And on to the next great intervention!

Glenn Greenwald points out that Libya is a classic example of something that happens over and over again: War hawks drum up some case for attacking some country, the ‘humanitarian interventionists’ gleefully sign on to the war effort and condemn those who think that the wars are wrong, there is great gloating among the war hawks when the invaded country’s leaders are toppled at the beginning of the war and a ridiculing of the war’s opponents, and then silence as things go badly awry, leaving the situation worse than before
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What the success of American Sniper says about America

I have not seen, and do not plan to see, this film about a real life sniper Chris Kyle who apparently has the deadliest kill record in US military history. While some critics say that Clint Eastwood’s film portrays war in a complex way, it may have been too nuanced because the public seems to have reacted to it with jingoistic pride at the way that Kyle gunned people down in the war in Iraq, making it a huge success at the box office. The fact that Eastwood put the word ‘American’ in the title seemed to me that he was saying that Kyle somehow represented America and this undoubtedly would have colored people’s perceptions to think of this film as an exercise in patriotism.
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Update on Alabama same-sex marriage issue

The stakes just got raised in the legal tussle between state probate judges in Alabama who refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and a federal district judge Callie Granade who had ruled that the state’s ban on same-sex marriages was unconstitutional. Granade has now directly ordered the probate judge Don Davis in the town of Mobile to issue licenses to same-sex couples. (You can read her ruling here.)
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The ‘mystery guest’ at my conference hotel

I am at present attending a conference held at a hotel in San Francisco. A day before my arrival, the organizers sent all the registrants an email saying that a “high profile” guest would be staying at the hotel for two days right in the middle of the conference and that there would be enhanced security due to that. All the doors except the main one would be closed and people would have to enter and exit through only the front doors and be subjected to security checks.
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We’re #49!

The organization Reporters Without Borders issues an annual ranking of nations on press freedoms and this year the US ranks 49th in the world out of 180. Five Scandinavian countries Finland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, and Sweden take the top spots. El Salvador, the country once notorious for its death squads that abducted and murdered any critics, including journalists, of its dictatorship, now ranks above the US at #45.
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Have they never heard of blowback?

Glenn Greenwald gives us another story for the files “What goes around, comes around”:

The U.S. Government often warns of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks from adversaries, but it may have actually contributed to those capabilities in the case of Iran.

A top secret National Security Agency document from April 2013 reveals that the U.S. intelligence community is worried that the West’s campaign of aggressive and sophisticated cyberattacks enabled Iran to improve its own capabilities by studying and then replicating those tactics.
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From the “Well, duh!” files

A Utah lawmaker has questioned as to whether having sex with an unconscious person necessarily constitutes rape. He raised this issue during hearings on a bill that removed an ambiguity in current law by clearly stating that it was rape. Prosecutors had said that the existing ambiguity made it difficult to pursue charges in certain cases, and thus made women who had been drugged or intoxicated more reluctant to come forward
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John Kiriakou finally out of prison

Former CIA official John Kiriakou has been released from prison and will serve the remainder of his 30-month sentence under house arrest until May. His crime? Revealing the fact that the US tortured prisoners during the Bush-Cheney era. The Obama administration got him to plead guilty they way they usually do, by piling on charges under the Espionage Act, difficult to defend under, so that he faced the prospect of 45 years in jail and millions of dollars in legal fees.
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Why so few women in philosophy?

In general in US academia, the numbers of women in the arts, social sciences, and the humanities are less than men but not too far from equality. The one exception is philosophy, where the number of women dip dramatically to the level of the sciences.

The reality is that the discipline of philosophy lags far behind other disciplines in the humanities in terms of number of women undergraduate philosophy majors, graduate students, and tenured faculty members. The best numbers indicate that women make up 21% of academic philosophers compared to humanities as a whole where women are 41% of academics. Our numbers are comparable to the physical sciences, where there has been more recent interest and intent to elevate the numbers. Women are 20.6% of academics in the physical sciences and 22.2% of the life sciences.
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Some of the problems diagnosed include the long history of professional male philosophers’ criticisms of women’s rational capacity (Marilyn Friedman), implicit bias and stereotype threat (Jennifer Saul), belief in meritocracy (Fiona Jenkins), difficulty in establishing credibility and authority (Katrina Hutchinson), problematic pedagogy (Catriona Mackenzie and Cynthia Townley), microinequalities (Samantha Brennan), and silencing (Justine McGill). Combine and compound the effects of all these practices, and one has very large systemic problems.

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