Free and Informed Choices of Words

It may be my present interest in traditions as part of heritage; it may be the amount I keep hearing about students from 'non-traditional' backgrounds; but I'm unable to read this without thinking that the term 'non-traditional' has rather escaped its proper bounds:

This article, entitled “Girls Gone Wild” and Rape Law: Revising Contractual Concept of Consent and Ensuring an Unbiased Application of "Reasonable Doubt” When the Victim Is Non-Traditional (American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law, Volume 17, Number 1, 2009), argues that the traditional contractual standard for consent applied in rape cases is erroneous and particularly harmful to non-traditional rape victims.

For Goodness’ Sake Don’t Give Them Ideas...

From the Department of Questions One Should Never Have to Ask:

How would you feel if you had studied for your university degree but were unable to graduate because you were overweight?

Alarmed, especially as a member of the 'leisured' discipline. The rationale for this idea:

"[That] we are responsible for their total well-being, not just the academic, but the emotional and psychological state of our students."

Which is simply false. Universities typically do invest a lot in student welfare provision, but students are adult human beings and as such their 'total well-being' is largely beyond the grip of the institution. (If I get upset about the government's foreign policy, is the University responsible for making me feel better? Trivially, no. Should it punish me for not cheering up in short order? No again, not least because that would be ludicrously counterproductive.)

If we parse 'responsible for' as something like 'culpably part of the causal origins of', then simply put, even the famous Durham Bubble isn't that totalising, and neither, I should imagine, is the presumably utopian campus of Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. If we read it as 'having a duty of care towards', the madness is a little less obvious, but the portent is to turn an academic community into some kind of cult-cum-asylum in which the student's whole being is supposed to be turned over to the academic hierarchy.

Our lot may have their foibles, but on the whole they just teach people about biopower...

Future Mock

Surprise revelation of the day:

We're no longer just in an era of 24-hour news. We're living in the era of the 60-second minute...

The Quango Paradox

Sir Joseph revealed that he was being paid £44,000 for six months as chairman of the new body... He said he would be reporting directly to Home Secretary Alan Johnson, rather than MPs... But he said he had been instructed by Mr Johnson to be as independent as possible.
B.B.C. News

Household Customs

On the effects of custody battles between warring divorcees:

Children - alongside the economy - are suffering because of this.

Next week: how post-rape trauma harms Britain's G.D.P.

Sabre Wulf Test Level, Presumably Set At Night

I managed to forget to post this video here when I uploaded it a couple of months ago. Making a break with the theme of recent posts, then, behold the Sabre Wulf (GBA) test level:

Some Acronyms Really Test Readers’ Endurance

It isn't completely surprising, after the long-running European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students, but seriously...

Funded under the European Commission's Framework 7 research plan, Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) is aimed at commuters in cars who travel long distances to work every day but will also look at ways to involve commercial vehicles.
B.B.C. News

M. Radical Freedom, co-opted for the arrangement of vehicles into motley 'platoons' as road trains? Evidently Sartre is still more admired than read.

How to Measure Bovine Sacredness

It seems that for certain legal purposes, i.e. the stifling of criticism, there is now an official definition of a 'philosophical belief'. Whether anyone who could be described as a philosopher was consulted about it is unclear.

Still, it should help us trim the canon down if need be. A belief is distinguished from 'an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available', so bang go Nietzsche and Foucault's historical games. Žižek falls foul of #5, since he has clearly made suggestions which 'conflict with the fundamental rights of others'; meanwhile, Diogenes the Cynic might have trouble with 'human dignity'. Zeno of Elea is in grave trouble, since even if we take him to be 'serious' (#4 again), it's doubtful that the Eleatics had much impact on any 'weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour' (#3) when they thought all that was illusory. Hobbes might have difficulty with the need to be 'worthy of respect in a democratic society' (#5).

Okay, not all of these are actually meant to be necessary conditions for something to be a 'philosophical belief'. As is evident from the statement that 'a racist or homophobic political philosophy would be excluded from protection due to the need for the belief to be "worthy of respect in a democratic society and not incompatible with human dignity"', some of them are conditions for qualification as a nice philosophical belief.

First Impression, Zeroth Edition

Charles Dickens had some interestingly titled fake book spines to fill up space on his shelves: of particular interest to philosophers is Kant's Ancient Humbugs, in ten volumes, but I must admit a softer spot for The Quarrelly Review and Growler's Gruffiology. It strikes me that, given how one naturally makes character judgments when encountering people's libraries, someone, somewhere probably has an entire living room full of fake books, selected from a hidden stockroom to give exactly the right impression to every visitor.

Of course, if I did anything like that, the 'right' impression for guests would be bestowed by non-volumes like Procrustes: A Reappraisal.

Case Nightmare Greenfield

Phantom islands are fairly abundant, if it makes sense to call nonexistent things abundant, but a phantom town in Lancashire seems fairly novel—at least, now that the earthwork at Old Sarum and the submerged town of Dunwich no longer return Members to Parliament. The Museum of Hoaxes wonders whether it might be Google's version of a trap street, but persons of a certain literary taste, already used to wondering whether Dunwich really is merely a vanished ex-constituency, may be thinking:

Argleton... That looks like... something familiar...

Hungry for Learning?

One often has cause to wonder (not least from the responses he stimulates) what perceptions of higher education the Oxford P.P.E. graduate Peter Mandelson acquired in his undergrad. days. Presumably he was unimpressed, or uncomprehending...

School leavers applying to English universities will get more data about courses under government plans to treat them more like consumers.

A food labelling-style system will flag up teaching hours, career prospects and seminar frequency, says the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

It's almost as though fees were already high enough actually to cover the costs of teaching. Data on career prospects are already available; standardised quantitative data about contact hours will I'm afraid be of limited use to people who have yet to experience study at any university, although on the positive side this development might discourage any further pressure to get them cut. 'A food labelling-style system', though, as the B.B.C. characterises it...? I can see right now how it isn't going to look:

• 022% liberation from unexamined commonplace assumptions
• 010% systematic knowledge of the Right and the Good
• 019% outright scepticism
• 028% rational enquiry into the nature of reality
• 007% Nietzsche
• 014% increasingly sophisticated forms of perplexity
• 100% love of wisdom

Warning: contains high levels of anxiety, low levels of political comprehension.