Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

A Hume scholar on Hume's racism

Philosopher Paul Russell (British Columbia/Lund) comments in The Scotsman.  In an e-mail to me (which he kindly gave permission to share), he observed:

Suffice it to say that Hume would have laughed at the resemblance between the sanctimonious moralism of this woke mob (who are tormenting him in death) and the crazy nuttiness of the Christian fanatics (who tormented him when he was alive) - they are very similar psychological types.

ADDENDUM:  And here's the petition that started it all.  The original proposal was to rename the tower after Julius Nyerere, but that didn't last long, as the petition organizer quickly did a mea culpa:

A previous iteration of this petition campaigned for the name to be changed to Julius Nyerere Tower. It has been brought to my attention by multiple students that Nyerere was harmful in his own ways, both through his ties to dictatorship and through his homophobia. This petition now only campaigns for the renaming of David Hume Tower. Thank you so much to the students who contacted me to educate me. I sincerely apologize for any harm I have caused.

Relax, you didn't cause any "harm", except ultimately to the reputation of the University of Edinburgh.

 

A sobering account of the nightmare that will begin on November 3 in the U.S....

...unless it's a Democratic landslide.

ADDENDUM:  What will bring any crisis to an end is that when the economic and market turmoil becomes too great, a message that will be communicated by members of the ruling class to their lackeys in the Senate and Congress--at that point, the Republicans will stop supporting Trump in his bid to hang on (assuming, of course, that it's a Biden victory, as expected).

What is court packing?

Since my e-mail "interview" with NPR is showing up in lots of stories, let me say a bit more.

"Court packing" is typically used to refer to FDR's proposal in the 1930s to expand the size of the Supreme Court, which had been holding New Deal legislation unconstitutional.  The idea was that FDR would add justices sympatico to the New Deal, and thus change the political leanings of the Court that would, in turn, influence its constitutional decisions.

FDR's proposed method of court packing was to expand the court, which would change a century-old norm governing the court's composition.  But the essence of court packing is not expanding the size of the court, it is changing the norms governing Supreme Court appointments for partisan ends:  you can do that by expanding the size of the Court, or you can do it, as Senator McConnell did in 2016, by denying a sitting President even a vote on his nominee for a vacancy on the Court, also a massive violation of an established norm.

Senator McConnell could, perhaps, have been trying to start a new norm, but now it's clear (if anyone had doubts) that was not what he was doing:  he wants to pack the court for partisan ends by adjusting the norms for appointments to suit his political preferences, one rule for 206 when a Democrat is President, another for 2020 when a Republican is President.

A question for readers: from feudalism to capitalism?

I know the standard Marxian story (as told by Marx!), but I'd be grateful for some guidance on literature by historians, Marxists or otherwise, especially about the transitions in very roughly the period of the 16th into the 18th-centuries:   the fall of feudalism and the remnants of the feudal order, and the gradual transitions towards the beginning of the industrial capitalist age.  (I'm less interested in the heyday of feudalism, say the 11th-14th centuries, so happy for references on the passing of that period as well.)   Essays or book recommendations welcome, as well as any comments you might have about the value of the work, the perspective it takes etc.  You should feel free to e-mail me at bleiter@uchicago.edu if you'd rather not post here.  Many thanks!

On the death of Justice Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS)

Her death is deeply unfortunate, not just for her family, but for the polity she served, and on many levels.

To start, it makes clear how perverse "life tenure" on SCOTUS has become when people live so long.  You can protect judges from political influence by giving them term-limited tenures that will extend beyond the terms of political actors:  in the U.S., that would be 15 or 20 years.  Many will complain, not unreasonably, that she should have stepped down during Obama's term.  In retrospect, she should have, but recall the Merrick Garland fiasco.

The real problem, of course, is that SCOTUS is a super-legislature--here is a popular explanation and a more jurisprudential one of this point--and so the prospect that a Democratic member of the super-legislture will be replaced by a Republican one is a serious matter.  The Nazi Senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, will surely try to ram one through, notwithstanding his obviously spurious claim last time around that the election should decide Justice Scalia's replacement (his absurd rationale for why Judge Garland of the DC Circuit, whom Obama nominated, should not be even considered).  If the Republicans succeed in appointing a new justice to the super-legislature, then in the next Democratic Administration (assuming there is one), SCOTUS membership will either be vastly expanded to counteract this reactionary court-packing or its jurisdiction will be stripped so that it becomes a less relevant super-legislature.

After Princeton President does ritual "mea culpa" for "systemic racism," U.S. Education Department announces investigation...

...since federal money, of which Princeton gets plenty, are conditioned on non-discriminatory practices by the receivnig institution.  Unfortuntely, President Eisgruber (who is, himself, a lawyer, but apparently didn't consult any in this instance) in his public statement a few weeks ago made a number of careless (and probably false) claims that, predictably, would invite scrutiny from an Education Department hostile to affirmative action and racial preferences; for example:

We must ask how Princeton can address systemic racism in the world, and we must also ask how to address it within our own community. That is true even though, for at least the past fifty years, this University has committed itself to becoming more inclusive....

Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton as in our society, sometimes by conscious intention but more often through unexamined assumptions and stereotypes, ignorance or insensitivity, and the systemic legacy of past decisions and policies....

[M]y Cabinet colleagues examined systems and practices covering all facets of the University....Much of this work is unglamorous, focused not on flashy symbols but on the nuts and bolts of University management. That is essential: to care about eradicating systemic racism, one has to care about systems...

All these statements are naturally read as saying that the current Princeton University suffers from various forms of racism.  The good, legal news for Princeton is that "systemic racism" isn't a legal category, so unless investigation turns up actual conscious discriminatory practices, nothing will come of this.  The law does not try to prohibit "systemic racism":  it prohibits intentional racial discrimination.*

Interview with Dutch publication about Trump

I talked with a reporter for the Dutch news magazine HP/De Tijd, some of this will make its way into a story they are running in October.  I'll post the full interview here, in case of it's of interest.  The reporter's questions are indented and numbered, my responses are prefaced by BL.

1. President Trump takes a clear and tough position in the debate about police brutality against African Americans and the demonstrations of the Black Lives Matter movement. He glorifies the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot two protesters in Kenosha. At the same time, he shifts the discussion about racism and police brutality against black Americans to a conversation about crime, violence and law and order. How remarkable is Trump's position in this debate?

BL:   Trump is a casual, rather than, ideological racist (Hitler was the latter).  Trump’s basic attitudes were shaped by his childhood in Queens (a section of New York City), which when he grew up was a largely white, middle- or lower-middle-class enclave (Trump himself was a child of privilege, but his attitudes are those of much of the milieu).  He learned instinctive support for police (and firemen and the military) and distrust of “coloreds” and “Negroes” who were disproportionately involved in crime.  (In the United States, the hit 1970s T.V. show “All in the Family” represents this outlook in the character Archie Bunker.)   What’s remarkable is only that Trump is President and says what he says out loud; millions of course believe the same.  While there are fewer “Archie Bunker’s” even in New York these days, there are still millions of white people still alive in the United States who grew up during the apartheid era in the American South, and they and sometimes their children harbor similar attitudes.

2. Does president Trumps position in the racism debate reflect the GOP’s point of view?

BL:  It does not represent the “official” position of the GOP, but ever since Richard Nixon, the GOP has tried to exploit white anxiety about crime, especially crime by non-whites.  Trump is more open and crude about it.

3. Taking such a strong stand in the racism debate, does the president have a clear vision in mind or can we speak of impulsive actions?

Climate change by county in the U.S.

Fascinating maps and data, by U.S. county.   Crudely, the South and the Southwest are in for trouble, the Midwest and Great Plains will fare better over the next 25-50 years.

Columbia Marching Band trolls the NY Times

Amazing.  The NYT will come to regret running this story, I suspect.

Why the right needs to pretend the "left" is more powerful than it really is

Political philosopher Lea Ypi (LSE) comments.  Her point about the Gramscian pedigree of the right's rhetorical strategy is amusing.  (Her focus is Britain, but most of the points apply in the U.S. too.)

Hume and Edinburgh, once again

A propos this, longtime reader Roger Albin (Medicine, Michigan) writes with apt observations that he kindly gave permission to share:

This would be the second time Hume is rejected by the University of Edinburgh.  Hume was denied a Chair at Edinburgh by some of the ideologically “woke” of his time, conservative clergy who suspected Hume of atheism.  Other than his short time as an undergraduate, Hume had no formal affiliation with Edinburgh.  Naming a building after Hume wasn’t an effort to honor Hume, it was an effort to have some of the luster of Hume’s reputation rub off on the University that rejected him.  Hume’s reputation loses nothing by this silly gesture and the University of Edinburgh is revealed as place that capitulates to fads.

How to evaluate history's heroes

Sensible comments from philosopher Steven Hales (Bloomsburg), and timely again given the Hume fiasco at Edinburgh.   From the concluding paragraphs of the essay:

Newton wrote to Robert Hooke that if he saw further than others it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. That was a medieval metaphor that went back to before the 12th century, when John of Salisbury wrote in his Metalogicon, “Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”

Medieval humility has been inverted in the modern era with the hubris that we are moral giants on the shoulders of the dwarfs of the past, wicked dwarfs who deserve our eternal scorn. As we tear down more monuments to former heroes and erase their names from our buildings, we ought to think about their blameworthiness by the standards and expectations of their own era. Those supposed moral dwarfs we now decry may have been giants of their time. And you don’t have to be a scientist to know that even the largest persons look small when seen from a distance.

David Hume has now been "cancelled" at the University of Edinburgh

When I first saw this on social media, I thought it was a joke.  It's not.  If members of the Edinburgh philosophy department don't raise hell about this (some members are, alas, confirmed knuckleheads), then let's cancel them too!  Indeed, let's cancel the University of Edinburgh!  

What's bizarre about the mass delusion now gripping the Anglophone world, even outside the U.S., is that no one yet knows whether George Floyd was killed because he was Black, rather than poor, marginalized, and non-cooperative (which cops hate!), the factors that actually explain most police killings (race is largely an epiphenomenon). 

And what's even worse is that none of this has anything to do with Hume.  

Hume was a man of his time in some ways, but we don't read him to figure out whether we should invest in the slave trade.  We read him because he transcended his time, because he touched the fundamental questions about what it is to be a human being in the world:  what do we know, what should we value, what is there really?   In that regard, he is like Plato, the enemy of democracy, and Aristotle, the defender of slavery, as well as Hobbes, Kant, Marx and Nietzsche:   he speaks to all human beings, despite his parochial prejudices. 

That these analysts of human being should be erased from the landscape, because of their local prejudices, is a symptom of our times, not simply of the narcissistic stupidity of "identity politics" and the craven spinelessness of academic administrators, but, more importantly, of the reactionary forces of the moment which  will love nothing better than the erasure of the cosmopolitan ideals we have inherited:  the forces of reaction, after all, are committed to vindicating the local traditions and prejudices and customs.  They can happily join forces with the identity narcissists in eradicating those thinkers concerned with the human.

ADDENDUM:  Leave it to the Edinburgh knucklehead Aidan McGlynn to try to rationalize this.  Of course it's not strictly a "cancellation" (that's actually why I put it in quotes), since it didn't involve a living person losing their job, but it shares with that phenomenon the effort to demote someone's status in response to meritless mob outrage.  Nobody thought putting Hume's name on the building was an insult, obviously taking it off is meant to signal disapproval and demotion, even if it is, as McGlynn says irrelevantly, a "tall brown, tower block" .  (I wonder what the knucklehead's colleagues interested in Hume think about this?  Will the mob soon come for their seminars?)  Enzo Rossi (Amsterdam) points out the additional irony that the former "Hume Tower" will now be known simply as its address "40 George Square," after King George who opposed the abolition of slavery.  (ADDENDUM:   Enzo tells me now that, unlike the George Square in Glasgow, the one in Edinburgh is not named after the King.  That's fortunate considering Hume's new name!)

The end of the Chicago Palmer House hotel?

In olden times, the Central Division of the APA often held meetings at the Palmer House here in Chicago.  But the pandemic may have finished off the historic site.  Perhaps another hotel chain will acquire the property, but that seems unlikely under current circumstances.

"How the evangelical movement became Trump's 'bitch'"

Philosopher Michael Rea (Notre Dame) offers a plausible explanation.  (He also alludes in the article to an earlier  incident involving Richard Swinburne at a Society of Christian Philosophers event that we noted here.)

It's worth emphasizing that evangelical (indeed Republican) support for Trump is not instrumentally irrational.  He has, in fact, delivered on standard Republican agenda items:  e.g, conservative (sometimes reactionary) judges, tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy, undermining the Affordable Care Act (albeit failing to repeal it), and making it easier to discriminate against disfavored groups, like those who are transgender.  It is a mistake for Democrats to focus so relentlessly on his deformed personality and rude mouth, rather than the substance of his policies.

Ironically, the one issue on which Trump has not been a standard-issue Republican concerns international affairs:  he favors better relations with Russia, rather than hostility (his motivations for this are, to put it mildly, suspect, but the position is correct!); and he is adverse to putting U.S. soldiers into combat.   On these issues, he is, ironically enough, better than both the Republicans and the Democrats.

"Reasonably polarized"

Thoughts from philosopher Kevin Dorst (Oxford/Pittsburgh).  He writes: "The series will be the first pass at a book I've been working on for awhile, arguing that we should see polarization as due to largely rational processes. Basically, the claim is that we're all caught in a big epistemic tragedy of the commons where epistemically rational ways of processing ambiguous evidence lead to polarization."  One question I hope Professor Dorst will address is, if this is the explanation, why the epistemic tragedy of the commons is so much worse in the U.S. than many other affluent and nominally democratic nations.

Ibram Kendi eviscerated

This is a somewhat wild polemic, alternately perceptive and then baffling, but quite amusing as well.  An excerpt:

Ibram Kendi reasons through conservative ideologies such as Evangelical Christianity and Afrocentrism. His theories are a confused kaleidoscope of sociological nonsense and unverifiable historical claims.  His assertions have no resonance in the long history of antiracism scholarship, research, commentary and writing. Kendi fills the book with definitions. However, his definitions are not definitions at all, but mere tautologies, where he uses the term he’s defining in the definition, sometimes several times. He makes empirically unsubstantiated claims such as we’re all racists, including most Black people and Frederick Douglass and W.E.B Du Bois. He disconnects power relations from his understanding of racism; he separates racism from its economic foundations and from the exploitation of labor for profit; he uses the term inequity over structural, systemic and institutional racism....

Kendi was raised as an Evangelical Christian. Thinking through absolutes of, for instance, good and evil, God and the Devil, organizes his understanding of phenomena. Confession, the practice of atonement, admission of sin, recognizing you are a sinner and rejecting denial are Evangelical Christian tropes he draws on to understand racism. He applies these tropes to teaching others how to be anti-racists. While perhaps good for conservative Christian eschatology, it’s really bad for anti-racism scholarship and research.

How does this play out in Kendi’s intellectual practice? He says a racist is “One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.” And on the other side an antiracist is “One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their racist action or expressing an antiracist idea.” Stated in another way, good people are people who do good things and bad people do bad things....

Kenan Malik on "white privilege" and class

Sensible, as usual (he is responding to Chris "I make things up" Bertram:  in this case, Bertram invented a straw man position that no one holds, as Malik rightly notes).

Anti-racism is not what's needed in America

Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels take another stab at countering the mass delusion that has gripped the nominal "left" in America over the last few months; as they argue (correctly), " becauseracism is not the principal source of inequality today, antiracism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it."   An excerpt (I've put a few bits in bold):

What we’re actually saying every time we insist that the basic inequality is between blacks and whites is that the only inequalities we care about are those produced by some form of discrimination—that inequality itself isn’t the problem, it’s only the inequalities produced by racism and sexism, etc. What disparity discourse tells us is that, if you have an economy that’s getting more and more unequal, that’s mainly generating jobs that don’t even pay a living wage, the problem we need to solve is not how to reduce that inequality and not how to make those jobs better but how to make sure that they aren’t disproportionately held by black and brown people....

Complaints about disproportionality are liberal math. And a politics centered on challenging disproportionality comes with the imprimatur of no less a Doctor of the Church of Left Neoliberalism than economist Paul Krugman, who asserted in his role as ideologist for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign that “horizontal” inequality, i.e., inequalities measured “between racially or culturally defined groups,” is what’s really important in America and dismissed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ elaborate program for social-democratic redistribution as “a pipe dream.”3

It’s the fixation on disproportionality that tells us the increasing wealth of the one percent would be OK if only there more black, brown, and LGBTQIA+ billionaires. And the fact that antiracism and antidiscrimination of all kinds would validate rather than undermine the stratification of wealth in American society is completely visible to those who currently possess that wealth—all the rich people eager to embark on a course of moral purification (antiracist training) but with no interest whatsoever in a politics (social-democratic redistribution) that would alter the material conditions that make them rich.

"Democratic Socialists of America" is not a Marxist organization...

...as the recent Reed Affair showed.  (Earlier coverage.)   Even so, DSA should do better.

Wide-ranging interview with Noam Chomsky...

...by Fabian Corver.  (Thanks to Mark Pavlick for the pointer.)

Informative piece on the history of police unions in the U.S....

...in The New Yorker.   I did not know that it was the victory of the teachers' union in the early 1960s in NYC that paved the way for the police to finally unionize effectively.  But I was particularly struck by this observation (which brought to mind something written a few years ago):

According to Paul Hirschfield, a Rutgers sociologist who has written about international law-enforcement practice, the difference [in rates of police killings in the U.S. vs. Europe] is partly in the basic work environment. “American police encounter conditions that are more like Latin America than northern Europe,” he told me. “These vast inequalities, the history of enslavement and conquest, a weak social safety net. The decentralization. Police are more likely to encounter civilians with firearms here...."

Discussion of "police reform" is a bit like the blather about "urban school reform," it largely avoids the actual issue that drives the problems (police killings, poor performance in urban public schools), since that actual issue would demand systematic changes that neither ruling class party cares to tackle.

You thought the crazed "wokerati" were familiar, didn't you?

87 Reasons to Vote...

...the monster-child out of office, plus lots of useful resources and links (including how to register to vote, get absentee ballots etc.).

The injustice to Sarah Braasch continues: Connecticut denies her request for access to the police tapes from the night of the fake "sleeping while Black" incident

A criminal defense lawyer comments.  (Earlier coverage.)

Economics with a moral compass?

Amartya 'Sen (Harvard) and Angus Deaton (Princeton) discuss.

(Thanks to Alex Boche for the pointer.)

Philosopher Peter Ludlow interviewed...

...by a well-known "transhumanist" blogger; they cover a lot of ground, from New York in 1979 to crypto currency and crypto anarchy, from consciousness (and why Ludlow fears he might be a zombie), the external mind, and the dynamic lexicon, to why Ludlow is not a libertarian.  ("Transhumanists" are a fairly juvenile crowd, lots of enthusiasm for Ayn Rand, for example—Ludlow tries to set the interviewer straight!.).  

Philosopher Sophie-Grace Chappell (Open U) interviewed by philosopher Jean Kazez...

...at The Philosopher's Magazine.  This part of the interview, I thought, was especially interesting:

Biological sex is not a social construct. But even if it was, it wouldn’t follow, for heaven’s sake, that biological sex “is not real”. Money is a social construct. Crime is a social construct. Science is a social construct. War & Peace is a social construct. Music is a social construct. This interview is a social construct. Yet all of these things are perfectly real. They have the reality of historical and social formations. They don’t have the reality of the natural kinds that science is concerned with, like Panthera Tigris Tigris and H2O and tungsten. But whoever said that the only real kinds of things were the natural kinds?

By contrast with biological sex, gender is a social construct. It’s real, but it’s a historical and social reality. Das ewig Weibliche exists. Though “ewig” is a bit of an exaggeration.

Does that mean that gender is more easily changed than biological sex? No, not necessarily. Just because something is a social construct it doesn’t follow that it’s easy to change; just because something is a natural kind it doesn’t follow that it’s not easy to change. You will sooner extirpate the weeds from your garden than end the history of racism. For similar reasons, the fact that gender is a social construct does not imply that gender is easily abolished or even readily malleable.

On the aesthetic seductiveness of Nazism

This essay makes some important points:

Knausgaard attempts to reconstruct the thoughts and emotions of those who were attracted to National Socialism, under the principle that it is impossible to understand the emergence of Nazism—“the last major utopian movement in the west”—without understanding what moved the people of Germany, and later of other European countries, to embrace it. And what moved them, in Knausgaard’s view, was not the Nazis’ promise to redistribute income, or Hitler’s analysis of world affairs, or even, initially, their hatred of the Jews. What moved them was, rather, the joyful feeling of togetherness and community, of being able to transcend not only the fragmented democracy of the Weimar period but politics altogether.

“In National Socialism,” writes Knausgaard, “philosophy and politics come together at a point outside the language, and beyond the rational, where all complexity ceases, though not all depth.” Riefenstahl’s film communicates the pleasure the people experienced—how “good” it felt to them—at having escaped the quotidian chaos of their shabby republic and their trivial private lives, at being liberated from the restrictions of rationality and deliberation, at being on the brink of achieving something large and lasting, deep and simple....

In their focus on the emotional pull of Nazism—its promise to liberate citizens from the frustrations and banalities of an alienated, lonely existence, to connect them with a mass of like-minded souls in “unconditional joy”—the works of Malick and Knausgaard expose us to aspects of how fascism works that it would be laughable to think could yield to academic analysis, no matter how accessibly arranged.

“Establish a private life,” warns [historian Timothy] Snyder. “Listen for dangerous words.” Do we really imagine it was advice such as this that interwar Germans lacked?

U.S. Justice Department finds Yale discriminates in admissions against whites and Asian-Americans

This is pretty dramatic, and will no doubt lead to similar findings of violations by other schools, since all elite universities in the U.S. do exactly what Yale is doing (which is really discriminating in favor of African-Americans in a zero-sum game, i.e., admissions).  The resulting litigation will eventually makes its way to the Supreme Court, where the "plain meaning" textualism that yielded a happy outcome with respect to sex discrimination against transgender people will yield an unhappy outcome here:   affirmative action will be found to violate the civil rights law.   As I've remarked before, I do expect all affirmative action programs in universities to be found unlawful (in the case of private universities) and unconstitutional (in the case of public universities) by this conservative Supreme Court.  (By contrast, I am pretty confident this Court will not overrule Roe v. Wade, but will continue to approve practices that burden but do not wholly abrogate the right to choose abortion, which has been the Court's approach for the last thirty years basically.)

"[E]xtant racism isn't what principally produces our inequality and anti-racism won't eliminate it"

Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels are, of course, exactly right, and it explains why corporate America and the ruling class have gotten squarely behind anti-racist pablum.  More from Professors Reed and Michaels:

If the objective is to eliminate black poverty rather than simply to benefit the upper classes, we believe the diagnosis of racism is wrong, and the cure of anti-racism won't work. Racism is real and anti-racism is both admirable and necessary, but extant racism isn't what principally produces our inequality and anti-racism won't eliminate it. And because racism is not the principal source of inequality today, anti-racism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it....

It is well known by now that whites have more net wealth than blacks at every income level, and the overall racial difference in wealth is massive. Why can't anti-racism solve this problem? Because, as Robert Manduca has shown, the fact that Blacks were over-represented among the poor at the beginning of a period in which "low income workers of all races" have been hurt by the changes in American economic life has meant that they have "borne the brunt" of those changes. The lack of progress in overcoming the white/black wealth gap has been a function of the increase in the rich/poor wealth gap.

In fact, if you look at how white and Black wealth are distributed in the U.S., you see right away that the very idea of racial wealth is an empty one. The top 10% of white people have 75% of white wealth; the top 20% have virtually all of it. And the same is true for black wealth. The top 10% of black households hold 75% of black wealth.

Four ways to vote safely without depending on the post office that Trump is trying to destroy

Useful information.

ADDENDUM:  A bit more information about what's going on with the post-office that I noted on Twitter.

Adolph Reed couldn't speak at a meeting of the DSA

I'd heard rumors about this, and now the NYT has an account.  It's description of Reed's views is not particularly nuanced (it's understandably hard for the official mouthpiece of the prudent wing of the ruling class to present Marxist views, although Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor from Princeton [quoted in the article] doesn't have that excuse), but it has some good quotes from Professor Reed:

None of this surprised Professor Reed, who sardonically described it as a “tempest in a demitasse.” Some on the left, he said, have a “militant objection to thinking analytically”....

He finds a certain humor in being attacked over race.

“I’ve never led with my biography, as that’s become an authenticity-claiming gesture,” he said. “But when my opponents say that I don’t accept that racism is real, I think to myself, ‘OK, we’ve arrived at a strange place.’”

Professor Reed and his compatriots believe the left too often ensnares itself in battles over racial symbols, from statues to language, rather than keeping its eye on fundamental economic change.

Trump the Mafioso, redux

I'm a broken record on this subject, but the key to Trump is that he thinks like a Mafioso, as his former lawyer Michael Cohen once again confirms:

He wouldn’t mind if I was dead. That was how Trump talked. Like a mob boss, using language carefully calibrated to convey his desires and demands, while at the same time employing deliberate indirection to insulate himself and avoid actually ordering a hit on his former personal attorney, confidant, consigliere, and, at least in my heart, adopted son...

As anyone in law enforcement will tell you, it’s only gangsters who can reveal the secrets of organized crime. If you want to know how the mob really works, you’ve got to talk to the bad guys. I was one of Trump’s bad guys. In his world, I was one hundred percent a made man.

Chomsky on the Harper's letter about free speech and "cancel culture"...

...which he of course signed, but which has been controversial with the wokerati.  From the interview:

The letter is anodyne. It's a simple statement that it's worth being careful to preserve freedom of speech. The main attack on freedom of speech was not discussed there. It's the mainstream establishment, which for years has been engaged in massive cancel culture.

But now segments of the left are picking up part of the same pathology. It's harmful; they shouldn't be doing it; it's wrong in principle. It's suicidal. It's a gift to the far right. So here's a quiet statement saying, "Look, we should be careful about these things and not undertake this." Should've been the end. Then comes the reaction, which is extremely interesting. It proves that the problem was much deeper than was assumed. The reaction is pretty hysterical, mostly totally irrational. Sensible people, personal friends of mine, are writing articles attacking the statement because of the people who signed it. Just think what that means for a second. I'm sure you, like any other person who's well-known, are deluged with requests to sign statements on human rights issues, civil liberties issues, and so on.

Do you take account of who the signers are going to be? You can't. You can't know who the signers are going to be. If this position of the critics were adopted, there would never be a statement. Nobody in his right mind would sign a statement if the content of the statement is going to be judged by who might sign it tomorrow.

This criticism is much to the pleasure of the right wing, which hates these statements. So it's another massive service to the right wing. Just as breaking up a meeting of somebody you don't like is a service to the right wing. You want to play their game? Do it straight. Don't pretend you're on the left.

The interview covers other topics, and is mixed.  He's right that activists, and Sanders in particular, pushed Biden to the left.   It's silly, though, to compare the supposed popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement with that of Martin Luther King, since the former stands for almost nothing (and nothing threatening to anyone except maybe some police and all actual racists), while the latter stood for a substantive program of social, legal and economic reform that was a threat to the status quo, and not just in the apartheid South.

On attempts to redefine "racism" and where they go wrong

I found this essay by philosopher Aaron Preston (Valparaiso) quite illuminating, and it certainly helped clarify what has seemed to me the strange and misleading usage of the word "racism" by the wokerati.

ADDENDUM:  Someone on Twitter calls my attention to another essay on this subject by philosopher Joseph Heath (Toronto).

Randall Kennedy takes apart the ludicrous hyperbole in the anti-racist declaration by some Princeton faculty

Kennedy's piece is here, and we noted the Princeton open letter here.   It's good to have a sober reality check on this nonsense; an excerpt:

The claim of racial exclusion is implausible. For years now, throughout the university, there has existed a self-conscious impulse to promote people of color to positions of leadership. Either today or in the very recent past, Black professors have been chairs of the departments of history, anthropology, English, religion, African American studies, and the Lewis Center for the Arts. Black professors have also served as the dean of the School of Public and International Affairs and as the director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Scores of scholars of color have been Humanities Council fellows. The general counsel of the university is Latinx. The dean of admissions is African American. The recently retired vice chair of the university board of trustees, Brent Henry, a Black lawyer keenly attuned to matters of racial equity, has been for at least the past decade one of the three or four most important figures in the governance of the university.

Current trustees include Terri Sewell, an African American member of the U.S. House of Representatives; Henri Ford, the Haitian American dean of the University of Miami School of Medicine; and Melanie Lawson, a seasoned African-American television journalist. These people, all Princeton alumni, are alert and capable and in demand. They are by no means needy. They could associate themselves with any number of prestigious enterprises. They would surely decline to contribute to or be involved with the sort of institution that the ultimatum depicts. This power and privilege is possessed also by many of the authors and signatories of the ultimatum, which accounts in part for the whiff of bad faith that suffuses the whole affair.

The ultimatum complains that, in its view, past initiatives aimed at enlarging the number of faculty of color at Princeton have “failed” because in 2019-20 “among 814 faculty, there were 30 Black, 31 Latinx, and 0 Indigenous persons. That’s 7%.” According to the ultimatum, this “is not progress by any standard; it falls woefully short of U.S. demographics as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau, which reports Black and Hispanic persons at 32% of the total population.”

It's official: Senator Kamala Harris will soon be President of the United States

Biden has made his pick.  Like Biden, she is "pragmatic," i.e, she will tilt whichever way the wind is blowing.  Unlike Biden, she is a better and more reliably coherent speaker.  A Black woman on the ticket should guarantee a huge Black turnout, which is crucial for Democrats.  At the same time, like Obama, she won't scare off those white voters whose latent racial prejudices and anxieties might be activated by a more progressive Black politician.  I have no enthusiasm for either on substance, but the main issue is to defeat the monster-child decisively, and hopefully they can do it.  I do think they will end up being a highly progressive administration if the Democrats can capture both houses of Congress as well.

ADDENDUM:  A few readers (and some Twitterati) didn't quite get the joke in the post title, above.  Senator Harris will be the next President because, on the assumption that the monster-child will be defeated (all bets are off for humanity if that's wrong!), (1) Biden doesn't seem equipped to carry out a full 4-year term, and (2) even if he does, Harris will be his heir apparent (given the huge role name recognition--think "Clinton," "Kennedy," "Bush"--plays in democracy).   The best thing about Senator Harris (apart from her ability to pull in votes from crucial demographics) is that her father is a Marxist.  That means there is hope for America yet.  (Readers who have not should look at Achen & Bartels, Democracy for Realists, which makes a strong case, especially in the American context, that democratic elections are all about group identities, not about policies.)

The unraveling of Vancouver

An amusing rejoinder to an essay that was correct about America, but apparently completely whitewashed the author's home city.

How the capitalist west rewrote the history of 1989 and after

A useful and interesting corrective; an excerpt:

Mass democratic mobilisations have, in fact, existed at the heart of these regimes: workers’ riots in June 1953 in Berlin, workers’ councils in Poland and Hungary in 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 (prolonged by the birth of the Czech workers’ councils), the revolutionary trade unionism of Solidarność (Solidarity) in Gdansk, Poland, in 1980. It is this history that the liberal interpretation of 1989 obliterates or falsifies — and tries to appropriate by presenting it as anti-communist. These popular movements fought, not to re-establish capitalism, but on the contrary in the name of socialist ideals....Capitalism’s triumph did not arise from a mass desire, but a choice made by the communist nomenklatura: to transform its privileges of function into privileges of ownership.....

More on the U of Southern Maine's "Anti-Racism" Pledge

Philosopher Jason Brennan (Georgetown) has some pretty funny observations here; an excerpt:

This kind of thing generally cheapens the idea of anti-racism. Universities are rather sad and pathetic places, in general. They're the kinds of places where, when people claim to get worried about racism, rather than using their ample resources to combat serious problems of racism out there in the world, they instead just hire a bunch of diversity officers who then create milquetoast programming for their student bodies, who already tend to be relatively non-racist and anti-racist. It's like getting worried about starvation, so you then distribute extra snacks to your generally well-fed student body rather than trying to feed actual starving people in refugee camps. You have to wonder whether the point is not to combat racism, but instead to be seen as anti-racist.

One does wonder that, doesn't one?

Legal remedies for libel are not instances of "cancel culture"

I was astonished a couple of weeks ago when a British lawyer actually took J.K. Rowling to task on this score; lawyers, at least, shouldn't be so stupid.   Rowling was a signatory to the Harper's letter about "cancel culture." She didn't thereby forfeit her legal right to be protected from unlawful speech, such as libel.   "Cancel culture," of course, as we saw yesterday, has nothing to do with legal remedies for unlawful speech or action.

What is "cancel culture"?

This is a pretty apt characterization of some of the markers of "cancelling", including, e.g.:

1) Punitiveness:   Are people denouncing you to your employer or your social connections? Are you being blacklisted from jobs and social opportunities? Does what is being said to or about you have the goal—or foreseeable effect—of jeopardizing your livelihood?

2) Deplatforming:   Are campaigners attempting to prevent you from publishing your work, giving speeches or attending meetings? Are they claiming that allowing you to be heard is violence against them or makes them unsafe?

3) Organization:   Does criticism appear to be organized and targeted? Are the organizers recruiting others to pile on? Are you being swarmed and brigaded? Are people hunting through your work and scouring social media to find ammunition to use against you?

Nematodes are no joking matter!

This story is bizarre, even by the standards of the Twitter Red Guard!

(Thanks to David Velleman for the pointer.)

Matt Drudge's turn against Trump

I know most readers have better things to do than spend time in America's right-wing crazy media land; I do too.   I don't have TV any longer, so can't watch Fox (thankfully), and I can't imagine actually listening to deranged morons like Rush Limbaugh.  But I do follow the on-line "Drudge Report," which has had an outsized influence on the right-wing media for two decades, basically setting the terms of discussion and making issues salient (think of it as a much, much bigger version of this blog but affecting more than academic philosophy!).  

Run by Matt Drudge, an eccentric recluse and high school dropout with a stable-full of standard know-nothing prejudices, Drudge championed Trump in 2016, and for most of his tenure.  But starting earlier this year, Drudge began to sour on Trump--and this coincided with the arrival of the pandemic to America's shores.  My hypothesis is that Drudge is, in addition to his other eccentricities, a hypochondriac for whom the arrival of a genuine health threat, together with Trump's obviously incompetent response to it, was the straw that broke the camel's back.   This is good news for civilization, of course, since Drudge's steadily negative coverage of Trump will influence a segment of the benighted populace that neither Democrats nor the Lincoln Project will reach.  At a minimum, it should dampen their enthusiasm for turning out to vote for the monster-child in November.

UPDATE:  Reader Henry Cohen writes:

In "Matt Drudge's turn against Trump," you refer to Trump's "incompetent response" to the pandemic. Like "bungling," which I often see used to describe it, it seems inadequate because it is consistent with a good-faith response, which Trump's has never been. He covered up warnings he'd been given, seized PPE from blue states that needed it, urged people not to wear masks or practice social distancing, urged cities and businesses to reopen prematurely, and pushed the potentially fatal remedies of the malaria drug and drinking disinfectant. A sane person would know that all these acts would result in large numbers of deaths. Admittedly, Trump is not sane, but that doesn't mean that he was trying to prevent OR minimize the pandemic but botched it because of his incompetence.

Rather than "incompetent response," I'd say that his response has been to commit 156,000 reckless homicides, or words to that effect.

When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail

That was one reader's prior gloss on the remarkable tunnel-vision of Twitter's favorite feminist philosopher, but this latest public intervention confirms the myopia.  Biden, given his age and his decrepit cognitive condition, is likely picking the next President of the United States by naming his VP candidate, given the huge advantage "name recognition" confers in the charade known as American democracy and given the real probability that Biden can't discharge the duties of office for four years.  To miss all of that in order to hit your old nail (and promote your new book!) is amazing.

Diversity, Silicon Valley-style

And not just Silicon Valley, of course:

 

Ten more commandments found!

This is pretty funny.

How will the pandemic and economic crisis affect the landscape of higher education

Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU (so he takes pleasure in markets and the destruction they wreak), has prepared a detailed analysis grouping colleges ranked by U.S. News into four categories:  Thrive, Survive, Struggle, Perish.  According to Professor Galloway (warning: some  "management-speak" coming),

This dataset compiles numbers from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) maintained by the US Department of Education, US News & World Report, Google Keyword Planner, Niche.com's Student Life Scores, and the Center on Education & the Workforce. This dataset should not be taken as peer-reviewed or final. It’s a working document that seeks to analyze and understand the US college and university landscape and to help universities craft solutions. 

We plotted each university across two axes (four quadrants):

• Value: (Credential * Experience * Education) / Tuition.
• Vulnerability: (Endowment / Student and % International Students). Low endowment and dependence on full-tuition international students make a university vulnerable to Covid shock, as they may decide to sit this semester/year out. Consumers generally don’t like to pay the rack rate at a hotel whose general manager harasses them and is a bigot. But I digress.

Quadrants:

• Thrive: The elite schools and those that offer strong value have an opportunity to emerge stronger as they consolidate the market, double down on exclusivity, and/or embrace big and small tech to increase the value via a decrease in cost per student.

• Survive: Schools that will see demand destruction and lower revenue, but will be fine, as they have the brand equity, credential-to-cost ratio, and/or endowments to weather the storm.

• Struggle: Tier-2 schools with one or more comorbidities, such as high admit rates (anemic waiting lists), high tuition, or scant endowments.

• Perish: Sodium pentathol cocktail of high admit rates, high tuition, low endowments, dependence on international students, and weak brand equity.

The University of Chicago, according to Galloway's analysis, will "survive," while Northwestern University will "thrive."  (Don't ask me!  Maybe because Northwestern has fewer international students?)  Barnard College will "survive," while Colgate University will "thrive."  But it's the list of schools that he forecasts will perish that is truly alarming.  It includes Oberlin College, Skidmore College, Macalester College, Pitzer College, Franklin & Marshall College, Hofstra University, Bard College, Kenyon College, Lawrence University, Lake Forest College, Yeshiva University, The New School, and Sarah Lawrence, among many others.  I suspect he's wrong about most of these, but if he were to turn out to be correct, the carnage and the transformation of the higher education landscape would be stunning.

UPDATE:  Biologist Greg Mayer points out to me that Prof. Galloway has renamed the "perish" category "challenged," although the description of it remains unchanged!

The Lincoln Project makes the best anti-Trump ads

Let's make this official:  it may have started as the Wuhan virus, but it's now the "Trump Virus":

Somewhat more regular blogging resumes tomorrow.