Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

QAnon and survey responses

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

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

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

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

OUP will no longer print its own books...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 10:  UPDATED

...after more than 500 years of printing!

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

Philosophy as the "handmaiden of the human resources" department

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

Interesting UK decision under their Equality Act...

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

(Thanks to James Ladyman for the pointer.)

Interesting autobiographical interview with Amartya Sen...

...at the Harvard Gazette.

A Marxist movement within the Democratic Socialists of America

Hard to quarrel with this:

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

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

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

...at The New Yorker.

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

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

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

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

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

SAT scores and socioeconomic class

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

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

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

The *other* Nuremberg trials...

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

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

An interesting tale.

(Thanks to Christopher Morris for the pointer.)

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

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

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

A great Bob Dylan story

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

How to include transgender athletes in competitive sports

A proposal from philosopher Chris Suprenant (New Orleans).

The use-mention distinction and the N-word

Philosopher Gerald Dworkin comments.

The Canadian "eh" and other bits of linguistic diversity

An informative and amusing website from Yale.

Shostakovich and his music in Leningrad during WWII

Philosopher Alex Miller (Otago) tells the story.

"Indigenous science" is bad science

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

(Thanks to Mike G. for the pointer.)

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

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

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

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

Changes in the Zeitgeist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cancel culture watch, Human Rights Watch edition

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

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

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

On the etymology of the "N-word"

This is fascinating and informative.

Dembroff v. Singer

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

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

UPDATE:  A philosopher elsewhere writes:

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

On the Blake Bailey biography of Philip Roth

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

Peter Singer interviewed...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From a recent NYT column of his:

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

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

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

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

The stunning verdict in the killing of George Floyd

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

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

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

The crisis of the New York City college prep schools

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

These people are all out of their minds

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

"Anywhere out of this world," said Baudelaire.

Hope for America?

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

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

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

Bolsonaro's crime against humanity

What a despicable monster.

Words of wisdom from the late Marshall Sahlins, the famed anthropologist who died last week

Quoted here:  "We all die and we are all wrong. A good career is when the former happens before the latter."

A list of people "cancelled"

Probably overinclusive, but a useful counterweight to those invested in denying the phenomenon.  (The latter is a mix of the benighted and those who are themselves cancellers.)

(Thanks to Mark Couch for the pointer.)

ADDENDUM:  On the distinguishing features of the "cancellation" phenomenon (which is partly fueld by the Internet), see earlier discussions here and here.

The best thing about the late Prince Philip...

...was that he was a window into how the British ruling class really thinks. For that, he will be missed by me!

Who doesn't use the Internet?

Almost everyone in the U.S. does, but age, poverty, lack of education, and living in rural areas are the best predictors of not using the Internet at all (and even then, the vast majority in each group do use it).

What the heck is going on in the Evanston, IL schools?

Evanston is a suburb just north of Chicago, where Northwestern University is located.  This interview with a parent there makes the school district sound like a nuthouse, a place where Ibram Kendi isn't viewed as a slightly ridiculous "anti-racism" grifter, but is instead the intellectual lodestar.  The interview is with Ndona Muboyayi, a parent, and member of the NAACP Evanston/North Shore Branch.  From the interview:

Mboyayi: One day my daughter told me she was taught that all white people are privileged and part of a system of white supremacy. My son said the same thing. So I reached out to my daughter’s teacher to find out what exactly was being taught. It was pretty much like she said: that all white people were part of this system of white supremacy, and that all white people, because of the color of their skin, had privilege. I said, “But that's not true.” And the teacher said, “Well, what do you mean?”

I have traveled a lot. My father was a university professor and taught in both the United States and Paris, France. And when I visited, I saw white people in public housing. I’ve been to Belgium and Switzerland and seen very poor white people. I’ve visited other parts of Europe. I lived in Canada for 10 years. There are poor white people in Canada as well. I’m not saying systemic racism doesn’t exist, but class exists too, and I don’t believe that all white people have privilege. That white person who’s living in the Appalachian Mountains, who has no means or prospect of changing their situation—do they, too, have privilege? Compared to me and my kids?

UPDATE:  An Evanston resident and parent of kids in the public schools there  writes:  “Your comment about Ibram Kendi isn't off the mark at all. Evanston Township High School's Family Action Network actually had Kendi on campus twice to give talks, once in 2018 and 2019. In 2020 they doubled down by having huckster Robin DiAngelo come and give a talk. The last thing you want to be caught doing in this town is questioning the dominant ideology."

An inside look at how the "anti-racism grift" is undermining radical politics

A case study of the Chicago chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.

Biden's infrastructure plan will be good for higher education

This is what normal governments, interested in societal welfare, do:  they spend money improving societal conditions, including higher education.  In addition to $50 million for the National Science Foundation,

Historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions would also be in for more funding under the proposal. The plan calls for a $10 billion investment in research and development and $15 billion to create 200 research incubators at those institutions, with the framing that those investments could eliminate racial and gender inequities in R&D and STEM. Of the $40 billion dedicated to improving research infrastructure and laboratories, half would be set aside specifically for HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions.

This is far more sensible than all the "diversity blather," and will ultimately contribute not to "diversity" but to opportunity and advancement for the primary victims of world-historic injustice in the United States.

Faces reveal political orientation?

Maybe so.  Who hasn't noticed that Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Sean Hannity...there's something "off" about those faces?   The return of (gasp) physiognomy?

(Thanks to Blake Myers for the pointer to the article.)

On the expanding concept of "anti-semitism"

This essay makes the right points about the ludicrous expansion and weaponization of the concept to silence critics of Israel.

Yes, Canada is a small country, but it's still surprising that the Prime Minister is responding to a professor on Twitter...

...with about 9,000 followers.  California has more people than Canada, but I don't recall the Governor there bothering to speak out about any mid-sized Twitter accounts!  I guess I better make sure the Illinois Governor doesn't follow me on Twitter!

(Thanks to Joshua Selby for the pointer.)

ADDENDUM:  Someone on Twitter points out the most likely explanation for this:  "Not surprising for Canadians: an easy (and high profile) win for a federalist prime minister about to call an election and reliant on Quebec votes."

AI that can argue with humans?

Meet "Project Debater."

(Thanks to Jerry Dworkin for the pointer.  Jerry sent this to me with a subject line reading "machines that can argue with humans."  I replied:  "Aren't those called 'analytic philosophers'?"  Jerry retorted:  "No. Those are called machine guns. They fire rapidly mostly missing their target and often injuring innocent bystanders.")

Appellate court's decision on Equal Pay Act claim by faculty member...

...may have significant ramifications for retention offers to faculty.

"The Onion" on the bizarre comments by the police on the arrest of the mass shooter in Atlanta

Sadly apt.

The Twitter smear campaign against journalist Jesse Singal

Speaking of Twitter fabrications, this is a useful catalogue of Twitter lies about journalist Jesse Singal, who has had the audacity to write articles on verboten topics (like this). 

Bullshitters more likely to fall for bullshit

Philosopher Christian Miller (Wake Forest) comments on some recent research.

The saga of the NY Times reporter fired for mentioning someone's use of the N-word

An interesting saga, symptom of our times, but this is really the best part and it is very true:

I’m publishing my thoughts here on Medium because I know journalists.

We make America what it is — without a free press, democracy dies. But we’re still jackals. We can befriend you for years, and then bite off your arm just as you’re offering us a treat. We can’t help it. It’s the nature of the job.

At the highest levels, like Watergate, it’s about digging for the truth, no matter what corrupt government official it hurts. At the basest level, when even the crummiest scandal erupts, you have to repeat the accusation, even if you know it’s untrue or half-true, in order to explain the truth — no matter how much you may personally like the source you’re hurting....

Since January 28, I’ve been a jackal circled by jackals. Since not every journalist gets quotes right, on the rare occasions in my life that I’ve answered journalists’ questions, I’ve tried to do so in writing. That way, either they get it right or I can prove I was misquoted....

How the powerful use "identity" as a shield from criticism

Greenwald--who has become a mostly unreadable narcissist--is actually pretty funny and apt on this topic; He uses, as his initial example, a hack NYT journalist, Taylor Lorenz:

[One] reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people....

She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page for eight months, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has “reported” on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a New York Times journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation.

Some further thoughts on Twitter

The first round of observations was so popular (especially on Twitter!), I thought I'd add a few more based on things I've learned and observed the last couple of months.

1.  I came across this interesting chart via Justin Weinberg's blog, which shows that the vast majority of U.S. adults do not use Twitter at all (thank God!), and that usage varies, unsurprisingly, by generation.  38% of those 18-29 use Twitter (the highest percentage), while only 7% of those over 65 use it.  I'm in the distinct minority in my age range (only 17% of those 50-64 use it), and I mostly use it to provide links to the blog for the benefit the readers who now follow the blog by Twitter. 

2.  This data is consistent with an e-mail shared on Twitter awhile back by the journalist Jesse Singal: 

"[T]he vast majority of both psychologically healthy and accomplished philosophers stay off twitter like their life depends on it. The vast majority of people I know in academic philosophy either ignore, mock, or disdain philosophy twitter." - professional philosopher in email

Although many Twitterati reacted with rage and denial to Mr. Singal's tweet, the claim about "the vast majority" is consistent with the data about usage by age alone.  (Are the non-users psychologically healthier and more accomplished?  Probably, but the preceding data are neutral on that.)   I strongly suspect that relatively few non-Twitter users "mock or disdain philosophy twitter" (although that would be a warranted response were they to look), and that most simply ignore it.