Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Another triumph for diversity: Italian fascist set to become Prime Minister is also a woman

It's amazing that the New York Times is so pathologically invested in "diversity" that they can't shake the fixation, even when reporting on a not-so-crypto fascist with an infantile hobbit fixation.  The article is headlined, "Giorgia Meloni Could Be the First Woman to Lead Italy," instead of "First fascist since Mussolini set to lead Italy."  The article continues:

As happy as women’s rights activists are about that fact that a woman could finally run Italy, many wish it was essentially any other woman in Italy....

“It’s not a gain at all and, indeed, a possible setback from the point of view of women’s rights,” said Giorgia Serughetti, who writes about women’s issues and teaches political philosophy at Bicocca University in Milan.

There's no evidence in the article at all that "women's rights activists" are "happy" about Meloni:  the NYT just made that up, projecting their own ideology on to the Italian political landscape.

This really is a new low for "diversity blather."

An essay in the NY Times that uses the idea of "reification" (correctly)

Its general point about the "medicalization" of what are political problems is also correct.  An excerpt:

A crisis that affects mental health is not the same thing as a crisis of mental health. To be sure, symptoms of crisis abound. But in order to come up with effective solutions, we first have to ask: a crisis of what?

Some social scientists have a term — “reification” — for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.” Examples are not scarce.

Things are about to get much worse when it comes to Ukraine

Start with this:

Russia on Tuesday paved the way for the formal annexation of swathes of Ukrainian territory, backing referendum plans in areas of Ukraine its soldiers control in a direct challenge to the West that could sharply escalate the war....

In what appeared to be choreographed requests, Russian-backed officials across 15% of Ukrainian territory - an area about the size of Hungary or Portugal - lined up to request referendums on joining Russia.

The self-styled Donetsk (DPR) and the Luhansk People's Republics (LPR), which Putin recognised as independent just before the invasion, and Russian-installed officials in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions have asked for votes over less than 24 hours.

Luhansk, Donetsk and Kherson officials said the referendums would take place in just days - on Friday Sept. 23 through to Monday Sept. 27. Russia does not fully control any of the four regions, with only around 60% of Donetsk region in Russian hands.

If Moscow formally annexed a vast additional chunk of Ukraine, Putin would essentially be daring the United States and its European allies to risk a direct military confrontation with Russia, the world's biggest nuclear power.

"All this talk about immediate referendums is an absolutely unequivocal ultimatum from Russia to Ukraine and the West," said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik.

Inflation, from the perspective of the working classes

The contrast with mainstream capitalist media coverage is instructive.

New York City these days

MOVING TO FRONT FROM THIS MORNING:  UPDATED (AND COMMENTS OPEN FOR THOSE ALSO FAMILIAR WITH NYC OVER TIME TO SHARE THEIR VIEWS)

Last week I was at the NYU Colloquium in Legal, Social & Political Philosophy presenting work on Marx (that was great, the best intellectual experience I've had in a long time [special thanks to Sam Scheffler and Jeremy Waldron for making it so!]), and as part of the invitation NYU kindly gave us an apartment for the week, which was the first time my wife and I had been in NYC together in quite a number of years (it was also the first time I was there since the pandemic).   Now I was born in Manhattan, and still have distinct traces of the Brooklyn/Manhattan accent I acquired from my father and listening to a lot of Lenny Bruce as a kid, and I later practiced law in NYC and lived there again between 1991-1993 with my wife while finishing my PhD.  So I have warm feelings towards my hometown, although it has changed a lot since the 1960s/early 1970s of my youth.  (Films that give you a feel for the "look" of Manhattan then include Serpico, The 7-Ups, and, most notoriously, Death Wish.)   

As global capital continues its evisceration of the working classes in the U.S....

...approval of labor unions rises to a high not seen since 1965.  Unfortunately, labor union membership today is only 9%, compared to 28% in 1965.   The capitalist class in the U.S. has been quite successful, largely through changes in the law, in suppressing union membership.

"Contemporary race theory" and the question of class versus race

Another interesting piece from Nonsite.org, where Professor Reed frequently publishes as well.  An excerpt:

Because all of these theories take for granted that racism is not only permanent but also the fundamental contradiction of American life, they all proceed from the assumption that racial groups are coherent and discrete entities with easily definable and shared interests. In other words, they conflate racial categories with racial groups and racial groups with political constituencies. Bonilla-Silva’s “structural interpretation” of racism posits that racial groups are “social collectivities” with shared “life chances” that form the basis for their collective “racial interests” (RR 471). One of the foundational concepts in Critical Race Theory, developed by Derrick Bell, is “interest convergence,” which maintains that “the interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will only be accommodated when it converges with the interest of whites.”6

"The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives" by Adolph L. Reed, Jr.

Verso kindly sent me Professor Reed's latest book, which is a very good read and illuminating.  (He discusses some of its themes in this podcast with his son, an historian.)  Reed, born in 1947, grew up in New Orleans during the final years of the Jim Crow era.  One of his aims is to record for posterity the lived experience of that time for one black person, but another is to demonstrate both the class politics of Jim Crow and how class differences among African-Americans affected their experience of the racism of the era.  Here's how Reed sums it up near the end of the book (these excerpts are from pp. 139-140):

The Jim Crow racial order has been vanquished.  That is clearest at the level that defines daily life and aspirations.  Removal of the strictures of official apartheid has radically altered opportunity structures and patterns of work, quality of life, and social relations in small and large ways that aren't readily apparent to those who didn't know the old order.  Working together as equals encourages socializing together, which is also enabled by elimination of the petty apartheid of Jim Crow in public accomodations.  Occasionally, when I notice an interracial group of co-workers or friends out in a restaurant, bar, or the like, I recall how utterly impossible that would have been as late as 1960....

But passage of the old order's segregationist trappings throws into relief the deeper reality that what appeared and was experienced as racial hierarchy was also class hierarchy.  Now blacks occupy positions in the socioeconomic order previously available only to whites, and whites occupy those previously identified with blacks.  And the dynamics of superordination and subordination, patterns of appropriation and distribution, and dominant understandings of which material interests should drive policy remain much as they were.

This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated, and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology.  Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests.  At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it....

More signs of the times: life expectancy falls dramatically in U.S....

...largely because the U.S. was right up there with Brazil and Peru in mishandling the pandemic disaster, aided and abetted of course by one of its two main political parties, the Repugs.  From the NYT report:

The average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021, the sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years and a stark reminder of the toll exacted on the nation by the continuing coronavirus pandemic.

In 2021, the average American could expect to live until the age of 76, federal health researchers reported on Wednesday. The figure represents a loss of almost three years since 2019, when Americans could expect to live, on average, nearly 79 years....

While the pandemic has driven most of the decline in life expectancy, a rise in accidental deaths and drug overdoses also contributed, as did deaths from heart disease, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, the new report found....

Free college causes fascism, the dangers of an "educated proletariat"...

...and other oddities from the early days of the Republican war on higher education (with a focus on Reagan and the University of California system in the 1960s and 1970s).

(Thanks to Joshua Selby for the pointer.)

Adolph Reed: "Black Studies as a Class Project"

The latest from Professor Reed; an excerpt:

Inattentiveness to racial inequality’s embeddedness in capitalist political economy links directly to the fact that antiracist discourse posits “racism”—rather than historically specific political-economic and legal institutions, relations, and practices—as the causal source of (unjust) inequality affecting black people past and present. Racism, however, notwithstanding efforts to represent it as something more concrete via modifiers like “structural” or “systemic,” is an abstract idea, an attitude or belief, and is therefore incapable of causing anything.4 Insofar as the idea is regarded as the motive force determining blacks’ position in society across time and context, persistence of black people’s disproportionate representation among the most vulnerable, marginalized, and impoverished populations today can appear continuous with slavery and Jim Crow. According to that idealist reasoning, which also underlies Afropessimism’s ontological devil theory and is the essence of race reductionism, racism is the cause, rather than the result, of slavery, of the Jim Crow regime, and of contemporary inequality as well.

As usual, the whole essay is worth your time!  I'll also be posting before long about his book The South:  Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, which I also commend to readers.

Pollitt on Rushdie and offending the religious...

...at The Nation; an excerpt:

The idea that religion should be protected from disagreement—that’s the problem. Why should the holdings of any faith be beyond critique, satire, even mockery? Religion is not a hereditary trait. It’s a set of ideas and behaviors and social practices. Those can be changed, and have been repeatedly throughout history. Blasphemy is part of that process, because it encourages questioning and independence of spirit and resistance to obscurantism and unjust authority. We progressives are supposed to take a side. Galileo or the Inquisition? Rushdie or the ayatollahs?

Sociologist Randall Collins on the "big picture"

An interesting and wide-ranging interview about the social and economic developments associated with the period of the "Great Acceleration" (roughly the post-WWII period that has brought about the climate change catastrophe); an excerpt (with some resonaces with this):

[B]efore 1940, high school graduates were a small elite and a sufficient degree for management jobs; as high school became mass rather than elite, in the 1960s the same jobs now required a B.A; by the 1990s, an MBA. The sociological argument had been that mass schooling created social equality; but statistically it became clear that extending the length of schooling continued to give more credentials to the children of educated parents. In my 1979 book, I argued that equality would never be achieved along this path; better to decredentialize by banning credentials in hiring....

Class is not an identity

Instructive discussion by Daniel Burnfin, a recent PhD in Philosophy and German from University of Chicago, with whom I've had the benefit of discussing many issues in Marxist economics over the last couple of years.  An excerpt from the beginning:

Ascriptive identity is a category that names different types of relatively immutable properties of individuals, whom it then groups according to those properties. Ascriptive identity concerns the properties with which individuals identify, ‘as’ which they identify themselves, or as which others identify them. That is, ascriptive identity concerns what individuals consciously think that they ‘are’ or what others think that they ‘are’. It concerns gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and so on. Moreover, ascriptive identity is primarily discursive. And it is the basis for so-called “identity politics”. Many leftists today treat class as though it were one identity among others; as though class politics were a subset of identity politics. For example, the “working class” understood as an identity might designate white, heterosexual male, denim-clad manual laborers, who listen to rock and roll and prefer lite beer. Of course, this is a caricature. But it illustrates the way in which class is distorted beyond recognition when it is understood as though it were an identity.

The Marxian concept of class does not concern the properties of individuals, or what they or others think that they ‘are’. Rather, it classifies individuals according to what they ‘do’ or the functions that they perform in a socio-economic system such as modern capitalism....

Federal judge in Florida enjoins the blatantly unconstitutional "Stop Woke" act

The opinion is here.  Judge Walker was not amused by Gov. Viktor DeSantis's outrageous legislation:

In the popular television series Stranger Things, the “upside down” describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world…..Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down. Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely. But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely

Now, like the heroine in Stranger Things, this Court is once again asked to pull Florida back from the upside down. Before this Court is a motion for a preliminary injunction, asking this Court to enjoin a host of Government officials from enforcing portions of the Individual Freedom Act—a law that prohibits employers from endorsing any of eight concepts during any mandatory employment activity.  Because the challenged provision of the Act is a naked viewpoint-based regulation on speech that does not pass strict scrutiny, Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, ECF No. 18, is GRANTED in part.

(A broader constitutional challenge [on behalf of students and teachers] to the legislation is also being mounted by the  ACLU, since the particular issue here [described in the second paragraph, above] was more narrow.)

UPDATE:  Reader Brock Sides points out to me that footnote 12 in the Court's opinion cites Kant, Nietzsche, and Merleau-Ponty on the question of what "objectivity" is and whether it is possible!

President of American Historical Association criticizes "presentism" in history scholarship and its usurpation by politics...

...singling out, inter alia, the 1619 Project, the misuse of history by conservative Supreme Court justices, ignoring the role of Africans in the slave trade, and a few other items.  He has now issued an absurd and abject apology:

My...Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on how we “do” history in our current politically charged environment. Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association.

Former Delta flight attendant sues after being fired for attacking Trump as a racist on her Facebook page

The amazing part is that she has to sue on grounds of race discrimination, since private employees have no legal protection in the U.S. from being sanctioned by their employer for speech on matters of public interest.  (A public employee has some protection on this score--see the discussion of the Pickering test here.)   Faculty at most private universities are in  the unique position of enjoying the right to speak on matters of public interest without fear of sanction by their employer, thanks to the AAUP definition of academic freedom.  But there is no reason in a supposedly free and democratic society that all employees should not enjoy some version of that right.

The American system of legalized bribery of public officials

Many folks have puzzled about the behavior of the nominally Democratic Senator from Arizona, Kryrsten Synema, but I suspect in most cases the explanation involves payoffs known as campaign contributions.

Philosophers Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse (both Vanderbilt) make it into the Edsall column at the NYT on "belief polarization"

Here.  The usual sources for Edsall are social scientists and sometimes law professors.

The political ads in the Kansas abortion referendum

They're good ads, and other states and politicians should learn from them.

Two observations about yesterday's "midterm" elections in the U.S.

Abortion will be a winning issue for Democrats in the fall, thanks to the super-legislature's annihilation of the right.  Kansas, an extremely "conservative" (read:  religious reactionary) state, nonetheless voted by a lopdsided margin in favor of abortion rights. 

Meanwhile, Arizona Republicans nominated a fascist in-all-but-name for the Senate contest against the incumbent Democrat.   This little fascist is a protege of the oligarch Peter Thiel, whose contempt for democratic and liberal values is quite open.

Modern mysteries: "Why" would a tech billionaire (Larry Ellison) become a leading donor to the Republican Party?

Utterly mysterious that someone fabulously rich would align themselves with the imprudent wing of the ruling class party.   What a puzzle.   Maybe Marcuse could help?

Reed on Black Lives Matter

Here; bracing, no-nonsense stuff as usual.  An excerpt:

There never was a coherent politics there; nor was there any objective reason to assume there could be—especially considering that it was always a wan replay of Black Power in its faith that a generic slogan and some, often Potemkin, street action could generate a mass movement, and with what agenda exactly? To be sure, BLM helped to focus public attention onto police brutality and killings of black people, but no broader left politics necessarily follows from that. And to the extent that BLM projects and insists on a race-reductionist account of that injustice, its critique does as much to obscure the systemic foundations of the police behavior as it does to illuminate the behavior itself. Moreover, BLM, and contemporary antiracist politics in general, was always ripe for articulation toward entrepreneurialism, etc., not least because the personalities most visibly associated with it were careerist race ventriloquists and corporate media operatives. Did you see Van Jones collapsing with tears of joy after Jeff Bezos gave him $100 million? Or Kimberlé Crenshaw’s declaration, in yet another attack on Sanders, that “every corporation worth its salt” had done more to support antiracist causes than the Democrats or the left?...

Ireland's experience with a constitutional abortion ban

Interesting piece at NYRB (behind their paywall, however); an excerpt:

In 1985, after the Eighth Amendment [banning abortion] had passed, 3,888 Irish women were recorded as having abortions in Britain. By 1991 the number was 4,154; by 2001 it was 6,673. The numbers began to diminish somewhat thereafter, but only because Irish women were finding ways to procure abortion pills without leaving the country. If the purpose of abortion bans is to actually reduce the rate at which women terminate pregnancies, the Irish experience shows how utterly ineffectual they are. Some poor, vulnerable, or very young women and girls can be forced to carry babies they do not want, but a policy that depends for its success on female impoverishment and powerlessness is not easy to sustain in an open society.

Fetterman, the Democrat for Senate in Pennsylvania

You have to like a candidate whose "first" issue is a pro-union message.   Fetterman is basically a social democrat, like Bernie Sanders.  Fortunately, he's younger than Bernie, and he is also very social media savvy.  He's also very down to earth, which probably has something to do with how this unconvential politician made it to Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania. He's also tall, which would make him the perfect Democrat to go up against Trump in 2024 (seriously, don't underestimate the pure impact of physicality, of a Democrat towering over Trump, and calling him on his non-stop bullshit).  I'm hopeful he will be the next Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania and the Democratic nominee in 2024.

(His Twitter feed and ridicule of his ridiculous opponent Dr. Oz is very amusing too.)

Another triumph for diversity: 4 of the 5 leaders of the major corporations at the center of America's military-industrial complex...

...are women.  What a relief!

On growing up in communist Albania, and the aftermath

Lea Ypi (LSE) is interviewed about her recent book.

Pebbles can make landslides

Nice reflections from Robert Paul Wolff on his life and activism.

More signs of the times: actual left policy analyst leaves Center for American Progress for AEI...

...because the Center for American Progress is suffering from neoliberal wokeness (much like the academy in this regard, and recall this and also this):

“My perspective is, the single most important thing to focus on in the social system is the economic system,” he tells me. “It’s class"....

To hear Teixeira tell it, CAP, and the rest of Washington’s institution-based left, stopped being a place where he could do the work he wanted. The reason, he says, is that the relentless focus on race, gender, and identity in historically liberal foundations and think tanks has made it hard to do work that looks at society through other prisms. It also makes people nervous about projects that could be accused of giving short shrift to anti-racism efforts.

“I would say that anybody who has a fundamentally class-oriented perspective, who thinks that’s a more important lens and doesn’t assume that any disparity is automatically a lens of racism or sexism or what have you … I think that perspective is not congenial in most left institutions,” he says....

 

Ivana Trump (the monster child's first wife) has died, and Sarah Palin was a fan...

...back in 1996!   This article (as far as I can tell it is genuine) has been circulating on social media.

On living in the midst of "gun culture"...

...in this case in Kentucky.  Quite remarkable.  (It may be behind the Washington Post firewall, however.)

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder

Many readers skeptical of the realist interpretation of events in Ukraine (which I have emphasized, since they are the correct ones, as they tend to be everywhere) have pointed me to the writings of Snyder, an historian of Central and Eastern Europe at Yale.  His writings have mostly struck me as naive (treating every bit of Russian domestic propaganda literally) and moralistic psychologizing (Putin is an evil man influenced by evil people!).  Dr. Roger Albin, a longtime reader, called my attention to this striking review of Snyder's Bloodlands by Richard Evans, the Cambridge historian:

The fundamental reason…for the book’s failure to give an adequate account of the genesis of the Final Solution, is that Snyder isn’t seriously interested in explaining anything. What he really wants to do is to tell us about the sufferings of the people who lived in the area he knows most about. Assuming we know nothing about any of this, he bludgeons us with facts and figures about atrocities and mass murders until we’re reeling from it all…

Equally anonymous [as the victims] are the men who planned and executed the atrocities. Snyder shows no interest in their character or motivation, in what turned them into torturers and killers. Nor does he have much to say about ideology, despite the fact that this was the driving force of mass murder in both the Nazi and Soviet cases. And the book gives us no sense at all of the ‘bloodlands’ as a region; its physical, social and cultural features are nowhere described; it too has no real identity here. That’s because it’s an entirely artificial construct – a label for the location of mass murder, nothing more.

Los Angeles returns beachfront property to descendents of Black family from whom it was stolen a century earlier

Under capitalism, this is exactly what compensatory justice demands.  Affirmative action, in its original conception was also a version of this--although not as precise in identifying the injured parties--until the super-legislature turned it into diversity blather in 1978.  Next year, the super-legislature will also put the "diversity" rationale to rest.

"The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED WITH AN INTERESTING RESPONSE

The EUI has made available a video of a recent lecture by John Mearsheimer (Chicago), which is a good antidote to the hysterical and moralizing nonsense that dominates American and much Western coverage of and commentary on the Russian war of aggression, even that by some allegedly informed academics.

UPDATE:  Professor Mearsheimer kindly gave permission to share the text of his talk:   Download Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis.National Interest

ANOTHER:  A well-informed response from a longtime reader:

I think Mearsheimer makes some misleading claims in the speech you shared on your blog. In general, I appreciate Mearsheimer’s perspective and critique of US policy, but he overstates his case. 

The judge who presided over a successful Establishment Clause challenge to an attempt to insert "intelligent design" creationism into a public school curriculum...

...comments on the super-legislatures latest evisceration of the increasingly attenuated "separation" between church and state.

(Thanks to Glenn Branch for the pointer.)

The super-legislature's power grab in the case of environmental law

An informative analysis by a longtime Washington, D.C. lawyer.

The latest reminder that the U.S. is a barbaric nation

The massacre of innocents near Chicago.

The super-legislature's mischief this year went beyond abortion, gun control, and religion and the public sphere

Jason Steed, an appellate lawyer in Texas (and former student of mine from my time at the University of Texas at Austin), has a striking thread on Twitter compiling all the bad things the court did.

"Constitutional Law, Moral Judgment, and the Supreme Court as Super-Legislature" (2015)

Recent events are making this assessment ever more relevant, sad to say.

Life in Kyiv during wartime

Philosopher Aaron Wendland reports on his impressions.

A comment on the current pathology of the U.S. legal system

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 25, SINCE BOTH BITS OF MISCHIEF HAVE COME TO PASS--ON THE ROAD, RIGHT NOW, SO DON'T HAVE TIME TO WRITE MORE

Very soon, the super-legislature of the United States is likely to decide that there is no constitutional right to abortion, and may also loosen existing gun regulations even further.   When an earlier super-legislature, the Warren Court of the 1950s and 1960s, made decisions, they mostly made life better in the benighted states of America--and they were also more in sync with prevailing political opinion.   The current incarnation of the super-legislature, dominated as it is by religious reactionaries, is poised to make life much worse.

All of this results, in the U.S., from the doctrine of "judicial supremacy" in matters of constitutional law:  the Supreme Court gets to say what the Constitution means, and all other political branches must defer.  (This has no basis in the Constitution, it is purely a matter of convention.)  This is certainly one model, but it is not the only one:  in the UK,  Parliament is supreme and the Supreme Court gets to advise Parliament that laws seem to be unconstitutional, but the Court can not strike them down.

Meet Kelley Watt of Tulsa, Oklahoma...

...a damaged human being who now damages others.

UPDATE:  It  turns out Ms.Watt has done work with James Fetzer, a notorious conspiracy theorist who lost a defamation action brought by a parent of the one of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting.  (Thanks to Cora Diamond for the pointer.)

Donald Trump is one of the worst human beings alive, but it's not simple to prosecute him for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election

This short essay by Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith gives a good explanation of why the decision to prosecute Trump is so fraught, contrary to various traditional and social media blowhards.

On "left" and "right" neoliberalism and the diversity industry

An interview with Walter Benn Michaels at Jacobin from 2011, but still timely; some excerpts:

The differentiation between left and right neoliberalism doesn’t really undermine the way it which it is deeply unified in its commitment to competitive markets and to the state’s role in maintaining competitive markets. For me the distinction is that “left neoliberals” are people who don’t understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things.

One of the first major works of neoliberal economics by an American is Becker’s [The] Economics of Discrimination, which is designed precisely to show that in competitive economies you can’t afford to discriminate....

Millenial narcissism, redux: "overly sensitive, overly fragile, and no sense of priorities" and "Democracy dies in dumbness"

Bill Maher's pretty funny (and typically off color) take on the Felicia Sonmez fiasco at the Washington Post:

 

Double jeopardy, again

A propos this, SCOTUS has just held that:  "The Double Jeopardy Clause does not bar successive prosecutions of distinct offenses arising from a single act, even if a single sovereign prosecutes them."  And they're talking about the state, of course, not a private university!

"Identity politics" neoliberalism meets millenial narcissism

Many readers will have heard the story of the ex-Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez (age 39), who called out a colleague for retweeting a stupid sexist "joke" (it wasn't even funny)--the colleague Dave Weigel was then suspended for a month without pay even though he immediately deleted the tweet and apologized!--and then went on a Twitter jihad about her colleagues who didn't support her adequately and, of course, her feelings.  Glenn Greenwald, himself a world-class narcissist (who at least sometimes can focus on the issues), did peg this whole display correctly:

Sentience isn't conversation

Here's one takedown of the latest artificial intelligence fantasy, and a more succinct one from Ned Block (NYU) on Twitter:

Reading the whole Second Amendment, including the part about the "security of a Free State"

Law professor Thomas Crocker (South Carolina) comments.

Northwestern's English department lacks faculty expertise to offer survey courses in English and American literature

This is bizarre:

Stern said the department’s two introductory survey courses in English and American literature did not make use of its faculty’s expertise, as few professors could teach these courses.

It is an English Department after all.  I think it is wonderful to study other literary traditions, since they are all  beautiful, and great fiction always exposes people--including self-deceived moral posturers--for what they are.  But an English Department that has "few professors who could teach" courses in English and American literature?  Really?