

Most “cheapo” font collections are pretty much dime-a-dozen; however, I’ve been pretty impressed with the FontSite 500 collection, which I’ve had for several years, and which (in the grand scheme of things—fonts tend to be not cheap) is a steal. Yesterday, I discovered that Christopher League put together all the stuff you need to use the FontSite fonts in TeX and LaTeX under Linux.

If you’re someone like me, who gets annoyed at the limited font selection in TeX,* but can’t live without it—after all, I typeset all my papers and my entire dissertation in LaTeX, not to mention my vita and cover letters—this is a really neat add-on.

I watched the premiere of Fox’s new comedy/fantasy Wonderfalls this evening, in the Friday night “geek slot,” as my wife describes it.

Caroline Dhavernas stars as Jaye Taylor, a cynical, overeducated (philosophy major, Brown University) young woman working at a souvenir shop in Niagara Falls, NY. For some reason, a red wax lion and a brass monkey begin talking to her, telling her to do things, but not explaining why. Jaye, of course, thinks she’s going crazy, but does what they say in a effort to get them to shut up. The things they get her to do, lead, Rube Goldberg-like, to helping people, including Jaye’s sister Sharon and a UPS delivery man.

(What’s with the rash of young female characters with philosophy degrees? First Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation, now this show.)

Dhavernas plays the role well, and is very cute, but the supporting cast, with the exception of a Texan tourist, is pretty bland. The pilot was well written, with very funny dialogue and situations. And the location shots in Niagra Falls, NY are beautiful. I look forward to watching more of this show.

Hat tip to Crooked Timber for getting me interested enough to watch this show.

My two cents on using “they” as a singular pronoun: it’s acceptable in spoken English, but not in written English. In writing, one should use “he or she” unless one has to repeat it more than once in succession, or if one has to use the reflexive form, at which point it just gets too awkward. In that case, one should just use “he” or “she.” And for crying out loud, don’t ever write “he/she” or “(s)he.” Shudder.

I also note that Tim Sandefur shares my biggest grammatical peeve: signs at the checkout aisle that say “10 items or less.” It’s “10 items or fewer.” Use “less” with mass nouns (“Less than 10 inches of snow”) and “fewer” with count nouns (“Fewer than 10 cats”).

It’s interesting that “more” works with both mass nouns and count nouns.