Neurath's Boat

This is good news...

Via Tyler Cowen, apparently Pakistan is normalizing trading relations with India.  Countries with common borders tend to trade a lot when they're allowed to do so (it's astonishing how much of U.S. trade is with Canada, compared with the trade with China or Japan or Europe that always gets talked about), and when there's a lot of trade going on, there will be a lot of business interests that won't want a war to disrupt that trade.  Anything that reduces the chance of another war between two powers that now both have nuclear weapons is extremely good news indeed!

Remembering heroes

Dr. George Tiller was murdered a year ago today, because of the work he did in the service of others, work he continued to do in the face of harassment and threats, threats which ultimately proved tragically real.  Others have bravely carried on his good work, inspired by his example.  Dr. Tiller and those like him deserved to be honored by all of us.

I'd heard about this before

But this is the first link I encountered which prominently mentioned that Neda Soltani, recently murdered in Iran, was a philosophy student.  I suppose it's shallow that this makes me so much more interested in the story, just as perhaps I tend to go for the Khmer Rouge as my favorite example of 20th century monstrosity because of their "kill anyone with glasses" policy.  Anyway, here's hoping the situation improves in Iran, and that we don't get too many more stories like this.

Strangeness

Hubert Schwyzer, who taught me a great deal about Kant, also occasionally talked about his days as a graduate student at Berkeley in the 60s.  Among his other stories, he reported that a great change in fashion happened at that time.  When he started, all the professors wore ties.  By about halfway through his time there, he said you could tell a professor's political views by whether he wore a tie or not.  By the time he left Berkeley, no professors were wearing ties.

Schwyzer is, sadly, no longer with us, and the story he told was of a time before I was born.  I am thus rather mystified by this piece.  Admittedly, it's about jeans rather than ties, but it's still the same fashion war that his side lost almost half a century ago.  Isn't it time to concede defeat?

(I should perhaps add that I have no objection to people dressing up.  I just object to it being mandatory, as well as its use to reinforce gender roles, which seems to be something Will considers a feature rather than a bug).