Can You Sign the September Statement If You Object to PGR in Principle?

I have had several people write me now to explain that they can't sign the "September Statement" because doing so would be implicitly to endorse PGR. This is the weirdest flipside ever of Leiter's insistence that the true agenda of the authors of the September Statement is to destroy PGR.

Two Great Pieces on California's New Affirmative Consent Law

A couple days ago, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a new law in California establishing "yes means yes" as the standard by which sexual consent must be judged by colleges in California, rather than "no means no". Feminists, and other decent people, too, have been pushing for this sort of change for years, and it is important. Symbolically, it recognizes in the law that women are sexual agents and subjects of desire, not just passive objects of male sexual desire whose only choice point is to say "NO!!"

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.