Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Kanye West and Hitler

To the extent I even noticed Mr. West previously, he struck me as a talentless, ignorant buffoon, like many successful purveyors of "popular" music.   His recent forays into anti-semitism and Nazi sympathizing have put this absurd person back into the news.  One of the better commentaries on this grotesque  display comes from John Ganz; an excerpt:

While all these far-right goonies play constant games, equivocate, make bad faith disavowals, or employ euphemisms, Kanye doesn’t have the time, inclination, or ability to do all that. He just says the underlying truth of this kind of politics: he likes the Nazis! Yes, he pretty much said this verbatim, “I like the Nazis.” It was too much even for [Alex] Jones.

The "for-profit" hospice industry sounds like bad news

This is a rather depressing report, but it's worth reading fora nyone who is confronting end-of-life decisions for someone.

Otto Neurath on "scientific management"

This was an aspect of his work with which I was unfamiliar.  Comments from those more knowledgeable about the accuracy of this account welcome.

Law schools and USNews.com rankings

Readers will have heard about the revolt (which now seems to be petering out) against the awful USNews.com law school rankings (which involve inexplicable weightings of a dozen different variables, many involving self-reported data of dubious reliability).  For those interested, I've been covering it on my law school blog:   here, here, here, and here.

Were you wondering about the sexual behaviors and orientations of Cambridge University undergraduates?

I wasn't either, but this was still amusing (including the fact that philosophy students had the most sexual partners of any major).

The "sociology" of literary studies

Reader Scott Newstok called my attention to this very interesting LRB review essay of John Guillory's latest attempt to look at the history and organization of literary studies as a field.  A brief excerpt:

For Guillory, the pivotal development in the whole story was the arrival of ‘criticism’ as the dominant approach in the 1920s and 1930s, whether in the form of I.A. Richards’s ‘practical criticism’ in the UK or the New Critics’ ‘close reading’ in the US. This is when, in his view, literary studies became a discipline. But the attempt to turn criticism into a regulated and self-replicating profession generated all kinds of tensions, and Guillory urges that many of the issues agitating the field in recent decades are best seen as a working out of these tensions. For example, ‘criticism’ never quite shook off the aspiration to be in some way the criticism of society, not just literature, saddling the activity with exaggerated ambitions still evident today. At the same time, the logic of professionalism required a form of specialisation, a process carried further in the pressures towards intradisciplinary specialisation, which for the past 150 years has tended to take the form of expertise in the literature of a particular period. Even where the most ambitious conception of the discipline retains some overarching claim to underwrite the criticism of society, the cross-grained pressures of professionalisation demand ever greater subdivision: not to specialise is to risk one’s professional status by reverting to being an ‘amateur’.

A similar story might be told about academic philosophy in America one suspects, with the pivotal moment being the logical positivist invasion and takeover of America after WWII.  Thought on Guillory's analysis (or Collini's review) from those more knowledgeable about literary studies welcome (as well as thoughts about the relevance to philosophy).

 

"Salt of the Earth," a blacklisted 1954 movie, makes perfect Thanksgiving day entertainment...

...for those observing the American holiday today (originally posted in 2018):

Based on an actual strike by Mexican-American workers against a zinc mining company, it is set in New Mexico, and uses actual mineworkers and their families in most of the main roles (including the male lead, Juan Chacon--his wife was played by a professional actress, however).   The movie is strongly pro-union, unsurprisingly, but much more  surprisingly, it has a strong pro-feminist twist, that wouldn't have been surprising in 1975, say, but is remarkable for 1954 (I won't spoil that part, you'll have to watch it).  The main writers and directors were blacklisted for refusing to cooperate with the fascist McCarthy Committee, but like other communist sympathizers at the time, they were, in ethical sensibility, well ahead of their time.  (At the end, the movie reveals which actors were "professionals" and which locals--there are several surprises.)

UPDATE:  Readers who enjoy the film may also find this website interesting.

American exceptionalism?

Here's a chart, make of it what you will:

Country	Homicide rate per 100,000	Covid deaths per 100,000	Per capita GDP	GINI coefficient (higher=more inequality)	Military expenditures per capita (2019)
United States	4.96	326.90	$69,287	41.50	$2,224
United Kingdom	1.20	312.41	$47,334	35.10	$  720
Ireland	0.87	164.87	$99,152	30.60	$  228
Australia	0.89	62.77	$59,934	34.30	$1,028
Singapore	0.16	29.04	$72,794	36.00	$1,932
Brazil	27.38	324.10	$  7,518	48.90	$  128
Germany	0.95	188.34	$50,801	31.70	$  590
Switzerland	0.59	163.03	$93,457	33.10	$  603
Chile	4.40	325.20	$16,502	44.90	$  273
Israel	1.49	136.44	$51,430	38.60	$2,402

Is it "effective" altruism to give money to Republicans?

SBF did, as well as to conservative Democrats.

Did Bankman-Fried and his parents need $121 million worth of property in the Bahamas?

I do wonder how his friends in the "Effective [sic] Altruism" movement thought about choices like these.

Why billionaires love "Effective [sic] Altruism"...

...at The New Republic.

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

The ten "most regretted" college majors

Some deserving ones on the list, some surprising ones; this is by percentage of those who majored in a subject who would now have picked a different one:

1.  Journalism (87%)

2.  Sociology (72%)

3.  Liberal arts/general studies (72%) [not sure how this is defined]

4.  Communications (64%)

5.  Education (61%)

6.  Marketing management & research (60%)

7.  Medical/clinical assisting (58%)

8.  Political science/government (56%)

9.  Biology (52%)

9.  English language & literature (52%)

Curious what readers make of this list. 

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  As Professor Mayer points out in the comments, this is based on a survey of “job seekers,” so not at all a representative sample of colleges graduates.  

The threat to academic freedom in teaching and research from the "woke" thought police, an ongoing saga

A biologist at Williams College recounts her experience:

We each have our own woke tipping point—the moment you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism. For me that moment came in 2018, during an invited speaker talk, when the religious scholar Reza Aslan stated that “we need to write on a stone what can and cannot be discussed in colleges.” Students gave this a standing ovation.  Having been born under dictatorship in Brazil, I was alarmed....

Let’s start with teaching. I need to emphasize that this is not hypothetical. The censorious, fearful climate is already affecting the content of what we teach.

One of the most fundamental rules of biology from plants to humans is that the sexes are defined by the size of their gametes—that is, their reproductive cells. Large gametes occur in females; small gametes in males. In humans, an egg is 10 million times bigger than a sperm. There is zero overlap. It is a full binary. 

But in some biology 101 classes, teachers are telling students that sexes—not gender, sex—are on a continuum. At least one college I know teaches with the “gender unicorn” and informs students that it is bigoted to think that humans come in two distinct and discrete sexes. 

The "glories" of Empire

A useful reminder:

Elkins’s catalog of British interrogation methods is extensive and horrifying: inserting needles under fingernails (Malaya); stuffing oil-soaked sand into a man’s mouth (Palestine); inserting “gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, sticks, and hot eggs up men’s rectums and into women’s vaginas” (Kenya); pouring large quantities of water up someone’s nose (Palestine); applying electric shocks from car batteries (Kenya); tightening iron rings around a person’s head (Cyprus); subjecting prisoners to intense noise (Northern Ireland); and applying a lighted cigarette to the testicles (Palestine).

Thank God for civilization!

"Effective [sic] Altruists" treat girls like "meat" just like guys who don't posture so much

I think that's a fair summary of this:

EA circles...are widely incestous where people mix their work life (in EA cause areas), their often polyamorous love life and social life in one amalgomous mix without strict separations. This is the default status quo. This means that if you’re a reasonably attractive woman entering an EA community, you get a ton of sexual requests to join polycules, often from poly and partnered men. Some of these men control funding for projects and enjoy high status in EA communities and that means there are real downsides to refusing their sexual advances and pressure to say yes, especially if your career is in an EA cause area or is funded by them.....

From experience it appears that, a ‘no’ once said is not enough for many men in EA. Having to keep replenishing that ‘no’ becomes annoying very fast, and becomes harder to give informed consent when socializing in the presence of alcohol/psychedelics. It puts your safety at risk. From experience, EA as a community, has very little respect for monogamy and many men, often competing with each other, will persuade you to join polyamory using LessWrong style jedi mindtricks while they stand to benefit from the erosion of your boundaries. (Edit: I have personally experienced this more than three times in less than one year of attending EA events and that is far too many times. )

Why did the Democrats do relatively well: the Michigan experience

A longtime reader in Michigan shared these interesting observations: 

Democratic (both in the party affiliation and strict senses) politicians did particularly well in Michigan.

1. All state-wide offices (Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State) went to the Democratic candidates.
2. Democrats have a (narrow) majority in the State House and State Senate.  This is the first time that Democrats control the Legislature and the Governor’s office in ~4 decades. 
3. A couple of Congressional districts thought to be toss-ups or Republican leaning went Democratic.  This includes the historically conservative Grand Rapids area. 
4. Two major voter-initiated proposals to modify the State Constitution passed easily.  The nationally prominent one is modification of the constitution to preserve abortion access.  The other is likely just as important.  Rational voting access is now protected by the state constitution.  This step was taken to prevent our presently Republican dominated legislature from enacting more voting restrictions. 

How did this happen?  Three major factors:

2022 U.S. midterms post-mortem

So the big news is there was no Republican wave (although the Repugs will probably take the House), and the polls (which in 2016 and 2020) underestimated support for Trump and sometimes Republicans more generally, this time overstated their support.  The polls had the Pennsylvania Senate race basically tied, but in the end Fetterman, the social democrat in the mode of Bernie Sanders, looks to have beaten the absurd Dr. Oz by three percentage points.  Even more striking is the Wisconsin Governor race, where the Democratic incumbent beat the Trump-annointed Republican by more than three points despite polls showing a dead heat or the Republican ahead.  (This is important because the Repug legislature in Wisconsin has gerrymandered itself into permanent control.)   Even the awful incumbent Senator in Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, beat his Democratic challenge by only 1 point, despite polls showing a much bigger lead.

The only Senate loss for the Democrats looks to be in Nevada, where the incumbent will probably lose to a Republican from a brand-name family in Nevada politics.  (UPDATE:  I jumped the gun on this one, the Democratic incumbent is now leading, but there's still more than one third of the vote to be reported.)

Kathleen Stock reflects on last year's events

Interesting essay.  This was especially striking:

I still face the challenge of dealing with the fact that sections of my former profession and the press have a vested interest in winning the disinformation war about what a heinous villain I must be. Though I tend to insulate myself well from idiots, in occasional moments of weakness I take a look within the Twitter bubbles of others and immediately wish I hadn’t. Reading Academic Twitter can be like encountering your most critical inner voices spread out on the screen for everyone else to read too — except that for some reason, my inner voices now speak in fake American accents. They say “y’all”, and talk about “trans folks”, and call me a “grifter” for continuing to make my way in the world without collapsing into ignominy. I close the laptop and remind myself that there are various ways to be in a mental prison.

We noted one such disgraceful incident involving philosopher Bryan van Norden, for which he has not, at least as far I'm aware, apologized.

Meloni, the new Italian Prime Minister

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 3--SOME INTERESTING COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME

I've been in Rome over the last ten days (seminars and guest lectures, mostly at Roma Tre University, but also Rome Sapienza), where the weather has been remarkably mild (another "triumph" of global warming).  Meloni had her vote of confidence in parliament while I was here, and is now Prime Minister.  I've been talking to friends here about Meloni.  One, who said without hesitation that Meloni is a fascist, thought the democratic system was robust enough to resist backsliding.  She attributed the poor performance of the left parties to the fact that they spent all their time talking about "gay rights" and other social/cultural issues (my friend considers those issues important, just to be clear), and saying little about economic issues:  inflation, electricity costs, and so on.  Another friend pointed out that the President, who is a moderate, now has substantial power (a development of the last 20 years), and that will force Meloni to moderate her program accordingly.   A general view was that Meloni was far preferable to the other major figure on the far right, Matteo Salvini, variously described as an "idiot," a "buffoon," "incompetent" and so on. Comments from Italian readers or those knowledgeable about Italian politics welcome.

Chomsky on Dylan

A propos this, reader David Lobina calls my attention to this apt observation by Chomsky:

Just the other day I was sitting in a radio studio waiting for a satellite arrangement abroad to be set up. The engineers were putting together interviews with Bob Dylan from about 1966-7 or so (judging by the references), and I was listening (I’d never heard him talk before — if you can call that talking). He sounded as though he was so drugged he was barely coherent, but the message got through clearly enough through the haze. He said over and over that he’d been through all of this protest thing, realized it was nonsense, and that the only thing that was important was to live his own life happily and freely, not to “mess around with other people’s lives” by working for civil and human rights, ending war and poverty, etc. He was asked what he thought about the Berkeley “free speech movement” and said that he didn’t understand it. He said something like: “I have free speech, I can do what I want, so it has nothing to do with me. Period.” If the capitalist PR machine wanted to invent someone for their purposes, they couldn’t have made a better choice.

Bob Dylan is apparently a very unpleasant person

So I learned from this.  I rather like two periods in his output (roughly 1962-1966, and 1975-1976), but it did strike me as preposterous, even by the idiosyncratic standards of the Nobel Prize in literature, to award it to him.

(Thanks to John Doris for the pointer.)

More on the super-legislature's "diversity" in higher education case

Following up on yesterday's post, this NYT article makes clear that "color blindness" was not the point of Brown v. Board of Education:  race was used to denigrate and subordinate the disfavored race, that was the problem.  The use of race to advantage the subordinated race was not even on the table as a topic, for rather obvious reasons to anyone aware of the reality of race in American in the 1950s or the 1860s. 

Despite that, it's clear that diversity blather has exhausted itself (even in popular opinion), and produced a pathologically dishonest discussion of admissions and hiring in higher education.  We were much better off with the "quota" system that Bakke struck down (and which many other countries use), where it was absolutely clear what the goals were, which led to much less lying about the supposed "academic qualifications" of candidates.   

The brief arguing that the super-legislature should overrule Grutter (2003) and outlaw "diversity" in university admissions

The brief contains an interesting history of "holistic" admissions practices, among other things.  This also was striking (pp. 59-60):

Shortly after Grutter was decided, the defendant in that case confessed that he had pressed “the ‘diversity’ rationale” as a litigation strategy. Bollinger, A Comment on Grutter and Gratz v. Bollinger, 103 Colum. L. Rev. 1589, 1590-91 (2003). Bollinger bemoaned that he could not defend racial preferences as “a ‘remedy’ for past societal discrimination”—what everyone in higher education “really believed.” Id. Bollinger is hardly alone. Shortly before Grutter was decided, Harvard’s Randall Kennedy said, “Let’s be honest: Many who defend affirmative action for the sake of ‘diversity’ are actually motivated by … social justice.” Kennedy, Affirmative Reaction, Am. Prospect (Feb. 19, 2003), bit.ly/3EJc5To. They would defend racial preferences “even if social science demonstrated uncontrovertibly that diversity (or its absence) has no effect (or even a negative effect) on the learning environment.” Id. NYU’s Samuel Issacharoff likewise knows “‘[t]he commitment to diversity is not real,’” and Columbia’s Kent Greenawalt has “‘yet to find a professional academic who believes the primary motivation for preferential admission has been to promote diversity.’” Fitzpatrick, The Diversity Lie, 27 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 385, 395-96 (2003). The list goes on. See id.; Schuck, Affirmative Action: Past, Present, and Future, 20 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 1, 34-36 (2002); Levinson, Diversity, 2 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 573, 601 (2000).

I've also argued previously that "diversity" is a weak and implausible rationale for affirmative action.

RyanAir

I've now flown it twice while in Europe in the last few months, and have a couple of observations that may be of use to U.S. travellers in Europe.  Both times, the flight left and arrived on time.  Baggage arrived on time as well.  As long as you pay in advance for things like a seat and "priority" boarding, you can be sure of a fairly peaceful boarding process and of having room to store your carry-ons and a pleasant-enough seat (the absence of anywhere to stuff a newspaper or magazine in a seat pocket is a bit annoying, however).  The one thing that I find really irritating is that the entire flight is an ongoing advertisement for products:  duty-free stuff, liquor, fragrances, cigarettes and on and on.  And anything you want to eat or drink that you didn't bring on board has to be purchased, but the prices are not particularly extravagant by airline standards.  RyanAir's biggest advantage is a lot of direct flights in Europe, and from airports that most other major airlines don't utilize (e.g., East Midlands in the UK).

Curious if European readers, who probably have more experience with RyanAir, have different experiences.

Sleepwalking into Armageddon, Part 2

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 17, SINCE THE DISCUSSION IN THE COMMENTS CONTINUES--MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

Reader Boris Dagaev calls my attention to this chilling interview at the Financial Times with Alexander Gabuev, who "before he left Russia...was a member of the country’s foreign policy elite as one of Russia’s leading experts on China," and now works for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC (previously in Moscow).  An excerpt:

I think that if [Putin] believes that he’s losing this war and this war is existential for his understanding of his role in Russian history, we will see real-time preparations [for the use of nuclear weapons]. So he will try not to hide this. And it’s gonna be nuclear warhead-driven direction missile or whatever or artillery shells being unloaded. He will make it visible to give the west time to call him and start negotiation and avoid the nuclear escalation scenario, the way Cuban missile crisis was resolved....

The protests in Iran

One account from NYRB; readers can supply links to others in the comments.  An excerpt:

Are the protests that were prompted by the death in police custody of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, on September 16 comparable to the strikes and demonstrations that led to the Shah’s downfall in 1979, or has Amini become a figure in the tragic mold of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street-seller whose self-immolation in 2010 touched off the Arab Spring, a region-wide upheaval that, in the end, failed to fulfill its early promise?...

The protests that followed Amini’s death after she was arrested in Tehran by the morality police, apparently for an infraction of the Islamic dress code, started in earnest in her home province of Kurdistan, in the far northwest, and spread across the country. All the agencies of the state mobilized to meet the threat and began a nationwide campaign against the protesters, including beatings, arrests, deaths in custody, propaganda, and judicial indictments. After four weeks and an estimated two hundred deaths—casualty figures must be treated with immense caution—the protests don’t appear to be letting up. By some measures, and making allowance for our reliance on reports that protesters have managed to send out of the country despite the government’s efforts to block the Internet, they are growing....

A review of Hitler's Mein Kampf in the NY Times in 1933

The review is by one James Gerard, a New York lawyer and judge, who had been an Ambassador to Germany under President Wilson.  A few striking excerpts:

Now what manner of man, as disclosed by his book, is this Hitler, who has forced such a unification of Germany as Bismarck never dreamed of and who has arrayed a whole people from children to elders in a military formation which can only mean a war of revenge and who has revived the persecutions of the Middle Ages against an intellectual and harmless race? In the first place, do not think of this man Hitler as without brains and do not listen to the gossip which proclaims him morally unsound....

"Young Plato"

Following up on yesterday's post about "Bronx Socrates," reader Mike G. calls to my attention "Young Plato," about a teacher sharing philosophy with his young pupils in a tough working class area of Belfast:

 

Attack of the robots (on human labor), an ongoing saga

The latest, as Marx expected.

The coming clash between the universities and the society at large over "diversity"

This captures it pretty well:

A 2022 Pew Research Center poll found that 74% of Americans oppose the use of race in college admissions. Even more surprising, 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asians and 59% of blacks also opposed it. The same applied to both political parties, with 87% of Republicans and 62% of Democrats objecting.

But as the public attempted to slam the door shut on racial preferences, the universities were busy trying to open it wide. The stealthy end-runs around the law gave way to support for “equity”: the desire for racial proportionality in all things—never mind that the Supreme Court has held that quotas in college admissions are unlawful. Accordingly, many colleges have begun to abandon the use of test scores in applications.

This will come to a head next year when the super-legislature (i.e., the Supreme Court) declares that "diversity" is no longer a governmental interest than can justify any kind of racial preferences.

Pathological liar Alex Jones faces $1 billion dollar judgment for his defamation of parents of Sandy Hook victims

That sounds about right, although he's also trying to conceal his assets in bankruptcy.   This is a case where one wished that the U.S., like many European countries, had criminal defamation statutes, so that this venal and disturbed individual could at least be sent to prison.

Cedric Robinson's "Black [Anti-]Marxism"

Adolph Reed calls my attention to what reads like a  devastating critique of Professor Robinson's misnamed Black Marxism, which, unsurprisingly, has been popular with race-centric academics.  An excerpt:

What are the core underlying claims of Black Marxism?  In a nutshell, Robinson argues that Marxism or historical materialism is a European ideology that that has proven to be blind to racialism; that the epistemology of historical materialism, along with the political premium it places on proletarian struggle, does not apply to Africans and other non-European peoples. “It is still fair to say that at base, that is at its epistemological substratum, Marxism is a Western construction – a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development which is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures."  Robinson’s follow-up work, published in 2001, An Anthropology of Marxism,[6] consummates the diatribe against Marxism.   In place of the alleged “grand narrative” of Marxism, Robinson gives us a “grand narrative” of the “Black Radical Tradition.” “Robinson literally rewrites the history of the rise of the West from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century, tracing the roots of Black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people,” notes approvingly Robin Kelly in his oft-cited Foreword to the 2000 edition of Black Marxism, “and providing a withering critique of Western Marxism and its inability to comprehend either the racial character of capitalism and the civilizations in which it was born or mass movements outside of Europe.”[7]

Why you can't tickle yourself

At last, an answer!

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

A Nobel mystery

So the 2022 Nobel season is over.  In many articles, there is the obligatory reference to the surprise call the winner got, often in the wee hours of the morning in the case of American winners.  And here's the mystery:  often the call comes to their cell phone.  How does the Nobel foundation know the cell phone number of the winners?   Any ideas?

(Comments on this year's Nobel Prizes are also welcome.)

China has told EU it is strongly opposed to use of nuclear weapons by Russia

Hopefully this report is correct, since it will weigh more heavily on Russia's decisions than opposition from the West:

In recent conversations with their Chinese counterparts, EU officials say they have detected cracks in Beijing’s support for Russia. Chinese diplomats have removed their talking points blaming NATO for the conflict in Ukraine and made clear that the use of nuclear weapons by Russia would be viewed as totally unacceptable in Beijing.

The return of Mandeville (in the Wall Street Journal, of course)

Political theorist David Lay Williams (DePaul) comments.

NYU fires organic chemistry teacher for being too demanding, after student protest petition

I wish there were another gloss on this, but that seems to be the only one that is plausible.  It's not that the guy is emeritus at Princeton (until recent years, Princeton was not very strong in chemistry), or that he authored a widely used textbook.  It's that the guy taught organic chemistry for 15 years at NYU (after retiring from Princeton), without a problem, until....well, here's what the aritcle says:

After retiring from Princeton in 2007, he taught organic chemistry at N.Y.U. on a series of yearly contracts. About a decade ago, he said in an interview, he noticed a loss of focus among the students, even as more of them enrolled in his class, hoping to pursue medical careers.

“Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” he wrote in a grievance to the university, protesting his termination. Grades fell even as he reduced the difficulty of his exams.

The problem was exacerbated by the pandemic, he said. “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” he wrote. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.”

After several years of Covid learning loss, the students not only didn’t study, they didn’t seem to know how to study, Dr. Jones said.

A lot of students have been suffering because of the pandemic, no one doubts that.  And the Internet certainly started making people stupider and lowering their attention spans in the early 2000s.  But firing a professor who has been teaching for 15 years because of al this stinks to high heavens, and means the "inmates" (sorry, the "clients") run the "asylum" (sorry, the "business").

"Race reductionism" threatens to doom the left

This is the best piece I've seen in Counterpunch in awhile; an excerpt:

A debate rages on the left between the practitioners of identity politics and alleged “class reductionists,” but the latter seem to be decidedly in the minority. This is unfortunate, because in order to defeat the threat of the far-right—whether it’s called white nationalism, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, neofascism, or proto-fascism—we’re going to have to build a movement on the basis of class struggle. This doesn’t mean denying the legitimacy of the grievances of groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality, but it does mean incorporating them in a broader movement organized around the old Marxian dualism: the working class vs. the capitalist class.

Sleepwalking into Armageddon: Russia, Ukraine, and nuclear weapons continued

I would urge readers to at least look at comments #76 and after on the earlier, extremely informative thread about Russia, Ukraine, and nuclear weapons.   This is a very grave situation, and I now think it's highly likely Russia will use tactical nuclear weapons.  That was one natural takeaway from Putin's speech the other day:  if the U.S. can use nuclear weapons to make a point towards an enemy (the U.S. use of atomic bombs in Japan), so can Russia, to put it rather simply.   I'm going to open comments here for further discussion of these issues, since the last thread has gotten very long, although I commend all the participants there for the high level of discussion and invite them to continue here (and to offer a more optimistic interpretation).

As I'm teaching Thucydides tomorrow, I'll just conclude with a comment he made about the horrors of the civil war in Corcyra:  "The cause of all this was the desire to rule out of avarice and ambition, and the zeal for winning that proceeds from those two” (p. 92).  That was the cause of Athens's downfall as well, and it may be the cause of ours and Russia's.

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

MOVING TO FRONT FOR LAST TIME, ORIGINALLY POSTED SEPT 21--THERE CONTINUES TO BE TIMELY UPDATES AND INTERESTING LINKS AND COMMENTARY ON THE EVOLVING SITUATION 

Start with this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Socialism lite

This essay excoriates (from the left) what passes for "socialism" in certain circles these days, as reflected in the recent 2022 "Socialism Conference" in Chicago, which even included some philosophers (I missed it, happily).  Some excerpts, with some interspersed observations:

The vast majority of panels were on topics related to police/prison abolition, antiracism, reproductive rights, opening borders, and other progressive movements and causes with precious little to do with socialism proper. And while there were panels billed under the categories of “labor movement” or “socialist theory and strategy” (for example, “Class Struggle Unionism,” featuring union negotiator and labor lawyer Joe Burns, and “The ABCs of Marxism”), these topics received no more time, and often far less attention, than abolitionism or various kinds of identity politics. In other words, the Socialist Conference treated the labor movement—and even socialism itself—as just one of many progressive causes, and class as just another identity around which to organize....

[M]uch of the conference was devoted to making the case that any progressive cause or movement actually is socialism. Keynote speaker Ruth Wilson Gilmore, professor and a center director at the City University of New York, claimed that abolition is communism, race the modality through which class is lived, and mass criminalization class war, pretty much all in the same breath.

Is a change to Australian defamation law coming? A Murdoch lawsuit may be the impetus

Australia, like the U.K. and Ireland and most other democracies, is far less protective of defamation than the United States.  But it's clear that Australian law needs some modification:  can it really be defamation to accuse the Murdochs and their Fascist News network of helping incite the stormtrooper riot at the Capitol building last year?  From a recent article:

Rupert Murdoch's eldest son -- who is also chief executive of Fox News parent Fox Corporation -- is suing Crikey over an opinion piece that linked his family's media empire to the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.

The media scion's lawyers claimed their client was defamed over a dozen times in the article, which accused "the Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators" of being "unindicted co-conspirators" in the Capitol riot....

Crikey's defence, filed with the Federal Court Tuesday, denied it defamed Murdoch and flagged it would lean on two new defences created by [recent law] reforms.

"One is a serious harm threshold... the plaintiff now has to prove that they not only suffered some harm to reputation, but that it was serious harm to reputation," Rolph explained.

Crikey will also seek to argue that the opinion piece, by writer Bernard Keane, was in the public interest.

"I suppose the difficulty here is that defence is entirely untested. This will be a test case of that," Rolph said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inflation, from the perspective of the working classes

The contrast with mainstream capitalist media coverage is instructive.

New York City these days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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