Penelope Mackie, a philosopher at the University of Nottingham, has died. The following obituary was provided by Mark Jago (Nottingham). It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our friend and colleague, Penelope Mackie, following a period of illness. Penelope was born into an academic family. Her paternal grandfather Alexander was professor of education at the University of Sydney, and her father was the philosopher J.L. Mackie (whose philosophical papers she co-edited). She went to Somerville College, Oxford, in 1971, where she took the BPhil in Philosophy with a thesis, Identity and Continuity, in 1978, and later the DPhil in 1987, with a thesis, How Things Might Have Been: A Study in Essentialism. After her DPhil, Penelope moved to the US, first as a visiting lecturer at the University of Maryland (1986–1987) and then as Assistant Professor of philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University (1987–1990). She then returned to Oxford, this time as a fellow of New College (1990–1994), before moving to Birmingham in 1994 and then to Nottingham in 2004, where she worked until her death.
Reading
Our 7th most-read article of the 2022.
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Originally published April 18, 2022.
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“The Florida Department of Education announced Friday that the state has rejected more than 50 math textbooks from next school year’s curriculum, citing references to critical race theory among reasons for the rejections.” – CNN, 4/17/21
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Here in the great state of Florida, we are committed to protecting our children from any and all forms of indoctrination, and math is no exception. These are the mathematical concepts we find objectionable based on the dangers they pose to children:
To understand the attempted coup that culminated in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it is useful to go back to Donald Trump’s immediate response to the election he actually won, in 2016. The head of his transition team, Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, presented Trump with a detailed plan […]
The post Dress Rehearsal appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
Damning indictment of parts of union movement Incoming TUC general secretary Paul Nowak has appalled many of the movement’s activists by giving Keir Starmer a free pass not to increase public spending or revoke the UK’s repressive anti-trade union laws if Labour gets into power. Mr Nowak said that Labour can’t ‘turn on the spending […]
On this week’s Audit: The study group makes their way through the next several lessons of David Axelrod and Karl Rove’s MasterClass.
Surprise surprise ChatGPT is a monetarist moron too:
ChatGPT explains fractional reserve banking, as a surfer: pic.twitter.com/eS2l01OtTa
— ChatGPT (@ChatGPTGoneWild) December 29, 2022
ie GIGO garbage in garbage out… its always been this way and always will... there is no such thing as "artificial intelligence!" its just another Art Degree figure of speech by these platonist trained morons who dont understand information systems...
The story was so huge, the president weighed in.
Stjepan ‘Stippe’ Rasic har gått ur tiden. Malmös alla nattsuddare tackar dig för allt. RIP.
A remarkable story has surfaced in yesterday’s Mail on line saying that Civil Servants have been getting shopping vouchers as part of an annual reward: Millions of pounds worth of Greggs, Nandos and Primark vouchers have been handed out to reward Civil Servants this year. The vouchers are , it seems, worth up to £100... Read more
In early December, Nadhim Zahawi announced that people in this country—specifically nurses—should suffer through the unprecedented cost of living crisis in meek silence to ‘send a very clear message to Mr Putin’ that the country will remain united. In his mouth, the government’s refusal to reduce the scale of cold and hunger so many are […]
An analysis examines whether inflation since April 2021 can be linked to consumption growth and whether monetary policy tightening is working to reduce such growth.
Yves here. The Twitter Files disclosures continue at an impressive clip, increasingly focusing on the close involvement of Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies in curtailing and blocking Administration/Democrat-threatening lines of thought, such as interest in the Hunter Biden laptop or hostility to vaccine mandates. These revelations are as significant as the Pentagon Papers, yet […]
Capitalism is corrupt, but its defenders say it can be regulated to become less savage. History shows that the tendency of power and money to aggregate and be monopolized in fewer hands makes the dream of regulated capitalism impossible.
The post “Regulated Capitalism”: a Fairy Tale first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.They finally overturned Roe 2022 marks the year that they finally got the Supremes to overturn Roe vs. Wade. I’ve been following this issue from the very first days of writing this blog. It’s been a depressing trajectory. On the 10th anniversary of this blog, I wrote the following: My advocacy for a woman’s right to abortion predates this blog by decades. It’s a fundamental struggle for half the population and I’ve very much appreciated the attention and support of my readers over these last 10 years of writing about it. In this last election rape unexpectedly became a campaign issue. Oddly enough the concept of “legitimate rape” was something I’d written about some years ago when South Dakota tried to pass a ban on abortion without an exception for rape or incest (pending reversal of Roe vs Wade, of course.) This was, at the time, an unusual position. It’s much more mainstream in the pro-life community today.
Some perspectives on being an expat.
Today, I make available a video session that I recorded in Japan while I was working there in the latter part of this year. It sets out a range of interesting topics that form, in part, the research program that…
Our 8th most-read article of the 2022.
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Originally published March 28, 2022.
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“The Academy Awards briefly came to a stunning halt Sunday night when Chris Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, after which Will Smith went to the stage and hit him in the face.” — Washington Post, 3/27/22
Why are we doing this? I know why Trump put in place all the draconian policies that have now forced Cubans to try to emigrate to the US in massive numbers. But why are they still in place? This article doesn’t adequately provide an answer, particularly since many of the refugees now assembling at the southern border are Cubans. Living conditions in Cuba under Communist rule have long been precarious, but today, deepening poverty and hopelessness have set off the largest exodus from the Caribbean island nation since Fidel Castro rose to power over half a century ago. The country has been hit by a one-two-punch of tighter U.S. sanctions and the Covid-19 pandemic, which eviscerated one of Cuba’s lifelines — the tourism industry. Food has become even more scarce and more expensive, lines at pharmacies with scant supplies begin before dawn and millions of people endure daily hourslong blackouts. Over the last year, nearly 250,000 Cubans, more than 2 percent of the island’s 11 million population, have migrated to the United States, most of them arriving at the southern border by land, according to U.S. government data.
