I've been pretty busy trying to get everything together for our first debate tournament of the year. Anyway, here is a (rather long) post of links. Hopefully more original content will start again on the blog next week.
As you might have heard, Jeff McMahan has post up at the NY Times' The Stone about how we should allow (encourage?) predatory species to go extinct to reduce violence in nature. I don't have time to comment, but let me link you to some people who have. Jean Kazez did, EJ at Deconstruction Inc did, and Erik Marcus did (but the idea that philosophers shouldn't talk about philosophy because people are too dumb to follow seems counterproductive to all sorts of things). Jeff McMahan is the author of The Ethics of Killing, which is something I've been meaning to read for a while. Anyone else already did and want to tell me if it should to go to the head of the line for reading?
Here is an interesting article about how we are human because of other animals, which is a bit more interesting and serious than this article about how liking hot peppers make us human. On the second article, we really need to think of a good term for the fallacy of saying something that only belong to certain humans define us as humans.
I'm not sure if you have heard about the French targeting and deporting the Roma, but it is disgusting and obviously racist. Here is Ranciere on these actions. Make sure to read Devin Shaw and Peter Gratton's additions. Of course.
If you are in the Milwaukee area, check out this anarchist critical animal studies reading group. It looks totally awesome. (h/t MLA).
Adam has a post up on his personal citations system. It is the same as the one I use. Except for I don't have a story about how people associate me with citations. Except I use ibid, but I think that is because I first started thinking about footnotes and citations by reading law journal articles. Well, one law professor in particular, Pierre Schlag. And one of his articles in particular, "Normative and Nowhere To Go" (.pdf) which I read my junior year of high school. Here is the first footnote from that law article, "[Editor's Note: The Stanford Law Review has been unable to confirm the author's assertion here. The evidence we have suggests that in 1979, the author was employed as an associate with a large law firm in Washington, D.C. The author assures us, however, that the taxi driver/associate distinction is vastly overstated, and in some senses, is actually much more tenuous than might first appear. Cf. Elisabeth Hyde, Her Native Colors 20-37 (1986) (depicting the associate as human resource and information dissemination vehicle).] "
Dr. J has an interesting post on why she won't use turnitin. Joshua Miller has a response about why he does use plagiarism detection software. I have to admit, I started off on Dr. J's side, but have found myself greatly convinced by Joshua Miller's post. I'll have to think on this some more. UPDATE: Dr. J responds here.
Ginny Messina has a devastating post on the nutritional information contained in The Vegetarian Myth.
Graham Harman and Peter talk about the higher education's increasing costs here and here. This is the comment I end up making at Peter's place, "It seems that costs growing faster than inflation is not sustainable. I am not entirely sure what the future will bring. You are completely right that currently the system we have seems semi-secure without an alternative. Though I can easily see some sort of top down regulative legislation shifting things a lot. For example, if the entire system is being propped up by government subsidies in the form of loans, that gives the government a lot of incentive and power over the way academia runs itself. If we look at what is going on with the for-profit schools, it is hard not to see that as the possibility of our own future. At that could be in our near future (the President seems down for expanding it, and as much as Republicans hate regulation, they may just hate universities more). Also, on a rather technical note: is it a bubble? Doesn’t a bubble require some level of speculative investment?" None of that should be construed as supporting Taylor, who as far as I can tell, doesn't really deal with these issues in any way that seems helpful.
A new site dedicated to Veterinary Technicians has up a list of articles on transgenic animals. Worth exploring if you want to find out more on that topic.
This post's song is chosen for two reasons. The first is this interesting article about Afghan girls that take on the gender roles of afghan boys. But the other reason is that Dar Williams is my fiance's favorite musician, and I drove down and saw her over the weekend. I've never been particularly good at performing my normative gender roles, and I was apologizing for being bad at being a boy, and she said, "Don't worry, I love bad boys." So, Dar Williams, When I Was a Boy.
Her voice is a little boring, but I loved this song so much for the lyrics for so many years. Seems a bit cheesy now, but I can't help but wonder if that has to do with becoming a better boy.