Ow
Went biking out at Mt Majura with Simon ‘I only became an academic after finishing a career as a professional cyclist’ Niemeyer this evening, the first time I’d been on a trail in more than two months. Big mistake. Huge.
“Barbara Chamberlain, 79, also of Milwaukee, backed Edwards for the same reason,” the Associated Press reports from Wisconsin, “’I have hope for him beating you-know-who,’ she said.”
Oh come on, Barbara, you’ll just have stop living in fear and come out and say it—“Voldemort.” Now doesn’t that make you feel better?
Via Atrios and RMPN I found a beta version of FollowTheNetwork.Org. Apparently the brainchild of David Horowitz, it purports to be “a guide to the political left” and takes the form of a big database of people, funders, media, government and so on. The design of the site suggests that the left is a huge, interconnected web of shadowy figures and money flows. The database entries make for interesting reading.
The latest issue of the American Journal of Sociology [subscription required] has a number of interesting articles, but given the, ahem, cosmopolitan nature of the crew here at CT, a paper by Alderson and Beckfield on Power and Position in the City World System [also pdf] caught my eye. They examine power relations between three and a half thousand cities in a network analysis, operationalizing ties with a measure of HQ and branch locations of the world’s 500 largest corporations. The authors develop a blockmodel to identify clusters of regularly equivalent cities. Roughly, members of regular equivalence sets have similar relations to members of other equivalent sets, so equivalent cities stand in the same relations to other groups of cities.
As you might expect, the core of the city world system is the block made up of London, New York, Paris and Tokyo, and these four cities are much more powerful than any of the others. But outside this core group, the analysis suggests a some patterns that aren’t visible in from less formal approaches. Outside the “L-N-P-T” block, there are six other “Primary” blocks:[1] Amsterdam, Basel, Atlanta, Caracas, Cologne and … Bristol. Chris will be delighted.
Kevin Drum is surprised to learn that schools in Britain offer religious education classes. (Ireland is the same, by the way.) He comments that “I don’t think there’s anything unconstitutional about teaching a “History of Religion” class or something like it in an American high school, but it just wouldn’t happen. And then a proposal to add atheism as one of the highlighted religions? Kaboom!”
I’ve wondered before about this, in part because of a course in Classical Social Theory that I teach. I usually take a detour for a lecture before we read some Max Weber, because a chunk of the class (upper-level undergraduates) will have no clear idea what the Reformation was. This surprised me when it first happened, but now I anticipate it. Last year I got a very nice evaluation from an evangelical Protestant student saying, in part, “Thanks for respecting my views and for all the information about where Protestantism came from! I never knew that!” She would wear “Jesus Loves You” t-shirts to class and really livened up our discussions about Durkheim.
It’s quiztime, courtesy of Mike Rappaport at The Right Coast, who does not like us. He subjects four of our recent posts to what can loosely be called criticism. Go read what he has to say, and then match the devastating accusation to its target here at CT.
table(fig). {font-weight:bold;center}_|Accusation|Target|
|(. 1. Attacked conservatives when they were down |((. A. John |
|(. 2. Failed to discuss something on our blog |((. B. Harry |
|(. 3. Relies on news sources other than Fox |((. C. Chris |
|(. 4. Knows about the history of socialism |((. D. Kieran |
The effect of these criticisms on our credibility here at CT will be the subject of a later quiz.
© Kieran Healy’s Weblog. Powered by WordPress using a modified DePo Clean Theme.