Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

In Memoriam: Bob Moses (1935-2021)

One of the great figures of the Civil Rights movement, a man of extraordinary courage and moral clarity, Moses had studied philosophy as an undergraduate and graduate student, before more pressing matters commanded his attention.   The NYT obituary is here.  Philosopher Michael Wedin (emeritus, UC Davis), who wrote me last night about his passing, kindly gave permission to share his remembrance:

Just to let you know that Bob Moses has died. It was the greatest privilege of my life to work with him in the summer of 1964 in Mississippi. The news has hit me hard, somehow I expected him to live forever. In the spring of 1964 we organized the "West Coast Civil Rights Conference" at Stanford -- sole purposes were to raise money for and recruit volunteers for the Mississippi summer project. We got MLK to keynote the thing and convinced Bob to come out, which he did by car with four of his field workers. King was the big name but the real draw was Bob Moses. Not prone to King's style of elevated rhetoric, Bob really just held a conversation with the audience. But it was riveting--five hundred in the auditorium and you could hear a pin drop. Did not talk much philosophy with him, but he did say he'd been working on Wittgenstein before he left Harvard for Mississippi. There we were involved in getting a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation selected to challenge the regular group and the national meeting. Lost track of him after Mississippi but years later was informed by Hilary Putnam that he'd returned to Harvard to complete his Ph. D. and that Quine has given him all of his correspondence with Carnap. Won't even besgin to talk about his extraordinary work in the south.

The actual left in America has always supported robust civil liberties...

...unlike the New Infantilist left in the universities, on social media today, and even in some of the leftist media.  This piece is a useful reminder; an excerpt:

The founders of Dissent were fiercely anticommunist, yet you’ll find them repeatedly, heatedly, defending the free speech rights of Stalinists.

I’ll cite just one example. In an article about the state of liberalism in 1955, Irving Howe criticized Americans for Democratic Action for passing a resolution that supported “the right to advocate unpopular political proposals.” Why would Howe have objected to this? He objected because the ADA had changed the wording of a previous draft, which supported “the right to advocate unpopular political proposals, including communist ideas.” They’d taken out “including communist ideas.” In other words, he was attacking them for the failure to explicitly affirm the free speech rights of communists.

The early editors of Dissent, defending the free expression rights of a political group they loathed and feared, were in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg, who said, “Freedom is always and exclusively the freedom of the one who thinks differently . . . all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political life depends on it"....

Contemporary skepticism about the idea of free expression seems to rest on two pillars.

 

Adolph Reed on Robin DiAngelo and the political economy of "race" politics

Amusing interview; an excerpt:

Reed:  One of the interesting things I think that we’ve experienced over the last half century or so, and our reasons for this too and get into maybe, or maybe not maybe later, that racism as a category has expanded. The currency of what counts as racism has inflated like the Deutschmark in the late 1920s. So anything can be racist, and racism becomes the sole explanation, or sole explanatory category, for making sense of any inequality or seemingly inappropriate or unjustifiable inequality that involves black people or other non whites in any way....

Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking inequality and inequality, even those inequalities that appear or the manifest themselves as racial disparities. Because the struggle against racism is exactly parallel to the struggle against terrorism… It can go on forever, because the enemy is an abstraction that you can define however you want to define it, at the moment that you wanted to find it....

The inflation of trauma

A former student, Mark Engleson, who is autistic, writes:

I recently got embroiled in a bit of go-round on Twitter (do not recommend). The background: the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts uses shock collars on autistic children to make them more compliant. The FDA tried to ban this use of the device, and a federal court threw it out.

On Twitter, someone posted a poll asking fellow autistics how traumatized they were by the knowledge that this is happening. I objected that this is a misunderstanding of trauma: the trauma here is clearly the children being shocked, not other people hearing about it. 

The problem with this language and this line of thought is that some went so far as to say that the problem with this whole situation is how it makes other autistics feel. Now, this situation disturbs me, but that's not why it's wrong: it's wrong because they're using shock collars on children. My feelings have nothing to do with it; if no one knew this was going on, it would still be horrific.

Alex Berenson, the world's dumbest journalist, redux

A good overview of the serial misinformation emanating from this malevolent buffoon, whom we've noted before.   Karl Kraus:  "No ideas the ability to express them:  that's a journalist!"

"The Edge of Democracy"

I recommend this Netflix documentary about the assault on democracy in the wake of Lula's social democratic revolution in Brazil, an assault that led to the rise of the fascist Bolsonaro.  I've been to Brazil several times, and have many academic friends there, so have followed these matters for awhile.  This documentary taught me a lot more.

Evanston public school teacher sues school district for race discrimination based on its curriculum and "anti-racist" [sic] training

A friend who is a Chicago lawyer sent me the complaint. Evanston is the town just north of Chicago, where Northwestern University is located.  The "training" and "teaching materials" described in this complaint are rather insane, and consistently confuse race with class in a way that will miseducate the students.  It is less clear to me how precisely the plaintiff has been injured, although the "hostile environment" claim may be the strongest.  It will be interesting to see what the courts do with this.

(As an aside:  while very little of the insane materials and training described in the complaint have anything to do with Critical Race Theory [CRT] as it evolved in Amercian law schools in the 1980s and 1990s, the connection to the hucksters Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi is clearer.  I'll say a bit more about CRT next week.)

Right-wing cancel culture watch: Scientific American removes pro-Palestinian opinion piece...

...by doctors lamenting the medical crisis wrought by the most recent Israeli bombardment of Gaza.  Suppression of speech critical of Israel and in support of the Palestinians has been the one consistent thread in "cancel culture" for decades now (recall Steven Salaita, Norman Finkelstein, etc.).  Scientific American has disgraced itself.

(Thanks to Fábio Shecaira for the pointer.)

The indictment of Trump Org CFO is not about "fringe benefits," but criminal "fraud"

An illuminating breakdown of how serious the allegations are by tax expert Daniel Shaviro (NYU).

Happy July 4th to my American readers!

Celebrate freedom, burn the flag.

The U.S. is a "young," not an "old," democracy

Apartheid was only dismantled in the U.S. a half-century ago, after all:

We sometimes brag that we are the world’s oldest democracy, and that is true enough in a technical sense. But if you use a more modern definition of democracy, one that includes voting rights for women and minorities as a prerequisite, then we are one of the world’s younger democracies.

“For me, as a democracy scholar, it’s ridiculous to say America is the oldest democracy in the world,” Lindberg said. “The U.S. did not become a democracy until at least after the civil rights movement in the ’60s. In that sense, it’s kind of a new democracy, like Portugal or Spain"....

Amartya Sen on India and the British Empire...

...in The Guardian.

Mari Mikkola (Amsterdam) talks about hate speech and pornography...

...at the Brain in a Vat podcast.

"Gender is not a spectrum"

Philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper (Warwick) comments.

Female law student in Scotland "investigated" by her university but then cleared...

...for (you probably guessed) expressing views about women.

(Thanks to Cora Diamond for the pointer.)

Egalitarianism, the mongoose way

Parents don't know which offspring are theirs.

(Thanks to Joshua Selby for the pointer.)

Anti-"Anti-Racism"

Some interesting material in this article; an excerpt:

Nesrine Malik, a columnist for the Guardian, calls much of the anti-racist movement “a kind of group narcissism … that promotes this notion that identity politics is about easing the passage of people of color in elite spaces. … It also promotes a view that reform is via individual guilt and correction, and distracts from the systemic ways that identity politics is being nurtured by the media and politicians.” The Columbia scholar John McWhorter, a linguist well-positioned to make sense of what is largely a rhetorical movement, calls anti-racism a “religion,” complete with the power to excommunicate those who fail to speak in canonical ways. But anti-racism is more than a religion; it has had real and dispiriting political consequences. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has noted, it arguably helped defeat the Bernie Sanders brand of social-democratic populism in the battle to define the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Will Ethel Rosenberg finally be exonerated?

An interesting essay about a new book about a horrible miscarriage of justice.  ("Miscarriage of justice" may be too tepid a description, given the involvement of the criminal Roy Cohn.)

QAnon and survey responses

A props the QAnon craziness, a couple of readers point out that some number of survey respondents (maybe 4% on average?) are either inattentive to the questions being asked or simply mischievous.  That's worth remembering, but hardly reassuring given that the survey found one in four Republicans believed in a batshit crazy conspiracy theory:  if we discount the clueless and the pranksters, that still gets us 1 in 5 believing a batshit crazy conspiracy theory!  So America is still doomed!

If only there were a theory that could explain why both political parties and the media complain more about shortages of cheap labor than about poverty and bad working conditions

It's a damned mystery, that's for sure:

Reports that low-wage employers were having trouble filling open jobs sent Republican policymakers into a tizzy and led at least 25 Republican governors — and one Democratic governor — to announce plans to cut off expanded unemployment benefits early. Chipotle said that it would increase prices by about 4 percent to cover the cost of higher wages, prompting the National Republican Congressional Committee to issue a blistering response: “Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage, and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill.” The Trumpist outlet The Federalist complained, “Restaurants have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work.”

OUP will no longer print its own books...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 10:  UPDATED

...after more than 500 years of printing!

UPDATE:   Rob Tempio, the philosopher editor at PUP, points out to me that the printing press being closed only produced booklets, flyers, brochures, newsletters, etc., not OUP monographs.

Philosophy as the "handmaiden of the human resources" department

Amusingly apt description of this, in an essay by philosopher Justin E.H. Smith (Paris 7) mostly concerned with literature.

Interesting UK decision under their Equality Act...

...which protects people from being discriminated against in employment for their "religious and philosophical beliefs"--in this case, beliefs in some tenets of gender critical feminism.  This is a much stronger employment protection than American workers enjoy.

(Thanks to James Ladyman for the pointer.)

Interesting autobiographical interview with Amartya Sen...

...at the Harvard Gazette.

A Marxist movement within the Democratic Socialists of America

Hard to quarrel with this:

[T]he DSA is far from a mass workers’ party: our membership is dominated by the professional-managerial stratum, academics, and college-educated millennials. In too many chapters, this skewed class composition has hardened into an impenetrable middle-class subculture that reproduces the pathology and dysfunction of campus activism. The result is an aesthetically radical liberal politics masquerading as socialism, where moralism displaces materialism, prefigurative politics displaces serious organizing, and an insular scene politics displaces class solidarity.

This must change. Socialism isn’t liberalism covered in red paint and roses. It isn’t a lifestyle, a subculture, a church, a social club, or a vehicle for career advancement. Socialism is about taking our wealth and power back from the capitalist class and giving it to those who created it. And to accomplish that, we need a true mass party where America’s diverse working class will feel at home....

Martha Nussbaum talks about sexual harassment, the #MeToo movement, and her recent book...

...at The New Yorker.

Attacking injured veterans of imperial wars of aggression...because they're white

This is appropriately scathing, and also amusingly written.  An excerpt:

I would not think that I would still have the capacity to be offended, after all these years of being desensitized, but Chris Lehmann has proven me wrong. Lehmann wrote something of such special cruelty that today I am moved to write in anger.

I was initially surprised that this piece had not kicked up a lot of outrage, but then I remembered that it was published in The New Republic and so no one has actually seen it. TNR, a legacy magazine if ever one deserved the name, has stumbled around like Mr. Magoo for two decades, trying to recapture past glories like shaming “welfare mothers” by re-strategizing and re-conceptualizing and re-branding and bringing in one talentless asshole after another to pilot the listless ship. TNR long ago achieved that status of being a publication that exists for no other reason than to keep Managing Editors and Senior Content Directors puttering along, a money pit from which new leadership can extract some expense-account lunches before passing it along to the next rube with a desire to be taken seriously by the worst people alive. At least there’s a kind of value in that, I guess; certainly no one is reading it. The last piece in The New Republic that mattered was, uh. Hmmm. Gawker gets more buzz than TNR and it was shut down five years ago. But Lehmann’s piece requires attention. True moral poverty of this type deserves to be recognized.

The offending piece is a review of a book called How White Men Won the Culture Wars by someone called Joseph Darda, a minor academic who I must congratulate for making such a naked stab for relevance with his book and its title. Its argument, according to Lehmann, is that the anguished fight for recognition, respect, medical treatment, and mental health care waged by veterans coming home from the war in Vietnam was, in fact, simply white male grievance politics. Legless 23 year olds who had been put through a meat grinder by a rapacious and indifferent military machine were, to Lehmann and Darda, no different from the angry white guys who own Ford dealerships that powered Donald Trump’s campaign. Their demands for recognition and access to basic social services can now be safely derided as the special pleading of the privileged; you know, the privilege of being crippled both literally and metaphorically. I urge you to read Lehmann’s piece to see how unbroken and shameless his contempt for these wounded and hopeless victims of empire really is. There is no “to be sure” paragraph here. Lehmann and Darda are committed to the bit.

SAT scores and socioeconomic class

MOVING TO FRONT (ORIGINALLY POSTED MAY 27)--AN INFORMATIVE DISCUSSION, BELOW

I do not know this literature, but this author claims that SAT together with GPA is a very good predictor of college performance, and that the impact of socioeconomic status on SAT scores is minimal.  Is he correct?  Is he correctly representing the literature?  I'd be interested to hear from readers more knowledgeable about these topics.

UPDATE:  There's a useful summary of the state of the discussion in comment #26, below, by philospoher Chandra Sripada (Michigan).

The *other* Nuremberg trials...

...and the failure to prosecute most of the German business leaders who aided and profited from the Nazis.

How a gay philosopher's book ended up changing Canada's law on the importation of pornography

An interesting tale.

(Thanks to Christopher Morris for the pointer.)

Laws purporting to ban teaching of "Critical Race Theory" are plainly unconstitutional

A leading Firsts Amendment scholar explains.  (I do laugh when the know-nothings on the right associate CRT with Marxism:  I wish it were true, but it's the opposite.)

Of course, the fascists proposing this legislation don't care that it's unconstitutional!

A great Bob Dylan story

Dylan turned 80 yesterday.  This delightful story is courtesy of my old friend Tommy Williams, the rock musician whom I've mentioned before.  He posted it on FB and gave permission to share it here:

I was 9 and in the 4th grade [this would be the early 1970s]. Our local paper, Newsday, had a TV Guide magazine in the Sunday edition with a Q&A column ("How do I write to Victoria Principal?" etc) in it. I wrote in asking for an address to write to Bob. They didn't print it, but sent me a postcard with a P.O. Box address in New York City. I proceeded to write a very long letter (on that no-line yellow paper they give you in grade school, with bits of wood still in it) with a lot of flowery verbiage, which would definitely be embarrassing today. I don't remember the whole thing, but I did say something like "what's the gadget that holds the harmonica? I made one from a coat hanger (found out years later that everyone had done that), but is that something you can buy at a store, or does that have to be custom-made by somebody?" I knew nothing. I sent the letter off, and being 9, promptly forgot about it.

A month or so later, a big yellow envelope arrived in the mail. Inside - oh, my God. An Elton Harmonica Holder, which in those days came in a shiny white box. On the front, in ball-point pen: "Wear this in good health - Bob Dylan." Talk about blowing a kid's mind - I still can't find the right words for it.

 

I used it once, then put it back in the box for safekeeping and bought another to actually USE (now that I knew you could buy them; I've burned through a few dozen in the years since). I kept it in storage for decades, and then my wife thoughtfully got an appropriate shadowbox frame and mounted it for me. It's now (as of today, Bob's 80th birthday) on the wall in our living room - amongst some wall-mounted guitars, of course.

 

Not many people are lucky enough to have something like that happen, but I've been massively lucky all my life, and I'm grateful for it all. There's a postscript, by the way...

 

How to include transgender athletes in competitive sports

A proposal from philosopher Chris Suprenant (New Orleans).

The use-mention distinction and the N-word

Philosopher Gerald Dworkin comments.

The Canadian "eh" and other bits of linguistic diversity

An informative and amusing website from Yale.

Shostakovich and his music in Leningrad during WWII

Philosopher Alex Miller (Otago) tells the story.

"Indigenous science" is bad science

That's pretty clear; calling it pseudoscience presupposes a solution to the demarcation problem, which no one has.

(Thanks to Mike G. for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  If you're coming here from Justin Smith's aggressively dishonest characterization of this post and Professor Pigliucci's critique of including "indigenous science" in the Canadian science curriculum, do take the time to follow the link, above, and read what Pigliucci actually had to say--Professor Smith obviously didn't.

Philosopher Jane O'Grady reviews Kathleen Stock's new book...

....at The Telegraph (you may need to register for a free trial).

UPDATE:   The full text of the review is available at this Internet chat forum.  (Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.) (Link now fixed.)

Changes in the Zeitgeist

Not sure if "everyone" knew these, but philosopher Dan Kaufman (Missouri State) is definitely on to something interesting about the evolution (or devolution) of cultural norms (in part due to the Internet).  As I'm also a New Yorker, I can confirm that a lot of these would have been widely shared norms and expectations of the 1970s and 80s (some do seem to me to capture more the kind of ideological compromises stressed middle class existence requires).  Some norms do change, for the better, but certainly not all.  Here's a few notable ones that particularly resonated with me:

[4] Confronting strangers with a raftload of stipulations as to how they must engage with you assumes that they care to engage with you in the first place, which may be untrue. And if they do, they probably will cease wanting to, unless you bring something so extraordinary to the table that it justifies all the trouble....

[15] Offense, insult, and hurt feelings are not particularly important, other than to oneself and to one’s intimates. This does not mean that you should go out of your way to offend others but rather that if you are offended, you shouldn’t be surprised if those outside your friends-and-family circle aren’t inclined to make a federal case out of it.

[16] You don’t accost random strangers on the street and unload your personal meshugas on them, because it’s not their business and they don’t give a damn. Nothing about these reasons fails to apply when you replace ‘street’ with ‘internet’.

[17] Scores of millions of people, most of whom neither know nor live near one another cannot constitute a “community"....

[22] The most virtuous people are the quietest about it. The least are the loudest.

[23] Terrible people have produced and continue to produce great works of art and popular culture, the value of which persists, regardless of the character or conduct of their creators.

Cancel culture watch, Human Rights Watch edition

A lawyer, discussing legal regulation of hate speech, did nothing wrong by mentioning the N-word, not using it.  Yet she's still been fired by a group that is supposed to protect human rights, which presumably includes rights of expression.  She didn't engage in hate speech, she was talking about hate speech.  In the current insane environment, even I'm not going to mention the actual N-word (I would of course never use it).

ADDENDUM:   A statement from the fired lawyer's attorney (sadly, having lost her job, she's now apologizing, despite having done nothing wrong):

Ms. PoKempner has dedicated her entire career to the protection of human rights. She used the n-word while teaching a class, solely for pedagogical purposes. She was providing a verbatim retelling of an incident involving the deposition of a KKK witness—by the Southern Poverty Law Center—that she had witnessed as a young legal intern. In that story, a lawyer used the word in questioning a KKK witness, to provoke a like response from the witness and get it on the record, which was important to winning the case. Her pedagogical purpose was to inspire a discussion of whether it is ever appropriate to use such language for the purpose of eliciting hate speech, even for the goal of exposing and combating racism. Following the telling, she told the students that when she heard this over 30 years ago that it shocked her. Unfortunately, she did not consider the shock her students would feel and how this stifled the very discussion she sought to generate. She deeply regrets the impact of her words on students and apologized to them repeatedly in class for her insensitivity, and continues to regret her language.”

On the etymology of the "N-word"

This is fascinating and informative.

Dembroff v. Singer

The Twitter smear merchants have been working overtime since The New Yorker interview with Peter Singer, but this exchange is really something:

The anecdote sounds aprocryphal to me, inconsistent with everything I've heard about Peter Singer.  (This is a more likely explanation.)  I have no shortage of harsh criticisms of Peter Singer's work (for example), but what is wrong with people that they stoop to repeating alleged anecdotes to impugn his character?  (Even if it were true, what is the point of repeating it?)   It really is one of the sicker aspects of Twitter.

UPDATE:  A philosopher elsewhere writes:

The Dembroff story about Peter Singer strikes me as very likely to reflect a misinterpretation.  In my times visiting at Princeton, I've been in a lot of seminars with Peter, and I never saw him playing anything like the "I'm extremely famous" card. On the contrary, he was unfailingly self-effacing, wryly funny, constructive, and very good at philosophy; in short, a model citizen.  I'm sure lots of people who have been around the Values Center can confirm this. 

On the Blake Bailey biography of Philip Roth

This is the best piece I've seen about this controversy, by Katha Pollitt at The Nation.

Peter Singer interviewed...

...in The New Yorker.  Some interesting bits, although I was sorry to see Professor Singer took the bait on this absurd question:

A lot of your works cite white male academics who, for lack of a better phrase, take up a lot of space in intellectual conversations: Joshua Greene, Steven Pinker, Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Sandel, Benedict Anderson, John Rawls, to name a few. Because so much of your work is fundamentally about equity, I wonder if that is something that’s on your radar.

That’s the manner in which I was educated, I suppose, and which still is very influential in the ideas that I’m involved with. I’ve certainly worked with a lot of philosophers who are not male, but they have been white generally [then goes on to name some of them from outside the Anglophone world].

The correct answer would have been:  "No, it's not on my radar, and it has nothing to do with equity.  My citing more Black writers would not contribute to equity; reparations for the descendants of the victims of slavery and de jure segregation would contribute to equity.   Scholarship is not about equity, it is about engaging evidence and arguments that are relevant and worth engaging.  If you have in mind some evidence and arguments relevant to my work that I have neglected, I would be interested in them, independent of the race or nationality of the authors.  But it is pernicious ideological obfuscation to act like keeping a tally of the race of authors you engage contributes anything to equity or human well-being."

UPDATE:   Something I posted on Facebook in response to a comment from a colleague elsewhere might also be relevant here: 

My position is that racial or demographic equity in citations is not a value in scholarship; truth and knowledge are the only values. If past racism has resulted in neglect of scholars who can contribute to truth and knowledge in a particular domain, then the demand should be to name those scholars so that they can be studied. But equity-qua--demographic-diversity per se is not a scholarly value. It has a stronger claim to be a value in pedagogy, policing, and other contexts of course.

America is doomed, part 411: even David Brooks is noticing!

From a recent NYT column of his:

Since the election, large swaths of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.

The first important survey data to understand this moment is the one pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discussed with my colleague Ezra Klein. When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.

The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”

Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”

The stunning verdict in the killing of George Floyd

When the jury announced they had a verdict just one day after closing arguments, it was clear Officer Chauvin was going to be convicted on at least some of the charges.  But I wouldn't have guessed that he would be convicted on all three charges, including the hardest one to prove, second-degree murder.  The second-degree murder  charge requires proving that Chauvin unintentionally caused Floyd's death while committing felony assault, the latter requiring "intentional infliction of substantial bodily harm."  The prosecutors must have done a very good job to secure a conviction on that charge as well.

Interestingly, during this whole trial, I've not heard of any evidence suggesting that Chauvin's criminal misconduct reflected racial animus.   Shoot me an e-mail if I missed something.

It's certainly a great relief that Chauvin was convicted, and actually encouraging that he was convicted on all three counts.  Let us hope it has a deterrent effect on other police officers.

The crisis of the New York City college prep schools

"Woke capitalism" isn't playing that well with the capitalists who pay 50k and up to send their kids to private high schools in NYC, schools which seem to have fallen through the Kendi-antiracist looking glass.  But the question is why?   The race fixation and posturing doesn't, of course, endanger capitalist relations of production, although I imagine it will endanger the privileges the parents are paying dearly for, as colleges rush to admit more racial minorities and fewer kids from "elitist" institutions.  (This Atlantic article captures the anti-private school Zeitgeist well).  Indeed, when the New York Times, the mouthpiece of the prudent wing of the ruling class in America, publishes an article like this about the invasion of the bastions of ruling class privilege by non-elite students, elite prep schools surely have good reasons to worry.  Their rush to hyper-wokeness is probably an attempt to rebrand the schools so that elite colleges can resume admitting their students in suitably large proportions.

These people are all out of their minds

Female white Yale professor serving on a nearby town council makes a "point of order" while a male Black councilmember is speaking; the latter refers to her as "councilwoman," she demands to be called "Dr."  He declines (rightly so, the title is irrelevant in a democratic body--he's the only sane person in the mix!), she calls him a sexist on her Facebook page.  Now there's a petition denouncing her as a "racist" and demanding her removal from the council.

"Anywhere out of this world," said Baudelaire.

Hope for America?

Mostly, I think America is doomed, but occasionally there is a glimmer of hope:

Only 47 percent of American adults said they were members of a church, mosque or synagogue, according to recently released polling that was conducted by Gallup throughout last year. It marked the first time that a majority of Americans said they were not members of a church, mosque or synagogue since Gallup first started asking Americans about their religious membership in the 1930s....

What’s driving this shift? In part, it’s about people who still identify with a religious tradition opting not to be a member of a particular congregation. Only 60 percent of Americans who consider themselves religious are part of a congregation, compared to 70 percent a decade ago, according to Gallup. But the bigger factor, Gallup said, is the surge of religiously unaffiliated Americans — people who are agnostics, atheists or simply say they are not affiliated with a religious tradition. The rise of this group — sometimes referred to as “nones” because they answer “none” when asked about their faith (and, you know, it’s a play on words) — isn’t new....

Bolsonaro's crime against humanity

What a despicable monster.