What Pedro could do

This paper discusses Bernard Williams's famous case of Jim and the Indians. It contrasts two ways of diagnosing the alleged errors of Act Utilitarianism in considering this case. One approach suggests that Act Utilitarianism fails to appreciate the importance of what Jim does; it fails to understand the significance of Jim's agency. This paper favours an alternative diagnosis, according to which Act Utilitarianism fails to appreciate the importance of what Pedro could do; it fails to understand the significance of Pedro's agency

Just as Quare as They Want to Be: A Review of the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference

The latter part of the 20th century has seen the emergence of radical black lesbian feminists and gay men who have begun to address the forces within black culture and the culture at large that have rendered their experiences and sensibilities silent. Theorizing from margin to center, individuals such as Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Essex Hemphill, and Joseph Beam, among others, have undertaken the hard work of creating language and theoretical paradigms, building literal communities, and excavating black history as a means of validating their humanity and longstanding contributions to black cultural formation. In light of this recent artistic and intellectual renaissance, the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference, held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from April 7-9, 2000, marked a moment of profound historical reflection and cultural recalibration. Building upon a legacy of work generated by black transgendered, lesbian, gay and bisexual writers and intellectuals, those black queers who assembled at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill determined to rethink and recalibrate the essential meanings of blackness and queerness from their own particular subject positions. Recalling DuBois’s notion of the problematic black subject at the turn of the 20th century, this conference foregrounded black same-sexual identity politics, homosexual desire and transgressive, non-heterosexist bodies as essential axiomatic problems to be considered by a Black and Queer Studies committed to addressing the needs of the new millennium. The skillful and generous organizers of the conference, Professors E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, described the conference as one intent upon examining how black queer theorists, in particular, can critically intervene in the formation of Queer Studies as a disciplinary project. To clarify the particular nature of this intervention, the organizers outlined a set of postulatory questions that provided the infrastructure and focus of the conference’s five panel discussions and keynote address: What are the implications of queer theory for the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people of color? Does queer as a term actually fulfill its promise of inclusivity as it is deployed in queer theory? How do those of us who teach queer theory effectively integrate the categories of race, class and materiality? How do we who are activists reconcile queer theory with political praxis? What is the impact of queer theory on the reception and analysis of black gay literature and cultural performance?African and African Diaspora Studie

Linearized Weyl-Weyl Correlator in a de Sitter Breaking Gauge

We use a de Sitter breaking graviton propagator to compute the tree order correlator between noncoincident Weyl tensors on a locally de Sitter background. An explicit, and very simple result is obtained, for any spacetime dimension D, in terms of a de Sitter invariant length function and the tensor basis constructed from the metric and derivatives of this length function. Our answer does not agree with the one derived previously by Kouris, but that result must be incorrect because it not transverse and lacks some of the algebraic symmetries of the Weyl tensor. Taking the coincidence limit of our result (with dimensional regularization) and contracting the indices gives the expectation value of the square of the Weyl tensor at lowest order. We propose the next order computation of this as a true test of de Sitter invariance in quantum gravity.Comment: 31 pages, 2 tables, no figures, uses LaTex2

A Lower Bound on the Mixing Time of Uniformly Ergodic Markov Chains in Terms of the Spectral Radius

We give a bound on the mixing time of a uniformly ergodic, reversible Markov chain in terms of the spectral radius of the transition operator. This bound has been established previously in finite state spaces, and is widely believed to hold in general state spaces, but a proof has not been provided to our knowledge

Some Inconvenient Truths

A recent paper by Fr\"ob employs the linearized Weyl-Weyl correlator to construct the tensor power spectrum. Although his purpose was to argue that infrared divergences and secular growth in the graviton propagator are gauge artefacts, a closer examination of the problem leads to the opposite conclusion. The analogies with the BMS symmetries of graviton scattering on a flat background, and with the Aharonov-Bohm effect of quantum mechanics, suggest that de Sitter breaking secular growth is likely to be observable in graviton loop effects. And a recent result for the vacuum polarization does seem to show it.Comment: 14 pages, uses LaTeX2