Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Lawyer Wendy Kaminer on the unhinged responses to the Harper's letter about "cancel culture"

I was amazed to learn that the letter (referenced in passing earlier today) was actually controversial, albeit among the usual herd animals, who never met an independent thought they could abide.   The lawyer Wendy Kaminer, who signed the letter, has a suitably stinging rebuke:

‘I rest my case’, I’m tempted to say, reviewing the unhinged responses of cancel-culture fans intent on cancelling the judicious defence of free speech in our ‘Letter on Justice and Open Debate’, published by Harper’s this week. I signed emphatically, which makes me one of ‘the worst people in the world of public intellectualism’, according to In These Times. What’s so bad about defending ‘the free exchange of information and ideas’ and critiquing ‘intolerance for opposing views’ and ‘a vogue for public shaming and ostracism’? In doing so we were not really defending the right to debate and criticise, according to In These Times: we were trying to squelch debate and censor our own critics, exhibiting a ‘bizarre aversion to being argued against … [that] now borders on the pathological’.

This is what citizens of cancel culture have apparently learned from Donald Trump: confound your critics by accusing them of precisely the sins you’re busy committing. Social-justice warriors have long demanded protection from the ‘trauma’ of hearing speech they deem offensive, calling for suppression of the speech and shunning of the speaker. So, employing Trumpian tactics, they accuse free-speech advocates of the censoriousness and psychic fragility that’s the raison d’être of their movement.

"Anywhere out of this world," said Baudelaire.

And with that I'm going back on hiatus to work on the book on Marx, as well as the drearier tasks presented by post-mortem bureaucracy in the modern world.

Several dozen Princeton faculty call for massive and systematic violation of their colleagues' contractual right to academic freedom...

...for the holy cause of "anti-racism."   ("Anti-racism" doesn't, in fact, mean opposition to racism any longer, for those who have not been paying attention.  And what is the connection between an abusive cop killing George Floyd in Minneapolis and alleged racism at Princeton?  There isn't any, of course.)  Some portions of the letter are harmless and predictable--the standard opportunism of the moment to claim resources and positions--but this proposal is chilling:

11. Constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

This is simply a call to violate the contractual academic freedom rights of faculty at Princeton.  Have any signatories, one wonders, even thought about academic freedom and its purpose?  Do they realize that the only review of "research and publications" by scholars that is consistent with academic freedom is one based on applicable disciplinary standards?  Vetting the moral or political bona fides of scholarship is what universities without academic freedom do.

Good news out of Poland

President Duda, of the illiberal and reactionary "Law and Justice [sic]" party, has been forced into a run-off election.  Good luck to Poland, where democratic processes may yet oust the neanderthals from power.

There is no bottom to dumb, part 392: protesters in Madison tear down statue of an abolitionist

Yikes.

Isaiah Berlin's vendettas

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY

Suitably scathing description of the overrated windbag.

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Longtime reader John Rapko writes:

Thanks for posting Ali's bit about Caute on Isaiah Berlin; I had overlooked it. I share your view on Isaiah Berlin. I think you'll be amused by this anecdote: 20 or so years ago, I was looking at recent arrivals at Moe's Books in Berkeley, a store where I've passed a few thousand pleasant hours. There were quite a few battered old philosophy books from the 1930s through the 60's, some of which I had never seen. As I flipped through them, I quickly realized that this was part of the library of Paul Grice, who had recently died, as there were various identifying documents stuck in the books. So I got to see a number of Grice's lecture notes and annotations. There was also an unopened (!) letter from around 1960 from Isaiah Berlin to Grice. Of course I opened it, and read Berlin informing Grice that he, Berlin, had no objection to admitting the dim-witted son of some Tory MP to Oxford. The tone of the letter was very chummy--'Oh you know, Paul, I have no problem with that sort of thing'. I took the letter, and a couple of years later showed it to Richard Wollheim, who suggested that I send it to Henry Hardie, who was then editing Berlin's letters. Alas, I simply forgot to do so, and I'm pretty sure I've got it stuck in a volume of Berlin's selected writings. But perhaps it's for the best, as Hardie may well have chosen not to print it. If by chance you ever know of someone who's writing on Berlin's shady Cold War shenanigans, please let me know and I'll send them a copy of the letter.

You can reach Professor Rapko at:  johnrapko-at-yahoo-dot-com

Comparative policing: the case of Austria

Man fined for farting.

"The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration"

This is quite interesting, a plausible alternative to the account popularized by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow.

(Thanks to Chris Lewis for the pointer.)

ADDENDUM:  From the essay:

Race is relevant because it is our best explanation for the absence of a working-class movement on the American continent, and thus the persistent underdevelopment of American social policy.⁷⁷ American slavery and then Jim Crow delayed the proletarianization of African Americans, with the result that they arrived in Northern cities after the first wave of American industrialization, in urban environments in which pivotal, scarce resources (jobs and housing) were hoarded by the first and second generations of established white ethnics. This was an environment destined to yield working-class disunity. Black Americans strove to penetrate well-protected labor and housing markets. It was no surprise that established incumbents would craft caste-based remedies to exclude them. Such strategies were rational, even if suboptimal in the long run.

In this sense, partisans of the standard story are not wrong to link American mass incarceration to American slavery. But they are connected not because slavery established some transhistorical imperative that America be always a land of white domination. Rather, they are connected because the plantation economy tied African-American labor to the land until 1940. Blacks were thus bypassed by America’s industrial boom. They are connected also because slavery was largely responsible for an American federalism which assigns law enforcement to those parts of the state least capable of paying the higher costs of redistributive remedies.⁷⁸ In the final reckoning, the story of the twin exceptions that have been the subject of this essay starts with this history.

On the meaning of statues

Philosopher Les Green (Oxford & Queen's U) comments.

The self-destruction of the American press

Very amusing and mostly right too!

(Thanks to Mark Couch for the pointer).

Cedric Johnson on "Black Lives Matter"

This is worth reading; an excerpt:

While a slim majority of Americans now believe police are more likely to use excessive force against blacks than other groups, millions more do not share the most militant calls to defund or dismantle police departments voiced by some activists.1 Most Americans are upset by police killings, but they also want more effective policing. Over the last five years, satisfaction with police has strengthened among all ethnic and racial groups, including African Americans (from 50% “at least somewhat satisfied” in 2015 to 72% now).

Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism. Such expressions are not a threat but rather a bulwark to the neoliberal project that has obliterated the social wage, gutted public sector employment and worker pensions, undermined collective bargaining and union power, and rolled out an expansive carceral apparatus, all developments that have adversely affected black workers and communities. Sure, some activists are calling for defunding police departments and de-carceration, but as a popular slogan, Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism. And the ruling class agrees.

Big victory for LGBT rights at the Supreme Court

The Court finds that the 1964 law barring "sex discrimination" includes discrimination based on sexual orientation or transgender status.   Roberts and Gorsuch joined the more liberal justices on this--I haven't had a chance to read the decision, but they are textualists in matters of statutory interpretation, so were no doubt persuaded that what members of Congree in 1964 thought about gay people was not the issue, and that discriminating against people because, e.g, they are attracted to members of the same sex was pretty clearly discrimination based on sex.

Another one bites the dust at the NYT...

...James Bennet, the opinion page editor responsible for Senator Cotton's now notorious "bring in the troops" op-ed, but who should have been fired long ago for other crimes against intellectual decency and literary good taste.

"Defund the police" doesn't actually mean defund the police...

...as a couple of readers pointed out to me; see for example, this interview:

That slogan ("Defund the police") really embodies this idea that we’re not going to fix the police, but instead we have to reduce them in every way we possibly can and replace them with democratic, public, non-police solutions.

That's sensible, but it needs a better slogan, since that one will be a loser at the polls.

Nietzsche's rules for warfare...and the question of race and class

A longtime reader sent me the following e-mail:

As I wrote you once before, you do follow Nietzsche's rules for warfare (Ecce Homo,   Why I am so wise,  7) Kaufmann translation.

"First:    I only attack causes that are victorious;   I may even wait until they become victorious.

Second:    I only attack causes against which I would not find allies,  so that I stand alone....I have never taken a step publicly that did not compromise me:  that is my criterion of doing right."

That takes cojones.   Especially on the left.    Admirable!

The funny e-mail was prompted by this post and this earlier one.

I have the actual privilege of not caring whether I have allies or not, although I know many readers share my concerns about the moronic condition of putatively "left" discourse in the United States (witness the cancellation of a talk by Adolph Reed by the Democratic Socialists of America because he has the "wrong" view about the causes of police violence). 

The sociology of police violence (racism isn't the real problem)

This is informative (much more so than the "cops are racist" blather on social media), from the always insightful Randall Collins (Penn); it sheds lights on both why people dislike the police, and the situational and social variables that incline the police towards violence.  Some excerpts:

[3] Police dislike defiance. Jonathan Rubinstein (1973), a sociologist who joined the Philadelphia police in order to study their everyday life (similar to Peter Moskos in the Baltimore PD 30 years later), found that their number-one priority is to be the person in control in all encounters with civilians. For the most part, a cop is out there alone, or with a single partner; they are almost always outnumbered by civilians. Particularly in areas where they know they are unpopular, they feel it is imperative to not let things get out of control. They want to be the one who starts and ends the encounter, who sets the speaking turns (micro-sociology of conversation), who sets the rhythm of the interaction. Acts of defiance, whether micro-actions on the level of voice and gesture, or more blatant words and body movements, will cause a cop to increase their own aggressiveness in order to maintain dominance (Alpert and Dunham 2004). This a reason why trivial encounters with the police can escalate to violence far beyond what seems called for by the original issue.

[3a] Inner-city black code of the street emphasizes defiance. Elijah Anderson’s ethnography of black street life (1999; also Krupnick and Winship 2015) point out that in dangerous areas, where the police are distrusted, most people adopt a stance of being hyper-vigilant about threats and disrespect, and portray themselves as ready to use violence. Anderson says this is mostly a Goffmanian frontstage, a pretence at being tough designed to avoid being victimized. When dealing with the police, this leads to another vicious circle. Black people, particularly on their home turf, are more defiant of police than are whites; often this is no more than a confrontational way of talking, but these are micro-interactions that arouse police aggressiveness. Anderson notes that one reason people in the ghetto are wary of calling police is that they themselves may end up being arrested, because of the tone of these micro-interactions. Donald Black (1980), who pioneered observer ride-alongs in police cars, found that police arrested black suspects more than whites, but this happened when black people were defiant, which was more often than whites....

A call for police to take "collective responsibility" for police misconduct...

...from a former career police officer who also has a PhD in philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center.

(Thanks to Jonathan Gilmore for the pointer.)

Racial disparity does NOT help make sense of patterns of police violence

Unfortunately, this essay by Adolph Reed is timely again.   "Black Lives Matter," as I've noted before, identified a real phenomenon--police violence--and then consistently misdiagnosed it, as Reed demonstrates:

Available data (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl) indicate, to the surprise of no one who isn’t in willful denial, that in this country black people make up a percentage of those killed by police that is nearly double their share of the general American population. Latinos are killed by police, apparently, at a rate roughly equivalent to their incidence in the general population. Whites are killed by police at a rate between just under three-fourths (through the first half of 2016) and just under four-fifths (2015) of their share of the general population....[T]he evidence of gross racial disparity is clear: among victims of homicide by police blacks are represented at twice their rate of the population; whites are killed at somewhat less than theirs. This disparity is the founding rationale for the branding exercise called #Black Lives Matter and endless contentions that imminent danger of death at the hands of arbitrary white authority has been a fundamental, definitive condition of blacks’ status in the United States since slavery or, for those who, like the Nation’s Kai Wright, prefer their derivative patter laced with the seeming heft of obscure dates, since 1793. In Wright’s assessment “From passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act forward, public-safety officers have been empowered to harass black bodies [sic] in the defense of private capital and the pursuit of public revenue.”3

This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual declarations that “black lives matter,” rest on insistence that “racism”—structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however modified—must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings.

But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.4 And, according to the Washington Post data, the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota 4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%; South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%. However, with the exception of Colorado—where blacks were 17% of the 29 people killed by police—that does not seem to be the case....[N]o black people were among those killed by police in South Dakota, Wyoming, or Alaska. In New Mexico, there were no blacks among the 20 people killed by police in 2015, and in Arizona blacks made up just over 2% of the 42 victims of police killing.

Public health measures and "freedom"

Les Green (Oxford & Queen's U) comments (amusingly and aptly); an excerpt:

Admittedly, there are disagreements about freedom.  Some philosophers say these turn on people having different ‘concepts’ of freedom; others say that we have various ‘conceptions of the concept’ of freedom. (It can only be a matter of time before someone says that we have different ‘concepts of a conception of a concept’ of freedom.)  My own view is parsimonious.  I think we are free to do what we can actually do, and not free to do what we cannot do because we are prevented from doing it or because the action has been made infeasible.  What we disagree about is why freedom and unfreedom matter.

Some people hate restrictions just because they hate anyone making them do things they don’t want to do. (Teenagers, and some libertarians, tend to fall into this class.)  For others, unfreedom is of concern only if it also limits their autonomy, the power to shape their lives to fit their needs and character, as JS Mill put it.  Being forced to wear a mask while shopping may outrage the first group, but not the second because (save in special cases) wearing a mask does not limit any further activities.  A third group have still narrower concerns.  They only chafe under unfreedoms they judge to be imposed arbitrarily or unreasonably, in which cases they think they are being ‘dominated’.  These are all real disagreements, but they are fundamentally disagreements about the value of particular freedoms, not about freedom’s nature.

Can President Trump federalize the National Guard and/or send in the U.S. military to restore order?

Yes to both.   The Insurrection Act was utilized during the Civil Rights era to insure state compliance with court decisions in the American South, and it was utilized again during the urban riots of 1967 and 1968 in cities like Detroit and Chicago.

Biden's proposal to lower Medicare eligibility to age 60

This is informative.

(Thanks to Dr. David Ozonoff for the pointer.)

Yet another charlatan in the Trump administration

But at least he thought pretending to have a PhD in philosophy was better than having a PhD in management!

(Thanks to John Casey for the pointer.)

Section 230 and Twitter

Section 230 of the ironically-named 1996 "Communications Decency Act" provides that:  "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230).   What this means is that, whereas the New York Times is liable in tort if it publishes a letter that defames you or intentionally causes you emotional distress, if the exact same statement appears on Twitter, Twitter is not liable, only the author of the letter is.  (The author of the letter is liable in both contexts, of course.)  

The provision was meant to encourage the development of the Internet, which it has, and it is also primarily responsible for the Internet being the cesspool of misinformation, abuse, and tortious wrongdoing that it is.   Although Twitter polices speech on its platform in arbitrary ways, it--like most social media platforms--claims it would be impossible to actually police the platform for unlawful speech.   Note the further irony that Twitter, as things stand, is legally responsible for copyright violations by its users, and has established procedures for remedying such violations (these rules also impose burdens and costs on those claiming copyright violations).  Why Twitter and other social media platforms should get a pass on tortious wrongdoing by their users but not on violations of copyright by their users is a bit puzzling, shall we say.

After the "war" against COVID-19, we'll also need "war crimes" trials for...

...Governor Cuomo of New York and Mayor DiBlasio of New York City.  See, for example, this and this, but especially this damning ProPublica report contrasting their performance with the performance of San Francisco's Mayor and California's Governor.  Having screwed up the initial response, Governor Cuomo has certainly shown himself to be an adept public communicator, but that doesn't change the fact that people died because they didn't get going soon enough.

Katha Pollitt, the longtime feminist critic at The Nation, on why she does not believe Tara Reade

I don't read many columnists at The Nation, but I have read Pollitt off-and-on for many years (and it was a thrill to get to have dinner with her last year, when she and Steven Lukes were in town).  Here's her sensible take on the Reade business (earlier coverage).  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to learn from Pollitt's essay that Kate "enough about my book, what do you think of my book?" Manne has been demanding that everyone take Reade seriously; Pollitt's response is apt:

Many studies show that most women who say they have been sexually assaulted are telling the truth. However, when you’re dealing with actual individuals, it isn’t good enough to go with generalities. (As Susan Faludi clearly established, #BelieveAllWomen is a right-wing canard.) Otherwise, you get arguments like those of the feminist philosopher Kate Manne, who writes in The Nation that Biden is “the type” of man who would sexually assault Reade, because he has “a demonstrated history of handsiness.” That’s like saying a man accused of armed robbery is “the type” because he was in the habit of shoplifting. Touching women, invading their space, commenting on their bodies, looking them up and down are all regrettably common, especially among men of Biden’s generation; impulsively assaulting a staffer in a public hallway, not so much. Both behaviors may spring from “the same sense of privileged male entitlement,” but they are different in kind.

 

More on the pathetic case of Tara Reade

This latest bit of reporting should surely put this spectacle to rest.  Even before this expose, it was clear that Ms. Reade was a bit "off," quite apart from the other problems with her credibility. 

(While some segments of "woke" social media seem to think believing Ms. Reade is obligatory, some segments of reactionary social media seem to think Reade's accusations are like Dr. Ford's allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.  But whereas it has been clear from the start that Ms. Reade is "off", there were no such concerns about Dr. Ford, whose testimony was more credible, although not decisive about what happened.)

After the pandemic: disability and the right to work from home

Philosopher Leslie Green (Oxford/Queen's U) comments.

America is a disgrace, part 441: millions of families don't have enough food

Without federal action, this will get worse not better.

Pulitzer Prize for "Commentary" has gone to...

...Bret Stephens, Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer and, this year, Nikole Hannah-Jones.   (The Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting have a better history, fortunately.)

Madeline Kripke (sister of the famous philosopher), a leading expert on dictionaries, has passed away

This charming article about her collections and knowledge in the NYT also includes quotes from Saul Kripke.

(Thanks to John Komdat for the pointer.)

Why don't the British like Trump?

At last, an authoritative explanation:

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.  For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace....

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.  I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.

But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty....

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.

(Thanks to Clayton Agree for the pointer.)

The sexual assault allegation against Biden isn't credible

I wouldn't even bother addressing this, except I notice so many clueless philosophers on social media seem to think it's a central issue.  Thank God for lawyers with experience and sense.  From the conclusion of the preceding piece:

I know that “Believe Women” is the mantra of the new decade. It is a response to a century of ignoring and excusing men’s sexual assaults against women. But men and women alike should not be forced to blindly accept every allegation of sexual assault for fear of being labeled a misogynist or enabler. 

We can support the #MeToo movement and not support allegations of sexual assault that do not ring true. If these two positions cannot coexist, the movement is no more than a hit squad. 

A guy from Brooklyn explains to the government what needs to be done

This is how I talk, so God bless him (and fuck "the greedy cocksuckers"!):

And it's getting close to class consciousness!

 

Threadgill's in Austin closes

I saw the sad news from a friend on FB.  Janis Joplin sang here when she was a student at UT Austin in the 1960s, but, more importantly, the place served up really good Southern cooking (chicken-fried steak anyone?), and it was inexpensive and fun.  When we lived in Austin, from 1995 to 2008, we used to go there often with our kids, since as loud as they were, Threagill's was louder, plus it had tons of stuff they liked too.

1 out of 5 (or 6) working people in the United States has lost their job in roughy the last month...

...and that is a fact that will have serious social and political consequences, and not necessarily good ones. It's hopeful that a solid majority of Americans, according to a new Pew poll, believe Trump botched the response to the new virus (he obviously botched the response, but in America, one can only expect about two-thirds of Americans to recognize what is obvious), but whether that will affect the November election it's far too soon to say.  But that's not the immediate issue:  the immediate issue is that people without jobs, without income, and without hope are not likely to be tolerant of a prolonged shutdown.   It's easy for "white collar" workers, including academics, to deal with quarantine, since they can often do their job remotely, and are less likely to have lost their job unlike, for example, the restaurant, factory, hotel, and domestic workers.  It would be a mistake to think these latter folks are simply going to spend extra time on twitter sharing jokes and memes when they may have lost the ability to pay rent and buy food.   This could be a "long, hot summer" if these millions of Americans don't get relief from the government or get the opportunity to work again.  Factor in that in some parts of the country many of those newly deprived of livelihood may also be heavily armed, and this is a very dangerous brew.   Since the government, which is under the control of the imprudent wing of the ruling class, is unlikely to come to the real rescue, there will have to be a relaxation of the shutdowns or else we will be looking at civil unrest unlike anything since 1967, and it won't be confined to the urban poor either.

ADDENDUM:  Of course, "Wall Street feasts on death," as it usually does!

Mentally ill raving reactionary happens to be right about coronavirus...

...and so is featured in the NYT, thus effectively legitimizing someone who belongs in a cell.

"ICU Psychosis" and doubts about patient autonomy

A completely fascinating (and, at points, horrifying) account by philosopher Cheryl Misak (Toronto) of her experience being on a ventilator, and the questions it raises about the ability of patients in such conditions to participate in care decisions.

22 million unemployed in the U.S. in the last month...

...which probably means that total U.S. unemployment is around 20%.   If that level of unemployment lasts or increases, we are heading towards trouble in this benighted country.

Allegory for capitalism?

German zoo may have to feed some animals to others.

(I owe the post title to a friend on FB.)

"Precarity capitalism"

Helpful review of what sounds like a worthwhile book.

Fucking moron watch: Louisiana pastor to hold Easter services for 2,000...

...and he's even explicit about his "thinking":

“Satan and a virus will not stop us,” Rev. Tony Spell told Reuters. “God will shield us from all harm and sickness. We are not afraid. We are called by God to stand against the Antichrist creeping into America’s borders. We will spread the Gospel"....

“Like any zealot or like any pure religious person, death looks to them like a welcome friend. True Christians do not mind dying. They fear living in fear,” Spell told TMZ in an interview this week.

Our fascination with apocalyptic scenarios

Philosopher Stephen De Wizje (Manchester) comments.

Migrant workers, including undocumented ones, now deemed "essential" workers by DHS...

...which, of course, they are and were despite their mistreatment by the government and employers.

When polio was epidemic

A PBS documentary, that features, among others, the late philosopher Lawrence Becker (who taught for many years at both Hollins College and the College of William & Mary [due to polio, he had no use of his arms, but he typed all his manuscrips with his toes]).

(Thanks to Jim Klagge for the pointer.)

"Capitalism, Social Democracy and Socialism: Which is Right for America?": the debate video is now online

Here.  (I noted previously that the texts of the opening statements were available here.)   I haven't watched the video, but I do recall one mistake I made:  I should not have seemed to agree with Professor Caplan that social security should be means-tested.  Social security is a social insurance scheme, everyone contributes, and everyone collects from it.  It is not charity, but insurance. The fact that everyone collects from the insurance scheme they contributed to is another reason it is such a popular political program, a point I did make.

One curious bit during the Q&A was a fellow who was quite incensed that I pointed out, correctly, that the capitalist ruling class in Germany supported Hitler because they were afraid of genuine socialists (not social democrats).  My point--which alas Professor Caplan steadfastly ignored--is that a serious discussion of the merits of capitalism or socialism should not be based on the bad behavior of self-proclaimed capitalists or socialists. 

It was striking that Professor Caplan did not have any real reply to my basic point about the logic of capitalism:

[C]apitalist producers must reduce their costs, for if they don’t, their competitors will do so and then drive them out of business.  Since the logic of capitalism demands reduction of production costs, and since the wages of most people under capitalism are simply “production costs” to be reduced or eliminated, this cannot end well.   The only humane alternative is socialism, that is, ultimately taking collective control of the immense productive power that capitalism generates, so that its purpose is not the endless pursuit of profit, but producing what human beings need to live and flourish.

ADDENDUM:   During the debate, Professor Caplan responded to my observation that Pinochet was also a huge fan of "Chicago School" free-market economics.  (My point, again, was that the professed allies of capitalism and socialism are irrelevant to a serious discussion.)   Professor Caplan offered the rather ghoulish response that Pinochet only killed about 3,000 people during his reign of fascist terror.   Defense-by-body-count is not really my cup of tea, but if you go that route, the population of Chile at that time (about 9 million people) is relevant:  by way of comparison, it would be the equivalent of murdering more than 90,000 Americans for political reasons (and more than 750,000 tortured--see below).   S. Wallerstein, a longtime reader from Chile, also wrote with some useful additional information:

The official figure is 3,227 killed and disappeared and 28,459 tortured.  Those figures underestimate the total because in order to be listed family members had to file a report (for which they received a small pension,   which is an incentive of course) in the case of those killed and disappeared, and the victims of torture also had to file a report (for which they received a small pension too), but in many cases,  especially that of women who were almost always raped or sexually abused during the torture, no report was filed.   

If you want to use the figures, the sources are two "non-partisan" commissions, one on deaths and disappearances and the second on torture (headed by a Catholic bishop), called the Rettig Commission  and the Valech Commission  respectively.  Looking a bit more, I see that since the original commissions, they have found 30 new cases of deaths and disappearances and 9795 new cases of torture.  

Some reading about epidemics of the past

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--COMMENTS NOW OPEN FOR OTHER SUGGESTIONS

Dr. Roger Albin (Michigan) writes:

As you publicized the Snowden podcast and as many of your audience are probably compulsive readers looking for useful and engaging reading material, the following may be of interest:

Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome – which deals extensively with the impacts of epidemic disease on the later Roman Empire.

JR MacNeill’s Mosquito Empire – disease impacts in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

Elizabeth Fenn’s Pox Americana – on the Smallpox epidemic roughly coincident with the American Revolution and its considerable consequences.

Charles Mann’s more popular books on the impacts of the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere contain a lot of relevant material on one of the most consequential processes in modern history. 

As Harper makes abundantly clear in his fine book, epidemic disease often interacted with climate fluctuations.  Two excellent books that deal with the impacts of climate fluctuations and epidemic disease:

Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis – a comprehensive overview of the misnamed Little Ice Age centered on the 17^th century. 

John Brooke’s Climate Change and the Course of Global History – a remarkably ambitious overview. 

People aren't that "irrational"

Philosopher Kevin Dorst (Pittsburgh/Oxford) makes some very good points here; here's the crux of his argument (but the whole essay is worth a read):

In short, there is a widespread tendency to treat human deviations from standard economic models as symptoms of bias and irrationality. That is what I’m contesting. I’ll do that by arguing three things. First, deviations from such models are often perfectly rational; second, this is true of at least some widely-maligned “biases”; and third, it follows that until we scrutinize and refine the applications of such models, we will not know how many of the putative biases are truly indicators of irrationality. (To be clear: these claims don’t cast doubt on the importance of the turn from classical to behavioral economics—what they cast doubt on is the irrationalist interpretation of that turn.)

Epidemics in historical perspective

Philosopher Steve Sverdlik (SMU) called my attention to this interesting podcast with a Yale historian, made before the current pandemic.

Why the states trump Trump in most respects when it comes to the coronavirus response

Here's a very good explanation of the state of the law from a well-known public law expert, Dan Farber (Berkeley).  (We touched briefly on this the other day here.)  As I wrote ten days ago, it's "good news" right now that the U.S. is a "federal system" (at least if you're lucky enough to live in a state with competent leadership).  Trump can talk about "opening up the economy" by Easter (which is insane), but he can't actually do it, only the states can.

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

Support independent bookshops during the pandemic

A suggestion from philosopher David Velleman:

If people are worried about their local independent bookstores during the crisis — or even under normal conditions — they should consider buying their books from https://bookshop.org. This site enables independent bookstores to set up their own sites within the bookshop.org domain, with all fulfillment functions performed by a third party; and in addition to the returns the bookstores earn from their bookshop.org sites, they share in a pool of returns earned by sales from the central bookstore.org site. If your book its not yet available on bookstore.org, you can become an affiliate and list the book on your own sales site. You will then earn a share of the sales, but if you already link to your books on Amazon from your personal home page, you can switch those links to bookshop.org and format them in such a way that the earnings will go to your local independent bookstore instead, if they are also affiliates. (The format is https://bookshop.org/a/xxxx/yyyyyyyyyyyyy where xxxx is the bookshop.org affiliate number of the store and yyyyyyyyyyyyy is the ISBN-13 number of the book.)

Leiter v. Trump

A funny message, from longtime reader Larry Franz:

Thank you for your COVID-19 posts. The public needs reliable information like you've been providing. We also need TV networks to stop giving the president free access to misinform the public. He's a risk to public health.

Alas, I can only address one of these issues!