http://www.notnews.org Philosophy, public affairs and pop culture. Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:42:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Roughly a week into listening to the new REM album, Accelerate, I realized I’m having fun being an REM fan, and that hasn’t been true in a while. I’ve been walking around with my iPod, singing along with many of the tracks and probably scaring passersby. I’ve been recording TV ... http://www.notnews.org/culture/fine-fan-fun.html OK, starting tomorrow you’re probably gonna be stuck with a few days of REM blogging. But before I do, let me make a comment about one particular criticism in the Democratic presidential primary. The Clinton campaign apparently criticized Obama for calling himself a “law professor” when he was not a ... http://www.notnews.org/now-what/legal-tenure.html So I’m on my way to class today to give an exam, and I’m reviewing in my head the instructions I have to give about people putting away their iPods and turning off their cell phones. And I think to myself, “I certainly don’t have to tell them to turn ... http://www.notnews.org/s-o-s/speaking-of-the-90s.html Bill Clinton apparently takes issue with a Barack Obama ad in which he says “I don’t want to spend the next year, or the next four years, re-fighting the same fights we had in the 1990s.” Clinton responded, “what fights should we not have made?” Well, I think it would have ... http://www.notnews.org/now-what/well-off-the-top-of-my-head.html As my noodling about deliberation intersects with my near-obsessive following of Democratic presidential delegate selection results, it is probably worth examining the undercurrent of controversy about the use of caucuses in some states to select delegates. The argument for caucuses is that they encourage interaction between voters, encourages people to ... http://www.notnews.org/philosophy/the-time-crunch-of-deliberation.html OK, so brainstorming about the general idea of creating something deliberative juries to set policy – what are the drawbacks? A major one is participation. I think to work, this is something where you’d have to get large swaths of the population involved. You can’t let people out of it because ... http://www.notnews.org/philosophy/say-you-want-deliberation-well.html Doing some thinking out loud that may end up as a blog post regarding a paper I’m trying to put together, about people’s capacity for deliberation in democratic societies and what kind of institutions might work and not work. It starts with the problem of experts. As an empiricism-driven philosophy, pragmatism ... http://www.notnews.org/philosophy/look-who-knows-so-much.html Renewing the effort to do fairly regular blogging now that a new semester has started. Truth be told, the last semester put me in a bit of a funk regarding my teaching. My evaluations and in-class observations were generally positive, but because of what I was teaching (and what I ... http://www.notnews.org/education/who-let-these-crickets-in.html I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a better way to celebrate seven years of Not News than waking up to find that Network Solutions has temporarily suspended the domain registration. And on a day when some pretty important e-mails were expected to come down the pike, ... http://www.notnews.org/site/whered-we-go.html I’ve spent the last last nine-plus years of my life with philosophy as the focus of my academic and professional life. So it was a little bit of a kick in the teeth to read this article in the Inquirer this week about Anita Allen, a professor of law and ... http://www.notnews.org/philosophy/what-are-we-doing-here.html