Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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

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

The American system of legalized bribery of public officials

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

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

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

The political ads in the Kansas abortion referendum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reed on Black Lives Matter

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

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

Ireland's experience with a constitutional abortion ban

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

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

Fetterman, the Democrat for Senate in Pennsylvania

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

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

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

...are women.  What a relief!

On growing up in communist Albania, and the aftermath

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

Pebbles can make landslides

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder

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

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

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

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

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

"The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Thanks to Glenn Branch for the pointer.)

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

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

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

The massacre of innocents near Chicago.

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

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

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

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

Life in Kyiv during wartime

Philosopher Aaron Wendland reports on his impressions.

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

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

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

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

Meet Kelley Watt of Tulsa, Oklahoma...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Double jeopardy, again

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

"Identity politics" neoliberalism meets millenial narcissism

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

Sentience isn't conversation

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

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

Law professor Thomas Crocker (South Carolina) comments.

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

This is bizarre:

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

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

"Disability is not an identity"...

...and other thoughts.

UPDATE:  This link without comment seems to have been more controversial than most.  I think the piece is interesting, but a mixed bag, but c'est la vie!   Here's a response via Twitter.

On the perpetrators of mass shootings in the U.S.

Some interesting points, including that media attention to mass shootings generates more of them; an excerpt:

POLITICO: Since you both spend much of your time studying mass shootings, I wonder if you had the same stunned and horrified reaction as the rest of us to the Uvalde elementary school shooting. Or were you somehow expecting this?

Jillian Peterson: On some level, we were waiting because mass shootings are socially contagious and when one really big one happens and gets a lot of media attention, we tend to see others follow....

POLITICO: Are you saying there’s a link between the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings?

Peterson: We don’t know for sure at this point, but our research would say that it’s likely. You had an 18-year-old commit a horrific mass shooting [in Buffalo]. His name is everywhere and we all spend days talking about “replacement theory.” That shooter was able to get our attention. So, if you have another 18-year-old who is on the edge and watching everything, that could be enough to embolden him to follow. We have seen this happen before.

Densley: Mass shooters study other mass shooters. They often find a way of relating to them, like, “There are other people out there who feel like me.”

No more vacations in South Carolina...

...after this.   Really, civilized people should just boycott states with inadequate gun control measures.  That's more than half the country, of course.

CLARIFICATION:  The boy who was killed was from New Hampshire, but he was shot (literally at random) while on vacation in South Carolina (Florence County).

"Diversity statements" are still in (justified) legal peril...

...notwithstanding dissembling law professors.  CHE invited me to expand my letter to the editor, so I did.

The "universality" of classics

An interesting exchange between Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Classics, Princeton) and Solveig Gold, who was an undergraduate in classics at Princeton and now a graduate student at Cambridge University (she is also now the spouse of Joshua Katz).    Gold writes:

Classics is not about white people and Classics does not belong  to white people. The first is a question of how we read, the second, of who does the reading.

Classics is not about white people because the authors in our canon do not purport to be writing about white people. They and most of their characters may be white, but their stated goal is never to offer an account of the “white race,” an identity that would have meant nothing to them: it is to raise questions and tell stories that, they hope, grasp at truths transcending one place, period, or people.

An immodest proposal on guns

Blinn Combs, a philosopher-turned-lawyer in Texas, posted the following on Facebook and kindly gave permission to share it here:

Please, for the love of sanity, please stop saying conciliatory shit to people who'd just as soon see your children gunned down at school.

 

We ABSOLUTELY DO NOT HAVE two radical fringe extremes in what passes for the gun debate. We have one party dominated by absolute lunatics who've been pushing for years toward a lawless, dystopian, gun-infested, violence-saturated state.

 

And we have a feckless opposition party that demands ineffective, mindless half-measures. No matter what those feeble-minded fools in the democratic party say, they'll be painted by the lunatics on the other side as gun-banning anti-American radicals.

 

The problem is that we do absolutely need actual radicals. Actual living, breathing, and most of all THINKING people to demand actual, radical change, just to bring us into minimally civilized alignment with the rest of the world. We must stop endless, stupid debates about the meaning of the Second Amendment. The Heller decision should have signaled the end of polite debate, because it was and is a total farce.

 

But whatever Blackstone or Jefferson or Madison said, we need urgently to recognize that the 2nd Amendment was--and was understood to be at its drafting--a reactionary farce that died within a decade of its birth, and now lies rotten in its grave, hauting us as the ground of a right-wing death pact. There's a reason that only one other country in the benighted world has anything like it--Mexico. And they quite rightly read it as compatible with having all of one heavily-regulated state-owned gun story in the entire country. But we've long-since passed the point where such reasonable means are sufficient. We should, by all means, organize to repeal the 2nd Amendment. But here's what we should also do:

 

Adam Gopnik on American's gun insanity, back in 2012

Still true, and I suspect will still be true ten years from now:

After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)

The Australian federal election

The "Liberal" party (the party of the right, although as we 've noted before, they're basically Democrats in U.S. terms) was roundly defeated, while a Labor Prime Minister was elected, albeit without a majority in the legislature.   The Greens and the "Teal Independents" both showed an increased share of the vote, allegedly reflecting increasing anxiety about climate change.  (Of course, if Achen & Bartels are right, this explanation is too simple.)   At a time when some countries (the U.S., the U.K., Poland, Hungary) are veering to the right, it's nice to see another veering to something resembling the left.

A propos nothing...

...but the Internet threw this at me, and I must say it's very weird!  Bottom line:  do not forage for mushrooms, ever.

Adolph Reed on "antiracist" politics: neither left, nor egalitarian, nor democratic

His latest here; an excerpt:

The class character of antiracist clientelism is even more transparent than its fin-de–siècle progenitor’s. Its proponents can defend the assertion that racism is the fundamental determinant of life chances for black Americans only via a sleight-of-hand that divests slavery and Jim Crow of their historical specificity as discrete systems of economic and social relations and construes them as almost incidental extrusions of a transcendent racism or white supremacy or, even more tendentiously, in a devil theory positing that all human history has been driven by an ontological anti-blackness. Having transmogrified material social relations into attitudes, putative evidence that such attitudes persist supports assertions that “nothing” has changed since 1619 or 1919.18 It is telling that commitment to that argument subordinates providing concrete causal accounts of how current inequalities are thereby produced and reproduced to taxonomizing apparent racial disparities as instances of the workings of trans-historical racism or white supremacy. This perspective minimizes the significance of political-economic changes since 1965, including deindustrialization, the panoply of regressive policy developments associated with neoliberalization, and the significance of the marked increases in occupational, income, and wealth stratification among African Americans.19 The point of this politics is not to identify and pursue strategies to attack inequalities or injustices affecting black Americans but to make certain that they are understood as stemming from an evanescent racism. An implication is that only inequalities that can be attributed to specifically racial sources are a proper matter for concern. Combined with the central focus on addressing racial disparities within the existing capitalist class hierarchy, those characteristics of contemporary antiracism underscore the extent to which it is a class program.

Abortion, involuntary servitude, specific performance

Philosopher/lawyer Alec Walen (Rutgers) comments.

Philosopher Erin Kelly (Tufts) wins Pulitzer Prize...

...for a co-authored biography of an African-American artist who survived the Jim Crow South.

(Thanks to Afton Greco for the pointer.)

Abortion, religion and SCOTUS, redux

A propos this, Professor Rick Garnett (Law, Notre Dame) writes:

[I]t is not clear why the claim "human fetuses are moral subjects and this fact constrains what should be done with and to them" is any more "religious", or any less "moral", than the claim "all human beings are moral equals, regardless of race, and should be treated as such in law." 

The only people who are obsessed with protecting fertilized eggs and early stage fetuses are religious people, usually of a certain orthodox variety (mostly Christian in this country).  Professor Garnett is correct that his second claim about human equality also has a religious origin, which is why Nietzsche hoped that kind of moral egalitarianism would die along with God.  Unlike Nietzsche, I'm a moral egalitarian, despite being the least religious person in every other respect:   as Nietzsche also understood (in other contexts), moral attitudes are matters of deeply ingrained habits of feeling, that easily outlast their supposed justifications.   Fortunately, the egalitarian attitudes have, so far, survived the death of God:  in that sense, moral egalitarianism has become secularized.  But the pro-embryo movement has not become secularized in that way (where are its secular adherents?  why are 99.9% of its proponents religious?), and it really defies credulity for anyone to suggest that a conservative Catholic upbringing would not produce profound antipathy towards abortion that would influence, perhaps not consciously, how a judge approaches any case that presents an opportunity to restrict its legal availability.

ADDENDUM:  Here's what conservative Catholics would really like the super-legislature to do!  I trust even Professor Garnett would acknowledge the role of religious conviction in that position.

"Abortion and Women's Rights," a 1970 film

Via Rogers Smith (Penn) on Facebook, I came across this striking, short documentary, about a past that may yet become the future in large parts of the country.

If Roe is overruled, what's next?

Illuminating discussion from law professor Michael Dorf (Cornell).

On the now likely prospect that Roe v. Wade is overruled by SCOTUS, i.e., the super-legislature

The leaked opinion overruling Roe v. Wade (1973) (and also the later Casey opinion [1992], affirming the "core" holding of Roe) written by the right-wing Catholic justice Samuel Alito of the U.S. Supreme Court was most probably leaked by an abortion opponent worried that some of the other conservative Catholics who had joined the draft of Alito's opinion (Justices Coney Barrett, Gorsuch*, Kavanaugh, and Thomas) might defect (Thomas was certainly not a risk for defecting, the others possibly).  (see Joey Fishkin [UCLA] on Twitter for this hypothesis.)   As my colleague Geoffrey Stone observed regarding a badly reasoned 2007 anti-abortion decision by SCOTUS:

What, then, explains this decision? Here is a painfully awkward observation: All five justices in the majority in Gonzales are Catholic. The four justices who are either Protestant or Jewish all voted in accord with settled precedent. It is mortifying to have to point this out. But it is too obvious, and too telling, to ignore.

This time around one conservative Catholic (Chief Justice Roberts) was missing, but as recent years have shown, he is nervous about the  Supreme Court being treated as the super-legislature it is.  Stone's analysis generated an uproar, but it was correct then, as it would be correct now:  someone with a conservative Catholic upbringing will of course regard abortion as verboten, and will thus find attractive--even without recognizing their real motivations--any colorable legal arguments that return the question of its permissibility to the legislative process (knowing full well, of course, that its availability will be restricted as a result).  (To understand how reactionary Justice Alito is please note that as a young alumnus in his 20s of Princeton University he joined in the early 1970s the "Conservative Alumni of Princeton," a group formed in reaction to Princeton admitting women!)