Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Alan Dershowitz sued for defamation by victim of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein

I hope this one doesn't settle, as others have.  The plaintiff is represented by a powerhouse law firm.  From the complaint:

19. Dershowitz has repeatedly, publically claimed that he wanted to have a trial that would determine the facts concerning his conduct. He said on national television that he would waive the statute of limitations so that Roberts could sue him for sex abuse. However, when Robert’s counsel asked Dershowitz to do so, Dershowitz refused -- and continues to refuse.
20. Similarly, when Dershowitz was faced with an actual case brought by Edwards and Cassell which would have determined the veracity of Roberts’ claims, Dershowitz settled to avoid that determination.
21. More recently, Dershowitz, perhaps believing that Roberts who is now living with her husband and children in Australia would not be prepared to engage in litigation, has again taken to claiming publically that he demands a trial on the question of whether Roberts committed perjury and made up her statements about him for money. For example on March 2, 2019: My “accusers are Virginia Roberts and Sarah Ransome…I hereby accuse my false accusers of committing the felony of perjury and challenge them to sue me for defamation.” (Exhibit 6).
22. Mr. Dershowitz now has what he claims to have been looking for

I wonder whether the defense will try to establish a Dershowitz "modus operandi" by calling Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein to testify?  (Just kidding, but that would be priceless.)

Andrea Dworkin on Bill, Hillary, and Monica Lewinsky...back in 1998

Following some links from friends on Twitter, I came upon this old essay, which has, indeed, aged well, and is scathing and funny at he same time.

Wolff on "The Future of Socialism," Part Three

Here.

What crime did British jihadists commit?

Philosopher Cecile Fabre (Oxford) comments.

Twitter may be a cesspool, but Redditt may even be worse...

...and especially in this respect.

Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on fire...

...and the main spire has collapsed after burning.  (This is a link to live coverage.)  Pretty shocking for all those who, at some point in their lives, visited this iconic Paris landmark.  I first went there as a child in 1975, and have visited several times since.  Awful images.

Robert Paul Wolff on "The Future of Socialism"

Parts One and Two (with a third to come).   Well-informed and interesting, as always.

The attack on the Hungarian Academy of Sciences by the fascists in Hungary, and other mischief

And all this is happening while the EU does nothing.  As the author notes:

Hungary has committed suicide in plain sight, and it has done so with the inept assistance of the European Union – while the rest of the member states stand by and watch helplessly. The death dance of democracy has begun again, just like in the 20th century, by painting human rights, freedom of the press, judicial independence, science and art to be political questions. By portraying facts and reality as a matter of threatened identity. And by depicting hate and violations of the law as moral obligations. This is not just taking place within the EU, this is the EU itself, living up to the delirious nightmares of the far right. What right-wing nationalists call "bureaucrats taking away national identities" means, in practice, that Brussels continues to provide full financial support even as mentally ill rulers dictate the destruction of entire countries – their art, literature and science – in the name of resisting interference in domestic affairs, and by keeping borders open for those chased away. The mass moral hysteria of Hungarian political conservativism is the driving force of the cold civil war that has been battering Hungary since 2002.

The irony (albeit a dangerous one) here in the U.S. is that it's precisely those who imagine themselves to be "progressives" (and not fascists) who treat "science and art" as "political questions," and specialize in pleading "threatened [or vulnerable] identity" as the justification for just about anything.  (Recall the discussion of the academic lunatics on Twitter asserting that all scholarly citations are "political.")

Regarding the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the author writes:

The most recent victim was Central European University, but now, it is the turn of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Orbán's attacks usually start with a hateful press campaign against un-Hungarianness; in the case of the Academy, the prelude was an attack on "degenerate" gender studies as a representation of lazy humanities and therefore superfluous. It is followed by an extremely rapid legal and/or financial trick, rendering the victim dysfunctional – withholding the budget of the Academy, for example. Next, prominent Fidesz politicians reinforce the fabricated narrative by focusing on complex, incomprehensible and meaningless technical details. It is enough to confuse outsiders, but for those familiar with the matter, it is based on blatant lies to such a degree that it precludes any discussion....

Then, under the pretext of negotiations (which never actually took place in the case of the CEU), the whole matter is stalled until what's left of the opposition press loses interest and the public gets used to the underlying arguments of the government narrative (basic research is unnecessary, humanities are for liberals on the leftist fringe, gender studies spread homosexuality and the government's intervention isn't really much of a shift at all). After a few months, the original plan is carried out under the guise of a compromise solution: Every conciliatory step from the victim is used against her, the noise from the tired press and the confused public grows ever quieter and the government presents itself as being the solution to the conflict it generated in the first place. The fate of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the country's beholder of intellectual capital, appears to be sealed, because in the coming EU fiscal period support will primarily be available for innovation and research, and a directly controlled structure is necessary for Orbán to appropriate the funds.

(Thanks to Balazs Gyenis for the pointer.)

Lachlan Murdoch, the new reactionary head of Fox News, was a Princeton philosophy major...

...writing on Kant and Hegel under Beatrice Longuenesse and who also took David Lewis's time travel course (Alan Hajek [now at the ANU] was his preceptor!)  Now, of course, he is a wicked person responsible for much that is wrong with the world.

 

What is the most democratic resolution to the Brexit crisis?

Ten academics comment, including philosophers Rae Langton, A.C. Grayling, Katherine Hawley, and Robert Talisse, among others.

Maduro's Venezuela

A critical, and well-documented, account from philosopher Peter Ludlow.

On secession, and Brexit

Political theorist David Miller (Oxford) comments.

Turkish voters: "Fuck you, Ergodan"

God bless them, even if S/He doesn't exist.

More on Contrapoints on Gender Critical feminism

Philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith (Melbourne) responds in detail to the video we noted yesterday.

Contrapoints (Natalie Wynne) purports to take on Gender Critical Feminism...

...in a new video on YouTube.  She makes a few good points, and is funny as usual, but it's not in the end a good-faith engagement.  Among other rhetorical tricks, she associates (and cites) garbage from Reddit (!) threads on transgender issues with the Gender Critical position, but nowhere actually engages actual arguments of Gender Critical feminists and philosophers. And by the end, she devolves into the usual mindless rant against feminists one has come to expect from activists.  Opportunity lost, but perhaps not accidentally.  As a piece by Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine recently noted:

[The Gender Critical] argument...seems to me to contain a seed of truth. Hence, I suspect, the intensity of the urge to suppress it....The [central] argument is that viewing “gender identity” as interchangeable with sex, and abolishing clear biological distinctions between men and women, is actually a threat to lesbian identity and even existence — because it calls into question who is actually a woman, and includes in that category human beings who have been or are biologically male, and remain attracted to women. How can lesbianism be redefined as having sex with someone who has a penis, they argue, without undermining the concept of lesbianism as a whole? “Lesbians are female homosexuals, women who love women,” one of the speakers, Julia Beck, wrote last December, “but our spaces, resources and communities are on the verge of extinction.”

The Mueller Report

Two years ago, I noted that, "I've had a lot to say about Trump, not much about the Trump-Russia sideshow that's been raging in Washington, which has seemed to me either a non-story or a distraction.  Trump's admiration for Putin is easy to explain purely in terms of his psychological disturbance, without recourse to any of the tall tales circulating."   The Democrats, very unwisely, made a huge issue about the possible "collusion" with Russia, and now an extensive two-year investigation by Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents has come up with nothing, as I would have expected.  (Obstruction of justice is more ambiguous, especially because of the "corrupt intent" requirement:  it's not clear Trump has anything other than "corrupt intents," but he's also such an undisciplined monster-child, that there can be real factual questions about what we can infer from what comes out of his mouth.  The Mueller Report plainly didn't exonerate Trump on that score, but without evidence of collusion with Russia, the obstruction issue is likely to fade away, barring damning revelations if and when the report is made public.)

Trump remains a self-serving narcissist, idiot, and incompetent, with a Mafia mentality.  He's a danger to humanity.  The Democrats better not screw up the next 18 months.

 

The British ruling elite, before and after Thatcher

Mary Warnock as case study.

(Thanks to S. Wallerstein for the pointer.)

3AM Magazine's radical chic motto--"whatever it is, we're against it"--turns out to be bollocks

Their real motto is "whatever right-thinking zealots in our little corner of the universe agree on, we're for it."  The magazine has withdrawn Richard Marshall's interview with philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith (Melbourne) because in the course of the interview she denied that trans women are women, and expressed the gender critical view of these issues familiar to readers of the blog from the work of philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex).

Richard Marshall has resigned from 3AM Magazine, given this insulting treatment of his work.  He is right to do so, even though this is a huge loss for philosophy.  As he told me, it means the "end of the series" of interviews he has done over many years now, which now numbers nearly 400 interviews with philosophers about their work in accessible terms and freely available on the Internet.

If you value Mr. Marshall's work and freedom of expression and thought, then e-mail the owner and co-editor of 3AM to make that known.  He is Andrew Gallix, reachable here:   andrew@3ammagazine.com

Besides the loss for philosophy, it is also a further indication that, as Professor Lawford-Smith said in her interview, this issue is toxic in the UK.  Transwomen are transwomen.  Transwomen should be treated as women in most contexts.  There may be exceptions.   These sensible thoughts--well-expressed by a transgender philosopher noted here--are now verboten in the UK, it appears.

(And for the maniacs out there (you don't know who you are, but you are maniacs), here's links to evidence of my "transphobia" [sic].)

UPDATE:  Below the fold is the portion of the interview that has attracted the ire of the thought police:

On Javanka, the brain-dead children of money

This is very funny:

[T]he first daughter and her husband remain psychologically mysterious, at least to me. Why don’t they have impostor syndrome, given that their total lack of qualifications for the jobs they are doing makes them actual impostors?

According to “Kushner, Inc.,” Gary Cohn, former director of the National Economic Council, has told people that Ivanka Trump thinks she could someday be president. “Her father’s reign in Washington, D.C., is, she believes, the beginning of a great American dynasty,” writes Ward. Kushner, whose pre-White House experience included owning a boutique newspaper and helming a catastrophically ill-timed real estate deal, has arrogated to himself substantial parts of American foreign policy. According to Ward, shortly after Rex Tillerson was confirmed as secretary of state, Kushner told him “to leave Mexico to him because he’d have Nafta wrapped up by October.”

As political actors, the couple are living exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a psychological phenomenon which leads incompetent people to overestimate their ability because they can’t grasp how much they don’t know.

The American roots of actual "white" supremacy...

...although it wasn't really "white" supremacy so much as Aryan or Nordic supremacy, since Jews and Italians (among others now treated as "white") weren't welcome.  But Hitler and the Nazis were impressed, although the article includes this gem:

What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,” observes James Q. Whitman, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.” Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew...arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.”  The Nazis reviewed the infamous “one-drop rule,” which defined anyone with any trace of African blood as black, and “found American law on mongrelization too harsh to be embraced by the Third Reich.”

"Too harsh" for the Nazis!

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

"If trans women are women, what is a woman?"

Interesting essay from last fall by philosopher Sophie Allen (Keele) that only recently came to my attention.

In defense of Harvard's Ronald Sullivan

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--DEFINITELY WORTH READING!

Sullivan is a clinical law professor at Harvard and a very accomplished criminal defense attorney, who, among his many cases, recently joined the defense team for Harvey Weinstein; he is also the faculty member in charge of one of Harvard's undergraduate dorms.   Benighted Harvard students have launched a smear campaign against him, claiming this work disqualifies him from discharging his duties.  Their arguments are as irrational as one has come to expect in such cases, but we are all indebted to Randall Kennedy, also a Harvard law professor, for dissecting them with precision.  Of more general interest is this observation about the student attack on Prof. Sullivan:

These events are emblematic of a crisis besetting all strata of higher education, as activists of various stripes perceive cannily the temptation of administrators to mollify zealots in return for quiet — regardless of the merits of competing arguments or the importance of the values in question....

Those calling for Sullivan’s resignation or dismissal as a faculty dean solely because he is serving as Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer in a rape prosecution are displaying an array of disturbingly widespread tendencies. One is impatience with drawing essential distinctions such as that between a lawyer and his client. Another is a willingness to minimize or dispense with important safeguards like fair trials. Yet another is a tendency to resort to demonization.

That “progressive” activists could denounce so bitterly a person who has demonstrated so clearly a commitment to inclusive, humane, liberal values and practices is indicative of a concerted illiberalism that is menacing university life.

All this is, of course, familiar from events covered extensively on this blog:  from the mobbing of Rebecca Tuvel, to the campaign by faculty and students on both sides of the Atlantic to shut down critical discussion of the gender ID law in the UK, to the attack on academic freedom at Marquette under the guise of protecting the "vulnerable."

Everyone who cares about academic life needs to speak up about these issues and the bad behavior of the illiberal perpetrators, including when the perpetrators are students (just as Prof. Kennedy has done correctly in this instance, since it is almost entirely students running the smear campaign against Prof. Sullivan).

(Thanks to Jerry Dworkin for the pointer.)

Would someone really buy a self-driving car that would *not* swerve to avoid hitting a human...

...while hitting a cat or dog? 

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

Trump and the Mafia, redux

It's not just a Mafia mentality, it's a Mafia organization!

(Thanks to Steve Sverdlik for the pointer.)

An open letter about Patricia Lemer, putative autism expert

Mr. Engelson, a former student, gave me permission to share this open letter he has been circulating on social media:

To Whom It May Concern

As a high-functioning man on the autism spectrum, I write to protest the event at Politics & Prose with Patrcia Lemer. Her writing is predatory and presents a danger to society. By suggesting that her books contain solutions to "prevent" or "heal" autism, Ms. Lemer is peddling blatant falsehoods. Medical science does not know what causes autism, and thus cannot prevent it.

No one with autism has ever been healed of it. If there were a way to a rid myself of it, I would absolutely bulldoze everyone in my path to get to it. The fact is, though, that autism is a permanent, lifelong condition. One can learn to live as best one can one with it, but one cannot go from being autistic autistic to neurotypical. What we know suggests that would require "rewiring" the brain.

Desperate parents, willing to try anything to help their children, will buy into this junk science. They will sink money into attempts cure their children that cannot be successful. That money is better spent helping their children learn to adapt, to whatever extent they are able.

Ms. Lemer pushes the issue of vaccinations as causing autism. This has been proven untrue, and it is harmful; it encourages parents to avoid vaccinating their children against deadly diseases, and it diminishes herd immunity. I take this personally, as an "antivaxer" called me a "casualty" of vaccinations. Ironically, I am the third generation in my male line of descent on the spectrum, so genetics, not environmental factors, are clearly the operative factor here. I am also hardly a casualty: I worked full-time as a government contractor, making more than $75k; I have a side gig as music press, often reviewing three shows a week on comped press passes. I have an amazing life.

I recognize that my registration of protest will not affect this event, but it was important to me that you hear the thoughts of someone from within the autistic community. I often feel that, to cite the name of an organization, it may be that Autism Speaks, but maybe, when it comes to matters of autism, people should try talking to someone with autism.

Sincerely,
Mark Engleson

Free speech, good and bad

Sean Illing, the philosophically-minded journalist at Vox, kindly interviewed me about this article.  One thing we didn't get to talk about is my view that the academy is, when functioning properly, one of the only places where the Millian background conditions for free speech to be truth-maximizing actually obtains.  (Mr. Illing does a lot of interesting interviews, you can check them all out here.)

Literature and culture in America in the 1940s: no room for identity politics

An interesting review of what sounds like a fascinating book by George Hutchinson (Cornell); an excerpt:

The book brings into focus intellectual and emotional realities of the decade during and after World War II that current historical memory largely occludes behind heroicizing or condescending stereotypes. On the one hand, popular media serve up nostalgia for a “Greatest Generation.” On the other hand, academic dogma rebukes the decade’s aspirations for “universality,” for an inclusive sense of what it means to be human, portraying those hopes as imperialist cudgels designed to impose Western values on a postcolonial world....

Hutchinson’s central theme is that literature mattered in the 1940s because it focused on experiences that happened to everyone and because it made sense of them, not by abstracting or generalizing, but by recognizing that those common experiences came to everyone in a unique way:

    "When Richard Wright narrates episodes of his youth in Black Boy (1945), he doesn’t mean     to say that the fear, shame, and hatred that haunted his childhood can only be true for     him, nor are they only relevant to other African Americans. He writes as an embodied     human being to other human beings—who also are afraid, shamed, and hateful for their     own reasons—with a faith in the possibility that they will listen and come to a 'human' (his     term) understanding of his experience and also of themselves, whoever and wherever they     are—and that they will be changed by that understanding as he was."

Ann Petry, whose first novel, The Street (1946), about a black woman in Harlem, sold a million copies, wrote her second novel, Country Place (1947), about a white family who experienced what Petry’s African-American family had experienced.  Another black author, Willard Motley, wrote his first novel, Knock on Any Door (1947), about an Italian working-class family. Humphrey Bogart starred in the film made from it. “Black critics as of 1950 considered these novels…among the most important literary achievements since 1935...."

Update on the Athens Review of Books

The letter, noted earlier, has now appeared in The New York Review of Books, and is apparently being noted in Greek media. (The letter, with the full list of signatories, is here.)  One of the editors writes:  "Our request at the re-trial of 21st February to lift the freezing orders of our accounts was denied."

Michael Jackson and Martin Heidegger

Les Green (Oxford) comments.  In addition to making some good substantive points and some wickedly funny jokes (at the expense of the Catholic Church and English academic bureaucrats), this is also a really good piece of writing.  Read it!

No-platforming for expressing "incorrect" views about gender and sex now comes to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

An account from the victim here.

Bayard Rustin in the NYT

This isn't bad, although it should have been titled "civil and labor rights" hero and should have mentioned A. Philip Randolph, one of the other great Americans of the 20th-century.  There can be no doubt what Rustin would have thought of diversity blather!

Solid majorities of Americans (across racial groups) disfavor consideration of race, legacy status, and athletic ability in college admissions

This is striking.  I do expect the quite conservative U.S. Supreme Court to bar race-based affirmative action on constitutional grounds within the next couple of years. 

A very different take on Venezuela...

...one quite consistent with past U.S. practice vis-a-vis Latin America.

UPDATE:  Longtime reader S. Wallerstein calls my attention to this interview with the U.N. Rapporteur for human rights, whose report on Venezuela has been entirely ignored in the mainstream media.   He says there is no humanitarian crisis there, among other things.

Bloated salaries in the nonprofit sector

Illuminating critique by economist Dean Baker.

Pettit on Brexit...

...at The New Statesman's philosophy series.

Karl Marx in Teen Vogue

Really.  This is from last year, but still remarkable.

(Thanks to Matt Lister for the pointer.)

On being 97

A video about philosopher Herbert Fingarette, who died last year.  For anyone who has had the experience, as I have, of caring for a very elderly parent or relative, it is especially illuminating and moving.

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

On the current situation in Iran

See this and then this.

Diversity blather watch: Stanford edition

Stanford set up a program whose aim was to present diverse viewpoints on various topics but the program was criticized for not being "diverse" in terms of the race and gender of the speakers.   But the two kinds of "diversity" are not the same, and the value of the first (call it Millian diversity) has almost nothing to do with the values of the second, which used to be called affirmative action before Justice Powell confused an entire nation, including its alleged intellectuals.   Sensible reasons for affirmative action include compensatory justice, social inclusion, and providing role models.  Millian diversity, by contrast, aims to promote discovery of the truth through exposure to competing ideas and arguments.

UPDATE:  Philosopher John Dupre (Exeter) writes with an interesting observation:

As a former Stanford faculty member I was interested to read and briefly follow up your blog post on Stanford’s program of presenting diverse views to its community.  While I certainly cannot argue with your distinction between Millian diversity of views and diversity of the identities of holders of the views (though both might be a good idea), you don’t mention the rather ironic fact that, at least as far as I can find out online, the failings with regard to the second point are dwarfed by the failings with regard to the first.  An opening session with two billionaire funders of Facebook, one, Peter Thiel, a well-known extreme libertarian conservative, and the other apparently a good friend of his, chaired by the notoriously right wing historian Niall Ferguson, is hardly a paradigm of diverse perspectives. 

According to the website subsequent speakers included the IQ and race theorist Charles Murray on inequality, and a conversation on sexuality and politics between the well-known anti-feminist philosopher Christina Sommers and a right-wing Catholic journalist.  Francis Fukuyama looks about the most liberal speaker mentioned.

The critics may have got their criticism confused, but they certainly had much to criticise. As the Chronicle article suggests Stanford now recognises, a more diverse (sensu 2) planning committee might well have been a good way of getting a more diverse program (sensu 1).

Indeed, that program of speakers is not exactly a triumph of Millian diversity, although the way to get that is not with affirmative action on the planning committee, but Millian diversity on the planning committee, or simply a principled commitment to speakers with genuinely competing views.   The Federalist Society in U.S. law schools is actually a good model of the latter:  Federalist Society events always involve a commentator or respondent with opposing views to the conservative speaker.  (The Federalist Society does, in my view, too often give a platform to mediocre academics simply because of their politics, but even when that happens, they still have a respondent with an opposing view.)

The Democratic nominee for 2020

So there were over 800 votes in the poll since yesterday, although some suspicious voting for Gabbard/Bloomberg at one interval, so I'm going to list the top six, since Sherrod Brown was at times in the top five:

1. Bernie Sanders  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

2. Elizabeth Warren  loses to Bernie Sanders by 411–284

3. Amy Klobuchar  loses to Bernie Sanders by 406–322, loses to Elizabeth Warren by 452–265

4. Tulsi Gabbard  loses to Bernie Sanders by 460–230, loses to Amy Klobuchar by 320–240

5. Kamala Harris  loses to Bernie Sanders by 453–231, loses to Tulsi Gabbard by 314–279

6. Sherrod Brown  loses to Bernie Sanders by 484–136, loses to Kamala Harris by 271–219

Given the left-leaning tenor of this blog, and many of the readers, the only real surprise here, to me, is Klobuchar.  But comments are open, I'm happy to hear from readers about their choices, whether in the top six or not.  My own preference would be for Sanders or Warren, who have an actual social-democratic policy agenda.   Brown is also good on that score, and in some ways, Gabbard, although she has a lot of odd baggage related to her religiously-inspired bigotry in the past.  Please submit your comments only once, they may take awhile to appear.

Kamala Harris's father (a Marxist economist at Stanford) criticizes his daughter's identity politics pandering

This is curious, although one can imagine why--since he has an actual world view as opposed to a panache of sound bites and slogans--he would find this stunt so offensive.

Who do you support for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020?

No doubt the pundits have been waiting to see what the blog readers here think, so get on it!  Rank your candidates from first to last (you can also choose "no opinion" for those you have no opinion about).  I'll post results in a couple of days. Have fun!

UPDATE:  Would the person repeatedly voting for Tulsi Gabbard as #1 and Michael Bloomberg as #2 please stop and get a life.

Athens Review of Books, redux

Finally, an op-ed about the ARB case, which really deserves more media attention.

Steven Salaita today

Longtime readers will recall Steven Salaita, illegally fired by the University of Illinois for his constitutionally protected speech, who got a cash settlement, but not his tenured faculty position.  Having been effecively blacklisted by the Zionist thought police from the academy, he trained for and is now driving a school bus.  He writes about his new life here.  It's long, but extremely interesting and at times poignant, especially his relationship with his father.

Roger Crisp (Oxford) makes the case for "open borders"...

...in The New Statesman.

Vanishing insects

At first, one might think, "Thank God," until one remembers the whole ecosystem depends on them.  Yikes!

The increasingly strange Democratic field

On the one hand, we have candidates with actual, substantive positions that make clear they are not Republicans and not neoliberal Democrats--most clearly, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren--and then we have candidates who are selling their personality and life story and "feel good" blather, and not substantive agendas:  Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kristin Gillibrand, and now Amy Klubochar.  I sure hope the substance wins, and the personalities go back to their mirrors.

UPDATE:  This is apt, from political theorist Corey Robin (Brooklyn College).  (Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

"Annals of the TERF wars"

A bit long, some of it is rather funny and does aptly capture both the vitriol and irrationality of some of the on-line exchanges.

(Thanks to Steven Hales for the pointer.)

"Twitter is public"

A philosopher in California sent me this funny essay by Hamilton Nolan from several years ago:

In light of certain arguments currently taking place on the internet, we would like to issue a gentle reminder of a fact: Twitter is public.

The things you write on Twitter are public. They are published on the world wide web. They can be read almost instantly by anyone with an internet connection on the planet Earth. This is not a bug in Twitter; it is a feature. Twitter is a thing that allows you to publish things, quickly, to the public.

Most things that you write on Twitter will be seen only by your followers. Most things that you write on Twitter will not be read by the public at large. But that is only because the public at large does not care about most things that you have to say. It is not because the public does not have "a right" to read your Twitter. Indeed, they do. They can do so simply by typing Twitter dot com slash [your name] into their web browser. There, they will find a complete list of everything that you have chosen to publish on Twitter, which is a public forum.

Athens Review of Books under threat from politically motivated legal action by fascist former minister Nikolaos Kotzias (UPDATED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 31--LETTER UPDATED WITH NEW SIGNATORIES

Philosopher Alexander Nehamas (Princeton) wrote a useful account last year of what has transpired.  In the United States, this libel action by a public official would have been tossed immediately; but Greek law is at another extreme, and, together with corrupt courts, they have supported the fascist Kotzias's case.  (Even under Greek law, as best as I can understand it, Nehamas is right:  Kotzias was not accused of being a Nazi, although he's certainly a fascist!  Under official EU principles regarding freedom of expression, this guy should have no case.)

The ARB asked me to share this letter to the European Union--signed by myself and many academics internationally--about this attack on fundamental free expression rights the EU supposedly protects:   Download ARB letter current february 5

Folks at the ARB wrote to me:

Please note that the list of signatories is not complete and that we are still in the process of collecting signatures. The full list will be held and updated regularly on the website of the Athens Review (www.athensreviewofbooks.com). Whoever wants to add their signature they can email their name and affiliation to info@athensreviewofbooks.com until the end of February when the letter will be sent officially to Presidents Tusk and Juncker.

We lodged an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (which incidentally has on two prior occasions condemned Greece in similar cases involving violation of freedom of speech following appeals by its editor-in-chief). However the case will be heard in 2020 and so the journal will be shut down before the hearing and that is why we are trying to make our case known and bring it before the European parliament for discussion. 

The handling of our case has been sharply criticised by renowned professors and distinguished legal scholars. It is referenced in the Reporters without Borders’ 2017 annual report for Greece as well as in statements by the Association of European Journalists. In addition, four different MEPs from different political parties have submitted questions to the European Commission.

Freedom of the press and democracy in Greece are in jeopardy, in fact, Greece tops the list of European countries found guilty by the ECHR in cases concerning freedom of speech and violation of Article 10 of the Treaty of Rome. We ask that Greece finally respects the rule of law and EU Human Rights law. Our case shows is that the fight is never over and that for evil to triumph, all it takes is for good men to do nothing. This is not a struggle to merely defend ourselves; it is about defending principles and freedoms which we strongly believe are precious to all.

I have asked the ARB editors about whether they can set up a fund to which readers can contribute in support.  I will post more information about this as it becomes available.