Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The author of the "1619 Project," Nikole Hannah-Jones...

...is a journalist (Karl Kraus, where are you?), not even an historian, and she puts on quite a display on Twitter (e.g., announcing that as a Black person in America she doesn't have to consider historians like James McPherson "preeminent").  Most striking is her main line of defense against the criticisms we've noted the last few days:  "there is no such thing as objective history so complaints that the 1619 is an illegitimate reframing of history deny that all history is framed."   There may be no uniquely correct account of historical events, but there are certainly better and worse ones, correct and incorrect ones, and the objections are that the 1619 Project makes a number of contentious, and indeed false, claims about the history.   It's hard to believe an imbecile like this is writing for the NYT.

(Thanks to a young philosopher on the job market for calling this to my attention.  Because of the culture of open debate and tolerance for competing views in academic philosophy, this student did not want to be named.)

It appears this fellow doesn't care for Boris Johnson

Very amusing and apt:

 

Historian James Oakes (CUNY) interviewed about the NYT "1619 Project"

Another illuminating interview; an excerpt:

Q. [A] point we made in our response to the 1619 Project, is that it dovetails also with the major political thrust of the Democratic Party, identity politics. And the claim that is made, and I think it’s almost become a commonplace, is that slavery is the uniquely American “original sin.”

A. Yes. “Original sin,” that’s one of them. The other is that slavery or racism is built into the DNA of America. These are really dangerous tropes. They’re not only ahistorical, they’re actually anti-historical. The function of those tropes is to deny change over time. It goes back to those analogies. They say, “look at how terribly black people were treated under slavery. And look at the incarceration rate for black people today. It’s the same thing.” Nothing changes. There has been no industrialization. There has been no Great Migration. We’re all in the same boat we were back then. And that’s what original sin is. It’s passed down. Every single generation is born with the same original sin. And the worst thing about it is that it leads to political paralysis. It’s always been here. There’s nothing we can do to get out of it. If it’s the DNA, there’s nothing you can do. What do you do? Alter your DNA?

Who knew Lutherans were into "identity politics"?

Rev. Bruce Foster, a retired minister and a longtime reader of the blog, writes:

Your collection of responses to the 1619 nonsense at the Times is very useful. Of course if you weren’t an atheist but rather a member of a progressive Protestant church body all these arguments would be old hat to you. For at least five years my church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) has constantly stressed that all white people are racists, racism is the original sin of the USA and that White Privilege (always capitalized) must be confessed. These are not items up for debate or even discussion. They are to be repeated with all the passion and conviction that once was used for the Nicene Creed.  Yes, there are some people who try to protest, but if they are lay people they are never listened to, and if they are pastors and annoy their bishops enough their next church will be in Twisted Walnut Iowa (with the added punishment of every four years having ten visits by the likes of Peter B or Kamala H). But in fact these threats are rarely needed. In place of Two Minutes of Hate we have communal confessions of our joint sins and everybody feels better for it.

"Nietzsche, Trump, and Brexit"

You probably weren't expecting to find those three items together, but they are put there by my friend the philosopher Ken Gemes (Birkbeck/London) in this interesting talk.   Note that the introduction is in German, but Gemes delivers the lecture in English.   I think he gets one thing wrong about Nietzsche:  the fundamental problem for human beings is to find a meaning for inevitable suffering, not to find a meaning simpliciter, as Gemes claims.

The perfect holiday gift for your wife

This is hysterical (inspired by this nonsense).

Historian Gordon Wood interviewed on the NYT "1619 Project"

Here.  The New York Times owes the public an apology. An excerpt:

Q. Let me begin by asking you your initial reaction to the 1619 Project. When did you learn about it?

A. Well, I was surprised when I opened my Sunday New York Times in August and found the magazine containing the project. I had no warning about this. I read the first essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which alleges that the Revolution occurred primarily because of the Americans’ desire to save their slaves. She claims the British were on the warpath against the slave trade and slavery and that rebellion was the only hope for American slavery. This made the American Revolution out to be like the Civil War, where the South seceded to save and protect slavery, and that the Americans 70 years earlier revolted to protect their institution of slavery. I just couldn’t believe this.

I was surprised, as many other people were, by the scope of this thing, especially since it’s going to become the basis for high school education and has the authority of the New York Times behind it, and yet it is so wrong in so many ways....

More on the NYT fraudulent "1619 Project": an interview with historian James McPherson

Also interesting; an excerpt:

Q. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead writer and leader of the 1619 Project, includes a statement in her essay—and I would say that this is the thesis of the project—that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”

A. Yes, I saw that too. It does not make very much sense to me. I suppose she’s using DNA metaphorically. She argues that racism is the central theme of American history. It is certainly part of the history. But again, I think it lacks context, lacks perspective on the entire course of slavery and how slavery began and how slavery in the United States was hardly unique. And racial convictions, or “anti-other” convictions, have been central to many societies.

But the idea that racism is a permanent condition, well that’s just not true. And it also doesn’t account for the countervailing tendencies in American history as well. Because opposition to slavery, and opposition to racism, has also been an important theme in American history.

An interesting interview with Adolph Reed...

...at Current Affairs.  As usual, his perspective is an important one.

Jimmy Hoffa, union man

This is a friendly and balanced look at Hoffa's achievements on behalf of truck drivers and other working people, prompted by the Scorcese film The Irishman (which isn't bad, but it's just standard Scorcese mafia fare and does no justice to Hoffa's actual work).

A critique from the actual left of the NYT "1619 Project"

Via Samuel Moyn, I discovered this powerful critique of the "1619 Project" series at The New York Times, ; from the introduction:

“The 1619 Project,” published by the New York Times as a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine on August 19, presents and interprets American history entirely through the prism of race and racial conflict. The occasion for this publication is the 400th anniversary of the initial arrival of 20 African slaves at Port Comfort in Virginia, a British colony in North America. On the very next day, the slaves were traded for food.

The Project, according to the Times, intends to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”

Despite the pretense of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race....

The Internet, defined

"Costless, rapid communication of lazy, angry thoughts," from philosopher Christopher Morris (Maryland).  It could hardly be more apt!

A "mathematical proof" that "diversity trumps ability" turns out to be just more diversity blather

MOVING TO FRONT AGAIN, ORIGINALLY POSTED NOV 20--MANY INTERESTING COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME

UC Davis mathematician Abigail Thompson--at the center of yesterday's story--also wrote a devastating takedown of Lu Hong & Scott Page's purported mathematical proof that diversity is more important than ability, a bit of blather that often gets trotted out in discussions of "diversity."  Interestingly, the philosopher who sent this to me (also in the UC system) asked not to be named as the source, a testament to the climate in the UC system.   As a supporter of affirmative action, but opponent of diversity blather, I'm happy to share Professor Thompson's useful analysis.

BUT THERE'S MORE!   Philosopher Daniel Singer (Penn) criticizes Thompson's response and scroll down here for Professor Page's response.  (Thanks to Alex Guerrero for the former, and Justin Tosi for the latter.)  I'm opening comments for anyone who can shed light on this debate.  (The philosopher who sent me Professor Thompson's piece is someone more than able to assess the Thompson argument.)

On the Hindu fascists in India

A bracing essay by Arundhati Roy.

"[W]hen it comes to global-scale issues, what individuals do is somewhere between 100 percent pointless and 99.9999999 percent pointless" (UPDATED)

Impotent moralistic scolding is a favorite pasttime of philosophers, but when it comes to something like climate change, it's particularly absurd, as philosopher Steven Hales (Bloomsburg) argues (link now fixed):

We like to believe that when it comes to the great global issues of our time—climate change, pollution, poverty, mass extinction—that we each can make a difference. A small one maybe, but a real and significant difference, nonetheless. If we don’t try, or don’t try hard enough, we should feel culpable, and we have a concomitant moral responsibility to shame our lazy neighbors who refuse to make an effort. That’s a mistake. It not only makes us guilt-ridden and worse off psychologically, but even more harmfully it also provides only the illusion of effective action, thereby allowing global problems to fester without a proper solution.

Even professional ethicists are largely getting this wrong. I recently attended an international ethics conference, and the overwhelming take-away was the realization that philosophical ethics remains obsessed with individuals—trolley cases, what you should do, how you should act, who you should become. It is not appreciated that all the really serious moral issues of our time are collective action problems, and have nothing to do with you in the sense that they have nothing to do with individuals at all. The talks that did address collective action issues were keen on making them ultimately a matter of individual responsibility or blame....

Adolph Reed on Obama, Warren, and Sanders

Professor Reed really does not like Elizabeth Warren, and he's clearly right that Democratic elites would prefer Trump re-elected than Sanders.

UPDATE:  Meanwhile, the absurd Mayor Pete is now leading in both Iowa and New Hampshire.  We may have a scenario in which the winner of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries is then destroyed in South Carolina and Nevada, with heavily non-white Democratic electorates.

 

Ibram Kendi, totalitarian

Amazing:

He wants unelected “formally trained experts on racism” (presumably all from critical race-theory departments) to have unaccountable control over every policy that won’t yield racial equality in every field of life, public or private. They are tasked with investigating “private racist policies.” Any policy change anywhere in the U.S. would have to be precleared by these “experts” who could use “disciplinary tools” if policymakers do not cave to their demands. They would monitor and control public and private speech. What Kendi wants is power to coerce others to accept his worldview and to implement his preferred policies, over and above democratic accountability or political opposition. Among those policies would be those explicitly favoring nonwhites over whites because “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Mayor Pete's appeal to moderate Republicans

This is apt.

Spotted on the road in Kansas

Seriously.

CEU's Vienna campus opens...

....while the fascist Orban remains in power in Hungary, and Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen cosies up to him.  What a disgrace.

"How the 2010s changed physics forever"

Hype aside, I'd be curious to hear from knowledgeable readers about how accurate this article is.  Submit your comment just once, it may take awhile to appear.

Political turmoil in Hong Kong reaches the universities

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, site of recent clashes, has ended its term early.  Comments are open for more links and information about what's happening to the universities in Hong Kong.  Submit your comments only once, it may take awhile to appear.

Good news: lawsuit against Remington gun maker by Sandy Hook families will go forward

Let's hope it will get Remington and the others out of the business of marketing weapons of mass murder.

"Post-apocalyptical fiction" section, please

No comment needed:

Alan Dershowitz just met the "pro se" plaintiff from hell

"Pro se" litigants are those who represent themselves; usually they are not lawyers. But in this case, the plaintiff is David Boies, one of the most successful litigators in private practice over the last half-century.  The complaint is here:   Download Boies-Complaint.  All the claims are for false statements Dershowitz has made to the press accusing Boies of extortion, suborning perjury and so forth in connection with his representation of victims of Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse; each one is a case of defamation per se, meaning damage is presumed.  My guess is Dershowitz will pay hansdomely to try to settle this, but Boies has no reason to settle:  he doesn't need the money, and he wants to vindicate his reputation from these scurrilous attacks.   This could be interesting.

"OK boomer" and "I know you are, but what am I?"

Thoughts from philosopher Daniel Kaufman (Missouri State); an excerpt:

What it signals is that there will be – can be – no genuine youth rebellion from this generation; that the kids who in previous eras would have risked being hung from a tree, while trying to register black southerners to vote, or face being shot in the face by National Guardsmen while protesting an unjust war, have been bamboozled by their corporate masters into thinking that typing “OK Boomer” into their Apple I-Phones™ and broadcasting it through the medium supplied by Twitter,™ and selling t-shirts, printed by PrintCorp™, and proliferating hashtags and virtual-cancellations through numerous other corporate platforms, run and financed by “Boomers,” that they are actually rebelling; doing something; contributing.  And if organs like the New York Times and the Washington Post are stupid and gullible (or cynical) enough to cheer it on, what chance is there that anyone to whom anyone is going to listen is going to call it out for the pitiful bullshit that it is?

Legalized house theft...

...in Michigan.  Unless there's more to this story, this is remarkably outrageous, and some court should strike down the law on due process grounds, if nothing else.

Our old friend Lawrence VanDyke just got whacked by the American Bar Association

It seems like not much has changed in the last fifteen years.

"Lock him up!"

He actually deserves to be locked up for his life of crime; this is from last night's World Series baseball game, where the monster-child appeared:

 

Hope for America...

...assuming the decline is among evangelicals:

The religious landscape of the United States continues to change at a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.

Both Protestantism and Catholicism are experiencing losses of population share. Currently, 43% of U.S. adults identify with Protestantism, down from 51% in 2009. And one-in-five adults (20%) are Catholic, down from 23% in 2009. Meanwhile, all subsets of the religiously unaffiliated population – a group also known as religious “nones” – have seen their numbers swell. Self-described atheists now account for 4% of U.S. adults, up modestly but significantly from 2% in 2009; agnostics make up 5% of U.S. adults, up from 3% a decade ago; and 17% of Americans now describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” up from 12% in 2009.

"Social Justice" [sic] Kittens: the calendar

This is hysterical, since it captures the narcissistic stupidity of this bourgeois nonsense, and it does so with cute photos of kittens!  (There's a puppy calendar underneath.)

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Dean Rowan points out this from the source linked above:  "As usual, every bit of kitten and puppy dialogue is sourced from genuine social media posts. Nothing has been taken out of context or misrepresented—these are all faithful to the original courageous declarations which continue to delight and inspire." 

In praise of piano lessons

Science--science mind you!--says they're good!

The prudent wing of the ruling class is getting worried that someone not friendly to their interests might get the Democratic nomination...

...as this NYT article inadvertently reveals.  How disconnected can you be to actually think seriously about Hillary Clinton again?   That the billionaire 1970s Republican Michael Bloomberg is mentioned in the same breath tells us everything.

Quite apart from his lack of substance, this is the central reason why it would be a disaster to nominate Mayor Peter...

...because no Democrat can prevail without enthusiastic African-American support.  (I recall Robert Paul Wolff made this point at his blog months ago.)

A documentary about Paul Robeson

I happened today upon the documentary, below, about the great Paul Robeson, whom we have noted previously.   He was one of the great Americans of the 20th-century, notable not just for artistic talent, but moral and political courage beyond what almost anyone could muster.   He was, of course, vilified during the fascist resurgence in America of the 1950s for his unwillingness to attack the Soviet Union, but surely everyone now knows that Stalinist Russia would have been preferable to the life available to most Blacks in apartheid America of the 1940s and after.   (Random lynching is apparently less offensive to effete "libertarian" American sensibilities than the Gulag.)  As his son is quoted in the film as saying, it was Robeson's view that the main enemy of humanity was the right-wing of the United States.   If anyone today doubts that assessment, I'm not sure what to say.  Anyway, watch the film, which of course includes many clips of his singing and acting, as well as his genuine status as a "working class hero" (unlike the radical chic John Lennon).  We need aPaul Robeson today.

 

Europe's "most wanted" fugitives

Equal opportunity edition.  (Contrast the FBI's 10 most wanted list.  The difference is not just gender, it's also the severity of most of the crimes.)

Tulsi Gabbard on Hillary Clinton...

...after Clinton called her a "Russian asset," on Twitter:  "You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long..."  That's certainly apt, but don't forget Bill, who finished the neoliberal Reagan revolution from the right!  They're both equally awful!

Regarding the monster-child...

...this is perceptive.

38 wonderful words in languages with no simple English equivalent

This fun list is making the rounds on social media, and includes the wonderful Danish word "Hygge."   A number of years ago, I had the pleasure of giving a keynote at the annual meeting of the Danish Philosophical Association, and learned that a senior philosopher afterwards called me "hyggelig."  As my host explained, this...

...was unexpected and a very significant token of your status here. Normally [the Danish philosopher in question] is sarcastic and dismissive of all American philosophers (and most other philosophers for that matter). As I told you there is no higher praise in the mouth of a Dane (not least an elderly one).

As for the concept "hygge", it does indeed seem to share a common root with "hug" even if the matter is speculative. The Germanic root is "hyggja", which has to do with "holding [in mind]" . Modern English "hug" seems to be a broadened sense of a term, which once meant only "holding" (as e.g. in wrestling), again deriving from that Germanic root. In modern Danish you have "omhyggelig" which means something like "thorough" or "attentive" and "hygge" (the hard to translate concept" see e.g. http://hotword.dictionary.com/translate/ ) . From "hygge" you have "hyggelig", which means: "prone to spread "hygge", and "hygge sig", which means: to be in a situation of "hygge".

Why did Trump win?

It wasn't racism or racial anxiety.

The House should send its sergeant-at-arms to arrest Rudy Giuliani

Now this is some creative and constructive legal thinking!

The U.S. Supreme Court case on protecting LGBT individuals from workplace discrimnation

This is a hopeful account of the recent oral arguments from a strong supporter of legal and constitutional protections for LGBT rights.  I hope he's right!  (Earlier coverage.)

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Although the field is far afield of my competence and understanding, I took vicarious pleasure in seeing John Goodenough recognized, since he was a legend during the years when I taught at UT Austin, and his work has literally affected everyone reading this!  Unlike the Nobel prizes in peace and literature, or the fake Nobel in economics, all of which are thoroughly politicized, the other Nobel Prizes, including for chemistry, reflect genuine cognitive accomplishments.   Now they need to recognize the other chemistry legend in Texas, Allen Bard!

Yeats on Trump

This is funny.

Neglected works of intellectual history...

...at the Journal of the History of Ideas blog with substantive explanations of the choices.  Philosophers will find several of these of interest (one of the works is by a historian of philosophy).

Mr. Conway for the prosecution: Mr. Trump is psychologically unfit for office

We all knew that, of course, but Mr. Conway here lays out the case methodically and powerfully.  (As many readers will know, Mr. Conway was a litigation partner at New York City's most profitable law firm for many years.)

MEANWHILE a less reputable lawyer.

ANOTHER GOOD SIGN:  FOX TV commentator says Trump's conduct is illegal and impeachable; as important, this was linked by the DrudgeReport, which is the Internet counterpart to the FOX propaganda machine.

Federal trial judge sides with Harvard in admissions lawsuit about discrimination against Asian-Americans

IHE has an account of the decision; it will certainly be appealed and will land, eventually, before the U.S. Supreme Court which, I expect, will side with the plaintiffs and might even declare "diversity" rationales for admission decisions to be unconstitutional.

The moral bankruptcy of techno-elites

This is certainly true, but what shows their moral and intellectual bankruptcy is the prattle that comes out of their mouths about just about everything. But in a capitalist society, having made money is invariably interpreted as having opinions that are worth hearing, although the opposite principle might be a sounder one.

Abortion, miscarriage, and the Swedish artist Klint

Leave it to my colleague Agnes Callard to weave them all together!

Rosenberg on climate change and PPE

"The Stone" blog at the NYT is mostly a forum for contemporary philosophers to reveal how little they know about the world (and, sometimes, even about philosophy), but every now and then a good piece, with actual intellectual content, appears:  I commend this one by Alex Rosenberg (Duke).