  Slow Day I just finished reading a few papers from a recent conference at Syracuse University on Citizenship, and will hopefully have something to write about soon(must get brain to work...). One thing right of the bat though, of the three papers I read, one was from a philospher, another from a political theorist, and a the third from a sociologist. While the first two are properly part of the humanities discipline, the last is at least in a name a social "scientist.
" So, one might expect that the prose of the scientist would be the most clear, jargon-free, and supported by empirical evidence. But what I found was the that philosopher and political theorist's essays were vastly more lucid than that of the sociologist, which was bogged down by jargon; poorly constructed, vague sentences; and hopelessly generalized and trite assertions. Here's a gem from the essay: More broadly, the destabilizing of national state-centered hierarchies of legitimate power and allegiances has enabled a multiplication of non- formalized or only partly formalized political dynamics and actors.
These signal a deterritorializating of citizenship practices and identities, and of discourses about loyalty and allegiance. By the way, once I figured out what the hell these senteces mean, I also found that there was no evidence whatsoever to support these, as they turned out to be, rather outlandish statements. Anyhow, here's a urlLink story that really tugs at the hear strings and shows how the little people always get screwed over by the (Swiss) Man. A federal jury recently ruled for Swiss Reinsurance, and against the developer of the World Trade Center, who sued to make the insurance company pay twice for the destruction of the towers because he claims they should be considered separate events.
Swiss Re's victory is the latest in a series of law suits against a group of insurance companies that had insured the Trade Center, for a total worth of $3.5 billion. The developer (represented, incidently, by Wachtell) argued that the total should be doubled to $7 billion, but now it seems that he has to settle for the three and a half. I suppose that one can look beyond the haggling over this monstrous event and think about the intellectual question of how we cognitively separate or conjoin events in our memories and in the stories we pass down through time.
What defines the boundaries of one event: is it temporal or spatial? do we look at the consequences or the intent of the agents? But actually, I really just think this whole thing is kind of disgusting. Yes, I understand that life needs to go on and business needs to continue and that insurance exists so we can hedge against unimaginable events and that arriving at an efficient distribution of funds in the insurance settlement is best for the economy and so on and so forth.
Still, the dirty part of this business is still bothersome for some reason that I can't fully articulate, especially because it seems that the lawyers involved in this case see it (as they do everything else) as a game between the two opposing counsels. These games involve huge sums of money, and the difference between winning and losing seems to be whether rich people become stinking rich or merely filthy rich - the presumption here is that to be stinking, one probably has to be so filthy as to start radiating an odor, but I welcome comments on my usage here.
Speaking of usage, I've never seen so many different ways of urlLink calling someone stupid . The target, is of course, the president of these united states. But the novelty of this article is that, instead of being a "well-meaning dolt," Bush is actually someone who chose stupidity as a philosophy of life, thus making him far more dangerous (and also much less sympathetic) than the idealistic fool that even his supporters paint him to be. And the voters still put him ahead in polls... Some day, someone is going to write a political treatise on the virue of the rule of the dumb; it'll be like a Plato's Republic for an idiocracy. 
