Discussions of Philosophy Rankings

In the wake of recent events, a long-overdue discussion is now beginning in earnest about whether philosophy needs "rankings" and, if so, what sorts of rankings we should have. I've set up a page where I will try to aggregate links to such discussions. If you know of more such, then please let me know, by email.

In case anyone is still confused about this, it does not follow that the PGR boycott is or was directed towards changing (let alone obliterating) the Gourmet Report. What follows is just that, since a whole lot of people are and long have been concerned about the PGR rankings anyway, and since Leiter has for a long time been an obstacle to genuine reform and now seems on the way out, it is a good time to have a discussion of both whether and how philosophy departments should be ranked.

Day One...Part Two

From the wonderful Carrie Jenkins, here.

But this part seems wrong:

Some people have mistakenly attributed bravery to me.... I have been mostly just very scared.

since those are not incompatible. We are the bravest when we act in spite of the fact that we are scared, because we know what we are doing is right, not when we are too clueless to be scared.

I'll agree with this much, though, without meaning to boast: What the 21 of us who signed the original statement did was also brave, too, even if we were scared, and I know for sure I was.

Wonderful Post by Paul Waldman on the Culture Wars

Over at the Prospect:

However the actual 1960s played out, in our memories, the hippies were definitely the good guys, and the winners in the end. (This is in no small part because liberals created all the novels, TV shows, and movies that chronicled the period.) They may have been a little silly, but there's one thing that's undeniably true: They had all the fun. While the squares were getting buzz cuts, convincing themselves that the Vietnam War was a great idea, and nodding along with Richard Nixon's encomiums to the Silent Majority, the hippies were getting high, dancing to cool music, and above all, getting laid.

Read the rest here: http://prospect.org/article/why-culture-war-will-never-die.

The Internet and the Mob Mentality

Really excellent discussion, largely motivated by the vicious and misogynistic response to Anita Sarkeesian, about the mob mentality on the Internet.

How To Create an LVM Drive

I posted some time ago about how to add a new physical volume to an existing logical volume, but I need a new logical volume now. So let's write down the steps for doing that.

1. Add the physical drive to the machine, and then format whatever space you want to use on it. Nowadays, I use gparted to do this, as fdisk doesn't seem to support really big drives. So we need to choose "lvm2 pv" (LVM version 2, physical volume) as the type.
   Let's suppose that partition is /dev/sdf1.
2. Create the physical volume.
   
   > pvcreate -t /dev/sdf1
     TEST MODE: Metadata will NOT be updated and volumes will not be (de)activated.
     Physical volume "/dev/sdf1" successfully created
   > pvcreate /dev/sdf1
     Physical volume "/dev/sdf1" successfully created
   
   I always use the "-t" option first, to make sure the command will do what I wish.
3. Check your work, if you wish:
   > pvdisplay /dev/sdf1For those new to LVM, the "physical volume" is the closest layer to the hardware. It represents actual physical diskspace.
4. You can repeat those commands to create more physical volumes if you wish. These can then be grouped together in a "volume group", which basically acts as if it is one huge disk, even though it may physically be spread across a number of devices
5. Create a volume group in which our new physical volume(s) can reside:
   > vgcreate newvg /dev/sdf1 [/dev/sdg1 ...]
     Volume group "newvg" successfully created
6. Check your work, if you wish:
   > vgdisplay newvg
7. Create the logical volume:
   > lvcreate -n newlv -l 100%FREE newvg
   The -n option gives the volume a name, and the -l option says how much space in the newvg volume group to allocate. There are a lot of ways to give this option. See the lvcreate manpage for info.
8. Check your work:
   > lvcreate newlv
   This will also show you the path to the device. Here on Fedora 20, it is: /dev/newvg/newlv. I.e.: /dev/VolumeGroup/LogicalVolume. I don't know if that can vary from distro to distro.
9. Finally, we need to create the actual filesystem:
   > mke2fs -L NewVolume /dev/newvg/newlv
   Of course, there are other ways to do this, depending upon exactly what you want to do.

The LVM HowTo has lots more information.

Great Series of Articles on Men and Sex Work

Just reading a fantastic series of articles by Catherine 'Chas' Scott on sex work. Find them here:

• http://allthatchas.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/where-do-i-stand-feminist-pinball.html
• http://allthatchas.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/melissa-gira-grants-playing-whore.html
• http://www.allthatchas.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/katha-pollitt-melissa-gira-grant-and.html 

But perhaps the most interesting of these posts is this one:

• http://allthatchas.blogspot.com/2014/05/men-fantasies-and-nancy-friday-thoughts.html

which reflects on Nancy Friday's classic study of men's sexual fantasies, Men In Love. As Scott notes, what's striking about that book, published in 1980, is how little men's fantasies seem to have changed, even with all else that has.

Setting Up a Private Git Repo

For some time now, I've been running my own git repository on a server to which I have ssh access (since it's mine). Mostly, this hosts copies of various websites I run, such as my own personal site and various course-related sites. It makes it easy for me to be able to update the sites from different machines without things getting out of sync.

Details for how to do this are here:
  http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-on-the-Server-Setting-Up-the-Server
But since I'm the only user, I didn't need to set up a special git user, as described there. The point of doing that is to allow multiple people to access the repo (though you could also manage that just with file permissions, if they all have shell access anyway). The only thing I actually had to do, then, was to set up the repositories on the server and commit stuff to them.

Since I occasionally need to create new repos, here are the steps.

On the server:

# cd /git
# mkdir /newrepo
# cd newrepo
# git --bare init 

It actually doesn't matter where you put the repos. But putting them in some central location makes a lot of sense, right?

Then, on the client where I've got the stuff I want to put in that repo:

# cd /path/to/local/
# git init
# git add <files>
# git commit -a -m "Initial commit."
# git remote add origin myserver.com:/git/newrepo
# git push --set-upstream origin master

On various other clients, I can then clone the new repo as usual:

# git clone ssh://myserver.com/git/newrepo

 Of course, this doesn't allow anyone else access, even read-only access. But since it's just for me....