Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The Obama Disappointment

Predictable, of course, but this is well-said.

The Neoliberal Paradigm in Higher Education...

...has been preparing the demise of "public" research universities for 25 years now.   Those that become de facto privates like Michigan will survive as major research universities, and those that don't will see their former excellence gradually erode--unless, of course, there is some dramatic transformation in the economic and political culture.

How Judith Butler Writes Her Books and Articles

The secret revealed at last!

"On the Human" Forum from the National Humanities Center

They are featuring a number of items that will be of interest to philosophers.

Someone Needs to Advise Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer to Stop Digging

Really.  A public apology would suffice.

UPDATE:  The link is now fixed.

ANOTHER:  A thoughtful person even writes the apology for them.

Ayn Rand Deserves Fans...

...like this.

(Thanks to John Casey for the pointer.)

Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer: Dangerously Stupid Journalists of the Month

Many people will get sick and some may even die because these two are too stupid to be able to analyze and evaluate evidence.   Share the preceding link with your friends who read The Atlantic.

UPDATE:  Another useful demolition of these two irresponsible hacks.

British Bureaucrats are Insane, Part II

Case in point, of which this quote summarizes the problem:  "A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore."

"Swine flu" On Campus, Again

Useful update on the situation across the nation.  The injectable version of the vaccine started becoming available (for children and high-risk groups) in Chicago just yesterday.  The nasal mist version has been available on some college campuses since last week, as I understand it.  If college students are less dumb than Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher, we will hopefully be spared an unpleasant flu season on campus.

Dangerous Temptations for Young People: Drugs, Alcohol...

...and higher education.

(Thanks to David Rudolph for the pointer.)

Nader on Obama's Presidency So Far

Pretty fair appraisal in my view; a summary:

• His early months in office have been "very disappointing."
• Obama is "a frightened man," who won't take on corporate power.
• Obama is "conflict averse" - and a "harmony ideology type," who's being taken advantage of by the sharks in Congress, of both parties.
• He's "Bush-Cheney redux" when it comes to military and foreign policy, "albeit with better speeches" to the Muslim world. Given Obama's handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Nader wonders in amazement: "And they gave him the [Nobel] Peace Prize?"

In the grand tradition of Kissinger, Arafat, Begin...

...and other orchestrators of war and terror, the wholly meaningless Nobel Peace Prize has now gone to Barack Obama.  Would it not have been simpler to just issue a statement saying, "Thank God the war criminal and moral monster Bush is out of office"?

"There should never, ever be an Ayn Rand revival"

This is amusing.

(Thanks to Donald Hubin for the pointer.)

Cultural Barometer: Obama is in Trouble When "Saturday Night Live" Turns on Him

Here.

This is cute: "liberal" economists kissing up to "liberal" economists

In this case, DeLong smooching Summers.  That's sweet.  Too bad it doesn't change the facts.  "Ideas" and "arguments" indeed.

Rosenberg v. Levine on Marcroeconomics on Bloggingheads TV

Kudos to David Killoren for following up on our earlier post by lining up Alex Rosenberg (Duke) to discuss economics with economist (and Krugman critic) David Levine (Wash U/St. Louis).

No Obama Blather from this Democratic Congressman

A refreshing change of pace.

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

Posner on Keynes, and the Krugman-Cochrane Debate Continued

Richard Posner, repentant free-market utopian, has writte a nice overview of the main ideas of John Maynard Keynes, which also confirms a number of Krugman's charges against the "Chicago School" of macroeconomics:

Until last September, when the banking industry came crashing down and depression loomed for the first time in my lifetime, I had never thought to read The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, despite my interest in economics. I knew that John Maynard Keynes was widely considered the greatest economist of the twentieth century, and I knew of his book's extraordinary reputation. But it was a work of macroeconomics--the study of economy-wide phenomena such as inflation, the business cycle, and economic growth. Law, and hence the economics of law--my academic field--did not figure largely in the regulation of those phenomena. And I had heard that it was a very difficult book, which I assumed meant it was heavily mathematical; and that Keynes was an old-fashioned liberal, who believed in controlling business ups and downs through heavy-handed fiscal policy (taxing, borrowing, spending); and that the book had been refuted by Milton Friedman, though he admired Keynes's earlier work on monetarism. I would not have been surprised by, or inclined to challenge, the claim made in 1992 by Gregory Mankiw, a prominent macroeconomist at Harvard, that "after fifty years of additional progress in economic science, The General Theory is an outdated book....We are in a much better position than Keynes was to figure out how the economy works."

We have learned since September that the present generation of economists has not figured out how the economy works. The vast majority of them were blindsided by the housing bubble and the ensuing banking crisis; and misjudged the gravity of the economic downturn that resulted; and were perplexed by the inability of orthodox monetary policy administered by the Federal Reserve to prevent such a steep downturn; and could not agree on what, if anything, the government should do to halt it and put the economy on the road to recovery. By now a majority of economists are in general agreement with the Obama administration's exceedingly Keynesian strategy for digging the economy out of its deep hole. Some say the government is not doing enough and is too cozy with the bankers, and others say that it is doing too much, heedless of long-term consequences. There is no professional consensus on the details of what should be done to arrest the downturn, speed recovery, and prevent (so far as possible) a recurrence. Not having believed that what has happened could happen, the profession had not thought carefully about what should be done if it did happen.

Zombie Karl Popper Attacks!

A quick take on our recent discussions about economics.  (Thanks to Ben Burgis for the pointer.)

Alex Rosenberg on Cochrane and Economics

Alexander Rosenberg (Duke), as most readers will know, is a leading philosopher of science, especially of biology and economics, and author of a devastating critique of economics, Economics:  Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminshing Returns? (University of Chicago Press), which won the 1993 Lakatos Prize in Philosophy of Science from the London School of Economics.  I asked Professor Rosenberg for his reaction to John Cochrane's reply to Krugman, and he kindly gave me permission to post his thoughts:

I can imagine how a Chicago-school free-market economist like John Cochrane feels when he reads an article in the New York Times Magazine like Paul Krugman’s “How did Economists get it so Wrong?” How would analytical philosophers have felt if Quine had published an accessible version of “Two dogmas of empiricism” in the Times, along with cartoons making fun of Kant and Carnap?

The fact that Cochrane can't do any better than the response on his blog is about as significant for economics as the fact that the best opponents could do to Quine was Grice and Strawson’s question-begging article, “In defense of a dogma.”

Cochrane thinks that neither Krugman nor the last years of the Bush stock market can impugn the “efficient markets hypothesis” and so everything in conventional economic theory is untouched.

The efficient markets thesis is that the market makes complete use of all relevant information, and the “proof” is roughly that in a perfectly competitive market among perfectly rational agents prices invariably and instantaneously reflects all agents’ real beliefs and real desires. Any one who knows anything that can make him or her money acts on it—buys or sells—and that signal is picked up by every one else, who also acts on it, thus preventing any one from making excess profits—rents--long-term.

The first thing a philosopher notes about this notion is that since most people have false beliefs, especially about the future, an efficient market doesn’t internalize knowledge, but only beliefs. If they are mostly false, then the market isn’t efficient at internalizing (correct) information, it’s efficient at internalizing mostly false beliefs. If false beliefs are normally distributed around the truth, then they’ll cancel out and the proof of a probabilistic version of the efficient markets theorem will go through—market prices reflect the truth most of the time. Too bad false beliefs don’t always take on this tractable distribution. Even worse, when enough people notice the skewed distribution of false beliefs, they can make rents, as the markets crash. This is what Cochrane seems to think can't happen. How many times will it have to happen for the Chicago School to give up the efficient markets hypothesis?

There are so many way the assumptions of the efficient markets theorem can go wrong—different ones at different times, often even cancelling one another out, that it's easy for a complacent economist to see in the long term trend a vindication of the efficient markets theorem. And all Chicago economists have been taught to be complacent with their mother’s milk—Milton Friedman’s famous insistence that the falsity of assumptions doesn’t matter.

But Friedman’s children, like Milton himself, forgot his caveat that false assumptions are harmless so long as predictive power is improved, or at least preserved. Now the real point of Krugman’s essay is the obvious one. The economic theory the Chicago School prizes lacks the predictive resources even to have retrodicted the last two years of the world’s economic trajectory. The catastrophe of international finance is only the head-line grabbing symptom of this failure. And Chicago economists don’t have the slightest idea of where to start to explain (to retrodict) it. They don’t know which of their assumptions to give up, and how much of each of those to give up. Add in their ideological attachment to the nonsensical ideas that the marginal productivity of labor or capital measures its causal role, and therefore its moral right to a proportional slice of the profits, and you easily slip from Laissez-faire “science” to “trickle down” political philosophy.

Cochrane talks earnestly about how the Chicago School’s scientific economists are forever comparing their theories to quantitative data.  Since most of what they will accept as data is unreliable, and mostly it shows no short-term trends, the Chicago School satisfies itself that its theory is consistent with the long run (the logarithmic long run at that). Here the expected quote from Keynes can’t be resisted. In the long run, we are all dead. What we want from economics—if it purports to be a science—is at least medium term predictions. What Krugman seeks, and Keynes before him sought, is a theory that has some medium term consequences, something that would make it relevant to governmental policy that will ameliorate peoples’ lives while they wait for the hidden hand’s benevolent long run outcome. The Chicago school has scientifically self-protective and normative objections to the very possibility of medium-term prediction. It will put a theory that can make none out of business, and it will put a theory that does at the disposal of a government that might use it to redistribute if that is what it takes to increase the total size of the pie.

Keynes, not Kahnemann, was of course the first of the behavioral economists—think about propensities to consume, liquidity traps, and most of all “animal spirits.” It was easy for Chicago School proselytes to explain away ‘70’s stagflation by showing that perfectly rational economic agents couldn’t be fooled into spending their way out of a recession by inflationary government policies Keynes inspired. But the fact is that people are not like that. They are satsificers exploiting fast and frugal heuristics with kinky indifference curves.

Keynes’ repudiation of rational choice theory’s description of the economic agent was the first straw, and the last for the Chicago school.  Without even allowing for the work of the last 40 years, it was enough to put paid to Keynesianism among the free market elect. For the same reason—their retrospective rationalization of the stagflation they hadn’t predicted—they felt themselves able to ignore work that won many of the subsequent ersatz Nobel Prizes in their subject—especially those awarded for work in behavioral and other branches of economics that don’t take general equilibrium solutions seriously. The same after-the-fact account of why Keynesian pump priming stopped working in the ‘70s also licensed their repudiation of the Obama administration’s stimulus spending this year. We wont hear of its successes from them.  Too much of an embarrassment.

All the reasons the failure of financial markets gives us to question the scientific status of Chicago-school economic theory are mutates mutandis reasons to ignore their “rational expectations” claims (the wish being the father of the thought) that the stimulus wont work—or at least that the non-tax-cut portions of it wont.

Since I am not an insider, I’ll refrain from commenting on Cochrane’s hurt feelings about the insults. But if this is the best a Freshwater economist can do by way of reply to Krugman, there is not much chance he will have to take anything back.

Signed and substantive comments welcome.  Submit your comment only once; it may take awhile to appear.

UPDATE:  For the reading impaired, a signed comment is one with your full name in the signature line.  Postings that aren't signed, or are being posted with pseudonyms, are being summarily deleted:  they won't appear, so you're wasting your time.  And a substantive comment is one which engages the substance of the arguments.  Ex cathedra pronouncements by random nobodies are not substantive, and won't appear.

AND ANOTHER:   The comments of Brad DeLong, an economist at Berkeley, are also relevant to our topic du jour.  This is also pertinent:

Alex Tabarrok has a great post today clarifying the complaint that "economists failed to predict this crisis." Some big guns have come out and said that not only should they be excused for failing to predict the crisis, but they should be congratulated for predicting that they would fail to predict this and all future crises. (If you think I'm exaggerating to make a joke, read it yourself.) So Tabarrok calls this move for the obvious foul that it is. (Incidentally, Tabarrok is responding to this defense of macro by David Levine. But when I get more time, I have to write a full-blown article on it, it's so bad.)

Volcker on Economics

A propos our topic du jour, here is former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker:

I recently commented to some of my economist friends that I’m not aware of any large contribution that economic science has made to central banking in the last 50 years or so.

Our ability to forecast is still very limited. The old issues of the relative role of fiscal and monetary policies are still debated. Markets are certainly more complex, and some of the old approaches toward monetary control seem less relevant. Recent events have certainly illustrated limitations in our understanding of the economy.

Cochrane v. Krugman...or the Pseudo-Science of Macroeconomics Implodes

We noted Krugman's attack (which didn't go far enough) on the "pseudo-science" (with apologies to Larry Laudan) of macroeconomics, but now one of his targets, John Cochrane, an economist in the Finance Department at the Business School here has responded, and in terms that are not wholly, shall we say, edifying.   There is a useful overview of the debate here, which notes that, "Cochrane makes the same mistake he accuses Krugman of, by caricaturing and oversimplifying Krugman's argument, and, even worse, complaining that Krugman is only interested in making personal attacks on an ever-growing 'enemies list,' while engaging in his own litany of vicious slander."  The only "personal" criticism I can find in Krugman's original piece is the suggestion that some free-market utopians are motivated by the financial rewards of touting the party line.  Cochrane is far worse, but readers can decide for themselves.  But from a philosophical point of view, the really remarkable aspect of the Cochrane reply is the start.  As this observer notes:

I am trying to read John Cochrane's comments on Paul Krugman's article on why economists got it so wrong. I tend to get upset while reading. I have managed to get through the first paragraph in which Cochrane compares Krugman to someone who denies that HIV causes AIDS and compares developments in economics to progress in the natural sciences. Now in the natural sciences, there are counter intuitive models which are consistent with all available data and have withstood many tests. Also there are once mysterious facts which are explained by theories to the satisfaction of all people familiar with the theories.

Professor Cochrane even mentions the fake Nobel Prize in Economics as a way of legitimating the epistemic credentials of the field--which, of course, was precisely the objective of those who created it.  Yet this works only if you think of that Prize as on a par with the prizes in Physics and Chemistry, rather than, say, Literature or Peace, the latter two being quite explicitly ideologically motivated more often than not.

I am curious to hear how the Krugman-Cochrane dispute looks to philosophers engaged with economics.  (I am not inviting a free-for-all discussion of Krugman's or Cochrane's views, there are plenty of places on the Internet to rant and rave about that.)

UPDATE:  Here's a more substantive, and calmer, response to Krugman by a Minnesota economist, which suggests that Krugman has misdescribed the state of macroeconomics among its leading young practitioners.

Krugman on the Failures of Macroeconomics

For those who don't read The New York Times, this piece might be worth your time, though being an economist he can't quite draw the real conclusion about the epistemically feeble state of his discipline.

"Change we can believe in"

What a betrayal.

UPDATE:  People are so desperate to believe in Obama, that even smart people resort to brazen non-sequiturs.  Wow!  The U.S. is certainly long overdue for a civilized healthcare system, but that has nothing to do with the points made in the original link (from several days ago no less!), does it now?

Swine Flu Comes to Campus

It's been circulating all summer in the Northern Hemisphere, which influenza viruses usually don't do, and now that college is resuming across the U.S., outbreaks are already being reported.  The 'good news,' as it were, is that it now is clear that 30-50% of swine flu infections do not involve fever, and really are fairly mild (Dr. Niman, Pittsburgh's prophet of doom, is good on this subject).   The odds are pretty good that a majority of readers of this blog (since most are either academics or students) are either going to get swine flu or have already had it (perhaps without knowing it).   If, in fact, the incidence of infection is much higher than realized (because those with mild symptoms do not usually seek medical care), than the mortality associated with this strain of flu is really very low.  And if there has already been widespread infection with it, then, if we're lucky, there won't be as much transmission this fall as feared.  Still, it's a good bet that there will be a lot of absent students and faculty in September and October.  Meanwhile, The Accidental Blogger, who grew up in an environment with far deadlier viruses in circulation, has some sensible advice about how to avoid getting sick.

UPDATE:  Another example of what schools will be up against this fall.

100 German Professors Being Investigated for Taking Bribes to Award PhDs

Story here.  No indication of how many folks were paying bribes for philosophy doctorates!

There should have been a constitutional provision...

....for just this problem.  Of course, my friends who periodically send this to me aren't thinking specifically of George W. Bush, but a phrase that, for some reason, I often had occasion to use during the appointments process in the law school.  Go figure?

Speaking of plutocracy...

...it's alive and well.  And probably plays a role in explaining this too.

"Yes we can" sustain the plutocracy

That seems to be the fairest conclusion to draw after six months of the Republocrat Administration of Barack Obama.  Indeed, the colleague who once told me Obama is more liberal than he was letting on during the campaign, now admits he's a "timid centrist."  Of course, it would be OK to be a "centrist" if it wasn't the mid-point, as it is in the U.S., between the crypto-fascist right and what in the rest of the civilized world would be thought centrism.  Here's a scathing assessment from Chris Hedges, quoting extensively from Ralph Nader:

Chomsky on Libertarianism and Its Meaning

This is a curious interview; here he responds to a question about why he calls himself a "libertarian" given its association with figures like Nozick, Hayek, Rand, and Friedman:

Actually,  I don't think I've ever called myself a "libertarian," because the term is too ambiguous. I do often call myself a "libertarian socialist," however.

The term "libertarian" has an idiosyncratic usage in the US and Canada, reflecting, I suppose, the unusual power of business in these societies. In the European tradition, "libertarian socialism" ("socialisme libertaire") was the anti-state branch of the socialist movement: anarchism (in the European, not the US sense).

I use the term in the traditional sense, not the US sense.

I strongly dislike the figures you mention. Rand in my view is one of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history. Friedman was an important economist. I'll leave it at that.

Nozick, who I knew, was a clever philosopher. He did call himself a libertarian but it was fraud. He was a Stalinist-style supporter of Israeli power and violence. People who knew him used to joke that he believed in a two-state solution: Israel, and the US government because it had to support Israeli actions.

Hayek was the kind of "libertarian" who was quite tolerant of such free societies as Pinochet's Chile, one of the most grotesque of the National Security States instituted with US backing or direct initiative during the hideous plague of terror and violence that spread over the hemisphere from the 60s through the 80s. He even sank to the level of arranging a meeting of his Mont Pelerin society there during the most vicious days of the dictatorship.

Quite apart from practice, I don't suggest that they understood it, but in their "libertarian" writings these figures were in fact supporting some of the worst kinds of tyranny that can be imagined: namely private tyranny, in principle out of public control.  Traditional European libertarian socialism addressed this issue.  I often found myself agreeing with US-style libertarians -- not those you mention, but many in the Cato Institute, for example; in fact I could only publish in a journal of theirs for years.  But we had fundamental differences, specifically, about the nature of freedom.

I'm not trying to convince you. Merely to respond to your question, and explain why I'm comfortable with the terms I use, "libertarian socialism" -- which to US (and I suppose many Canadian) ears sounds like an oxymoron.

ADDENDUM:  A couple of readers wanted to know what I thought was "curious" about the interview.  It wasn't the point about libertarianism, which I thought a useful reminder.  But two items struck me as curious:  the hostility towards Nozick in the quoted remark; and, in parts of the interview I didn't quote, his attitudes towards and objections to the regulation of hate speech (the former not that surprising, I suppose, the latter argument silly, involving a wilful ignorance of the meaning and application of hate speech laws in Canada).  On the regulation of hate speech, see these posts from several years ago: here and here.

Academics and Political Party Affiliation, Again

A new Pew study finds that just 6% of scientists are Republicans.   Given the condition of the Republican Party, I'm surprised it's as high as 6%, but putting that to one side, the silence from right-wing bloggers about this new study has been deafening compared to earlier, less methodical ones, but the reason is clear:   whereas a case might be made that skewed political party affiliations in law or the humanities or the social sciences should be chalked up to bias in the hiring process, it seems a bit harder to see how partisan politics could figure in the evaluation of work in cosmology, molecular genetics, or physical chemistry.  So this raises the question whether other factors are at work in explaining political party affiliation.  A serious investigation of the question would have to consider what role intelligence, emotional or psychological health, and/or bigotry play in explaining why the Republican Party can attract only a small minority of intellectuals and scholars to its ranks any longer.

Cutting-Edge Science

The Accidental Blogger directs us to this blog featuring abstracts of actual scientific articles on, shall we say, curious topics.  It's very funny.

Texas Tech's Walter Schaller Spearheads Petition Protesting Appointment of Disgraced Former AG Alberto Gonzales

Kudos to philosopher Walter Schaller at Texas Tech University for organizing a petition to protest the appointment of disgraced former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to the faculty.  (More information and supporting documents here.)  The petition correctly challenges both the "procedure" by which he was appointed (there wasn't one!) and the merits of the appointment.  So far more than 70 Texas Tech faculty have signed.  As I understand it, Mr. Gonzales's former firm, Houston-based Vinson & Elkins, would not take him back, and the private sector generally has balked.  How strange and ironic for a public university to step in; so much for faith in markets!

My one and only comment on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

A few readers have asked whether I might have a comment on the arrest of Professor Gates of Harvard for "disorderly conduct" after someone phoned the police after seeing him and his car service driver forcing open the front door of the house, which was jammed.   President Obama, who described the arrest of Professor Gates as "stupid," has now been backtracking, since one is not supposed to criticize the police, apparently, in America.  "Stupid" is, I think, a very nice way to put it:  I do not see any evidence that the officer was stupid, just arrogant and irritated at being bawled out.  Even if one accepts verbatim everything in the police report--and more on that in a moment--it's pretty clear the arrest was unlawful.   Why would an intelligent officer make an unlawful arrest?  Because he was pissed off at being shouted down and thought he could get away with it, as the police usually do.

In any case, the police simply aren't very credible in circumstances like this, so it would be bizarre to credit the police report in all details:  police lie, all the time.  I recall a Queens (N.Y.) prosecutor telling me years ago that the police he would have to call as witnesses would openly joke about testifying in court as "testilying."  The culture of dishonesty in the service of both commendable (e.g., getting genuine criminals and preserving public safety) and self-serving (e.g., concealing misconduct and allowing the police to trample on those who offend them) ends is, from all the evidence I have seen, absolutely pervasive in American policing, at least in the major urban areas, where the pressures on the police are probably the greatest.  (On testilying, see the first few paragraphs here [and citations therein] or this L.A. Time article.)  Anyone familiar with police practice in major urban centers knows that "disorderly conduct" is the charge the police always fall back on when they don't have an actual charge to support an arrest.  (See the comments of Northwestern law profesor Steven Lubet in this regard.)  Some minority of "disorderly conduct" charges are probably legitimate, most are not.  Professor Gates acted imprudently, without a doubt, but he was right to be angry, and all the evidence now available strongly suggests the arresting officer acted illegally.

What role did race play in all this?  Less, I suspect, than the initial news coverage has suggested (or than this would suggest).  The woman who called the police was probably influenced by racial considerations:  why are two dark-skinned men forcing their way through the front door of a nice house near Harvard Square?  But would she have called the police if two white men were doing the same thing?  One hopes so, but who knows?   The arresting officer's annoyance at being bawled out may have been exacerbated by the fact that it was an African-American man shouting at him:  it's hard to know, we'd have to know a lot more about the officer in question.   Police do not like to be berated or challenged, period, and an incident like this should call more attention to police abuse of the charge of "disorderly conduct" as a way of trampling on the First Amendment rights of citizens to challenge police conduct. 

Signed comments from readers are welcome:  full name, valid e-mail.

What Hitler Learned from the US Advertising Industry (and the Industry was proud!)

Curious story.

Atlas Shrugged, the Movie: It's on the Way!

Helpful analysis here; choice paragraph:

Weep no more, bruised and battered libertarians: After 37 years of being shot down by rational people who see the book as a stilted and masturbatory work suitable only for college freshmen who haven’t figured out that, if everyone did exactly what they wanted all the time, civilization would collapse on itself—and by the way, dudes, most ladies don’t enjoy being raped into submission, even by rugged industrialists—your sticky dreams of turning Rand’s rambling screed about the values of selfishness and laissez-fare capitalism into a brutally dull, unwatchable movie are about to become a reality!

Iran Protests Again

A dramatic account by a philosophy student in Tehran of protests this past Friday.  (Thanks to Parsa Pezeshki for the pointer.)

The Bush Presidential Library at SMU: From Joke to Farce

Here.

Things are bad enough with the swine flu pandemic without the UK Minister of Health...

...revealing that he's not qualified for his job.

More on Iran

These two items I found worthwhile:  here and here (by an Iranian-American philosopher).  May the theocracy fall without anymore bloodshed.

The Geography of Vice and Sin

Here. 

(Thanks to Andy Cling for the pointer to this amusing site.)

Iran Election Results, Again

Due to other pressing obligations, I haven't been following this matter carefully, but Peter Momtchiloff calls my attention to an interesting chart from The Guardian; here are the four provinces with the most, shall we say, "suspect" results:

East Azerbaijan: Ahmadinejad received 10% in 2005, ‘57%’ in 2009.

Ardabil: Ahmadinejad received 7% in 2005, ‘51%’ in 2009.

Lorestan: Ahmadinejad received 9% in 2005, ‘71%’ in 2009.

Kuzestan: Ahmadinejad received 16% in 2005, ‘65%’ in 2009.

Hmmm.

UPDATE:  A useful round-up of links to analyses here.

Petition Regarding the Crisis in Iran

Dr. Masrour asked me to post a link to this petition, which follows upon the statement he and his wife wrote.

UPDATE:  Petition link has been changed. 

The Coup d'Etat in Iran

MOVING TO FRONT (from earlier today):   Here is the statement, including a list of web resources:  Download Iran Coup d'Etat

=================

Farid Masrour, a philosopher currently at NYU, and his wife, Giuliana Chamedes, a PhD candidate in History at Columbia and a former journalist, have prepared the following statement about recent events in Iran:

Concerned Iranians call for immediate action

A coup d'état is being carried out in Iran. 

Given the record turnout of voters for this election (around 85% of the voting-age population went to the polls), political analysts predicted that the results would be a mandate for change. 

However, the figures officially announced by the government attribute around 24 million votes to Mr Ahmadinejad. The number of votes won by Mr Ahmadinejad in the elections of 2005 was around 17 million, in an already contested election. His unpopular foreign policy, his repressive tactics, his suppression of women's rights, his treatment of racial and religious minorities, and his widely internally criticized economic policies, must have necessarily, according to all analysts, reduced the number of his voters. Thus, the more than eight million hike in the number of his supporters is simply unbelievable.

The official government figures state that the main challenger of Mr Ahmedinjad, Mr Moussavi, has received around 13 million votes. This result is shocking for various reasons. Throughout his campaign, Mr Moussavi received the official support of the former reformist president Mr Khatami, who resigned from candidacy to support Mr Moussavi in this election. There is no evidence of a fall from grace of Mr Khatami who won more than 20 million votes consecutively in two times. Moreover, almost all of the leading reformist groups in Iran have officially backed Mr Moussavi. The remaining groups have backed Mr Karoubi.There is also ample evidence that even some of the moderate-conservative groups which have traditionally voted against reformist candidates chose to back Mr Moussavi because of their frustation with Mr Ahmadinejad’s policies. Finally, the current election brought to the polls many Iranians who had previously chosen to boycott elections. In particular, numerous high-profile individuals who had advocated boycotts in years past now publicly declared that they would vote and that they would back either Mr Moussavi or Mr Karoubi. As the results of previous elections show, high voter participation in Iran tends to favor reformist candidates. All of this strongly suggests that Mr Moussavi should have obtained a record vote, higher than the average number of votes Mr Khatami obtained in 1997 and 2001. The 13 million votes officially announced for Mr Moussavi is thus grossly inferior to even the most modest projections.   

Mr Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, ran on a progressive platform. His demands include the call for a revision of the constitution in an attempt to protect the democratic rights of Iranian citizens, the protection of women’s right, e.g., promises to halt the mandatory enforcement of veil use, and the defense of the rights of religious and racial minorities. Mr Karoubi received the official backing of some of the former members of Mr Khatami’s cabinet, a number of leading clerics, many members of the women’s movement, representatives of religious and racial minorites, and the largest Iranian university student organization. The official announced result for Mr Karoubi, around 300,000 votes, is thus completely implausible and astonishing. Indeed, the figure is almost lower than the circulation number of his newspaper, lower than the results projected based on all previous polls, and almost twenty times lower than the number of votes that this candidate received in the 2005 election, when he was only 600,000 votes short of beating Mr Ahmadinejad in the first round of the elections. This again strongly suggests that the officially announced number has been simply manufactured, perhaps in an effort to portay Iranian public opinion as opposed to the progressive demands of Mr Karoubi.

In addition to the above, other evidence strongly suggests a pre-planned and systematic attempt by Mr.Ahmadinejad’s faction to manipulate the election results. First, according to the Iranian constitution, the official oversight body for elections is the Guardian Council, however this Council’s impartiality in the recent election is highly questionable. The chief of this twelve-man Council, whose members are appointed by the Supreme Leader of Iran, has explicitly and publicly backed Mr Ahmedinejad. Additionally, a letter was leaked and widely circulated a few days before the election, in which one of the high clerics in Iran, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, claimed that manipulating the results of the election is not only recommended, but is also the duty of good Muslims when the life of the Islamic republic is in danger.

Evidence that this recommendation was followed includes an open letter written by a number of employees in the Interior Ministry, and issued about one week before the elections, which expressed worries that certain high officials in this ministry seemed to be planning to manipulate the election results. Moreover, according to numerous official reports, many of the representatives of the two reform candidates were systematically and repeatedly prevented from being present at poll sites on the election day. Iranian law states that each candidate has the right to have a representative present at each poll site to oversee the process of voting and the counting of the votes; thus on the day of the elections, the Iranian people were deprived of the legal guarantees to which they are entitled by law.

Finally, a public and official statement issued by the Revolutionary Guards, one of the two branches of the army in Iran, charged Mr Moussavi and Mr Karoubi with an attempt to overthrow the Islamic republic with a colorful revolution, following the example of the colorful revolutions of East Central Europe and mid Asia. The letter explicitly threatened that the Guards would violently suppress any such movement before it is born. All of the above evidence suggests a systematic plot to not only manipulate election results, but also to use intimidatory and violent tactics to block any popular reaction.

The plot was indeed executed. On Thursday, June 11th, the night before the election, SMS services were cut off by the central government. Text messaging, which had become one of the most widely used means for political communication during the last few years in Iran, continues to remain suspended to this day. The Persian-language BBC, was also made unaccessible in Iran starting at the same time, on the night before the election. According to BBC officials, an unknown source is actively sending noise over the wavelength of the BBC broadcast in order to jam the signal. On the day of the election, numerous hours before the official closure of the polls, a considerable number of people were prevented from voting due to a “shortage of paper ballots”. Mr Mousavi’s campaign headquarters in Tehran was attacked in the evening of Friday, June 12th, the day of the election, once it became that Mr Ahmadinejad had lost by a clear margin.

According to sources with links to the Interior Ministry the real numbers were widely different from the officially announced figures: 30 million Iranians voted for change, with around 24 million chosing Mr Moussavi, and around 6 million backing Mr Karoubi. Our sources say that only 10 million Iranians have given their votes to Mr Ahmadinejad.To date, the two reform candidates have not recognized the results of the election, and have accused the ruling party of foul play.

Since the announcement of the official election results, hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets, in what is largely interpreted as an unorganized outcry against a stolen election. The protesters are chanting phrases such as "Down with the dictator", and "Give us our votes back". These protests are taking place in most of the major cities of Iran. This movement is spontanous, cuts across class lines, and has no clear leadership. Furthermore, there is absolutely no evidence that there is any foreign instigation, funding or involvement of any kind.   

Over 100 reformists and various local and international journalists have also been arrested. The internet services were initially cut off entirely and now work only intermittently, with various websites (including the BBC) blocked.

Anticipating the public reaction, the local and riot police occupied the streets in large numbers a few hours before the announcement of the results on Saturday morning. The response to the protests was immediate. The police used tear gas, pepper spray, and batons against female and male protesters. Evidence of this unprecedented violence is widely available online. Since last night, the situation has escalated. In addition to the presence of police forces, various government-funded plain-clothed militia groups, including Basiij (the militia wing of the Revolutionary Guards), have entered the scene, now armed with firearms, knives, machetes and hand granades. Because of the lock-down of the country, it is difficult to estimate the full extent of the violence already perpetrated, however various reports state that gunshots are echoing in a number of Iranian cities. The latest unconfirmed reports from trustworthy sources state that at least fifteen Teheran University students have been shot in the university dorms by members of the militia starting at around 1am. The unconfirmed death toll of the universty dorm raid is five students (four male, one female). Nearly four hundred students, including those who were severely injured during the attack, are reportedly arrested.   

Mr Moussavi, Mr Karoubi, and all the major reformist groups had called for a peaceful mass protest for today, Monday June 15th, to begin at 4pm in Teheran and in all of the major cities of Iran. It appears that this protest has been called off. But according to our sources anger against the coup and the brazen government-sanctioned violence continues to mount. So it is highly probable that the protestors will continue flooding the streets despite the ever-increasing danger and the government’s recent announcement that all forms of public protest are illegal and will be dealt with seriously. Indeed, the response of the government in the first few days following the Iranian election and the escalation of violence since last night, suggest that the government will not refrain from shooting the protesters today and in the upcoming days. Hundreds of thousands of Iranian citizens are in grave danger.

Therefore, we demand the following:

1- It is of utmost importance that the international community immediately use all diplomatic means of intervention to prevent a mass bloodshed in Iran.

2- The international media must use unequivocal terms in exposing this blatantly fraudulent election, something which thus far it is not doing.

Please circulate these demands widely to prevent consequences that are not only dangerous for Iranian citizens but also have inevitable consequences for the whole region.  We strongly believe that under no condition should there be any foreign armed intervention as a response to this crisis.

Final Thoughts on Feser

Here.

W.H.O. Finally Declares Swine Flu "Pandemic"

The official announcement is here; the decision was almost certainly overdue.  One good consequence of the decision will be the production of an appropriate vaccine, which, one may hope, will prevent a catastrophic flu season next winter.

What's wrong with the world, the shorter version

I added this as an addendum to the earlier post, but it's sufficiently amusing and clever that it warrants its own link.

Anonymous and Pseudonymous Speech in Cyberspace Again

Discussion of the latest tempest in a teapot here.

Hypocrisy Watch

State law schools face this problem all the time; I assume it is less common for politicans to lobby philosophy PhD programs to admit students!

What's wrong with the world?

People like Ed Feser (Pasadena City College), apologist for discrimination, now apologist for murder.   It would really be hard to make this stuff up.  Meanwhile, some suggestions for what to do by those who support abortion rights for women and oppose domestic terrorism against providers.

UPDATE:  Jeremy Shipley posts a perceptive reply to Professor Feser in the comments section:

Do the poster and commenters think that a relevant disanalogy arises from the fact that Tiller performed late-term abortions only when either the fetus was discovered to have a severe defect or when the woman's health was threatened? If not, why not? It certainly seems to me that even if I thought Tiller and others had reached the wrong conclusion that I could recognize the moral question as sufficiently difficult that a comparison with Jeffrey Dahmer was beyond the pale. Indeed, what is the purpose of making such a comparison? Surely it is not meant to rationally persuade others to your conclusion. You can't possibly have sat down to write this post thinking that you would change anyone's mind by this argument.

Furthermore, your injunction against vigilantism rings a bit hollow. Do you really mean for this to be an absolutely inviolable principle? Suppose a racist government refuses to protect a minority from persecution. Don't members of the minority have a right to protect themselves? Or, suppose a government refuses to outlaw rape. Would it not be justifiable to protect women by means outside the law? Do you really believe that there are absolutely no circumstances in which vigilante action is justified? I suspect insincerity. You offer a tenuous premise as the only reason more doctors should not be murdered. In light of the fact that your main argument cannot possibly be construed as an attempt to persuade and in fact adds nothing but incendiary rhetoric, I'm inclined to conjecture that the injunction against vigilantism is just cover for an incitement to further violence. That is, I suspect some might read this post and think "if the government had refused to stop Dahmer, I would have"; furthermore, I suspect you know that.

Of course, Professor Feser knows that.

ANOTHER:   More information on the tactics of the terrorists of the Christian right.

AND MORE on the latest victim of the domestic terrorists.

UPDATE 6/6:  Professor Feser's non-reply.   A word for Professor Feser:  it is not a "lie" to call you on your morally depraved rhetoric (and to link to your very words to prove the point!).  Anyone in their right mind can see what the point of comparing an abortion provider to a serial killer/cannibal actually is, and it isn't to lend weight to your two or three (prudent) sentences expressing nominal objections to his murder (cf. Mr. Shipley's remarks, quoted above).  The entire profession, except perhaps a few fringe lunatics (most of whom are already your co-bloggers), understands what's going on, which is why no one objects to my calling you on it.  Your hysterical rhetoric in reply is just a giveaway that you know you've been caught red-handed, as it were.   You and your co-bloggers are, indeed, "what's wrong with the world," as many readers of this blog have noted before.  ADDENDUM 6/8:  Professor Feser, please calm down--I didn't link to your now lengthy "reply" to Mr. Shipley because I hadn't seen it, because, unlike you, I don't spend the entire day reading blogs.  The post I did link to was your purported reply to me.  I am happy to link to your reply to Shipley, since all readers can assess its merits for themselves, just as all readers can assess whether or not you are an apologist for murder, since I linked to your comments in the first place.  Of course, you know what you are, and that is why you're increasingly hysterical on this subject.

ANOTHER 6/10:  This is a very funny, and apt, recap of the whole back-and-forth.  (Addendum:  I see Professor Feser has already discovered this item and--of course--'responded' at length.)

A FINAL UPDATE, 6/12:   The comment section at the post linked above is instructive, both about Feser and his readers, who seem to have a lot of trouble staying focused on the issue at hand.  Professor Feser reports deleting some of the personal attacks on him, but, being a high-minded and honorable fellow (unlike all his critics, of course), he left all the personal attacks aimed at me--including his own:

And what do you think Nietzsche would have thought of a pathetically status-obsessed egalitarian university professor whose "living dangerously" consisted of firing off nasty blog posts from the comfort of an office building, and only ever targeted at people he thought couldn't hurt him professionally?

Since no on else cares about this freak show, let me address my remarks to its main audience.  Professor Feser, you're obviously burning with fury that I've called you out, more than once now, on your twisted view of the world, but surely you can do better than irrelevant personal attacks?  I have focused on the appalling nature of your views, why not keep the focus there?   When your fury subsides, I assume you will acknowledge that I do not produce rankings because I'm "status-obsessed":  nothing has caused more harm to my professional "status" than producing them (I've remarked on this before, and it's obvious to anyone awake) and my actual opinion of lots of "high-status" academics is a matter of long public record.  (Think for a moment about why someone sympathetic to Marx would be interested in rankings.  You're not much of a philosopher, but you're not stupid, I'm sure you can figure this out.)  And you know as well as I do that the list of people I've excorciated includes philosophers and academics of far more significance than you (that's the extent of my egalitarianism, I am an equal opportunity critic).  I'm not as big a coward as most academics and I do say what I think.  That I've been as professionally successful as I have been (is this part of what irritates you?) is attributable to some combination of smarts and good luck.  It surely can not be attributed to my imprudent habit of targetting every religious fanatic, reactionary, mediocrity, and fool, whether they're at Harvard or Chicago or Pasadena City College.  You and your swarmy co-blogger Beckwith had dropped off my radar screen until you showed up as apologists for discrimination against gay men and women and I started reading the extraordinarily deranged blog you folks produce.  Catholicism and your sophomoric version of "natural law theory" do not excuse the moral depravity and venal creepiness of so much of what you folks believe.  On the other hand, I confess I was amused by all the effort Professor Beckwith put in to his exercise in failed reasoning by analogy, but I assume it was prudence on his part to depart from normal practice at WWWW and not open comments, lest someone make the obvious points in reply.  In any case, it's my intention to resume ignoring you, since mine and my readers' appetite for the "bizarro world" of WWWW (to borrow Professor Norcross's phrase) is probably sated.