Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Happy 4th of July from a Canadian professor

What he says sounds mostly right to me:

It was 249 years ago, when the United States separated from the British Empire. Over the past year it has separated from the world order it built over those 249 years, and from basic sanity and decency as well. For Americans, the madness gripping their country is a catastrophe. For non-Americans, it is an accidental revolution. This Independence Day, the world is declaring its independence from the US....

 

One of the great ironies of history is that the triumph of Maga has led to the piecemeal destruction of everything that once made America great, and on every level. Its power derived from a reliable trade network, with logistical chains that were the wonders of the world, combined with a huge alliance network, and the greatest scientific and technological institutes in the world. It is systematically destroying all of those strengths far more thoroughly than any enemy could.

America is turning away from itself, and the rest of the world must follow. The new independence requires frankness, even brutality. There is no such thing as a deal with America any more. Canada and Mexico made one with Trump in 2018. He broke it at the first possible opportunity. Their national word is worthless. They understand only force and money, and increasingly not even those. Their military actions are more or less random, half-considered, about as deep and significant as a social media rage post. They instantly forget who helped or hurt them. All those Afghans who saved American lives a decade ago have lived to regret it, being deported, just for the spectacle of it all, back to their torturers. There is exactly no security in being their ally. If the American government declares war on something – poverty, drugs, Islamic terrorism, anti-democratic governments – you can be quite sure that whatever they’re opposed to will be much stronger by the end of the fighting.

The NYC mayoral race

Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman and democratic socialist, scored an upset victory in the Democratic primary over Andrew Cuomo (the former Governor, whose father had also been Governor of New York).  He ran on an actual "populist" economic platform (not a fake Republican one), calling for rent freezes, free buses, free childcare, and making NYC affordable more generally, with higher taxes on the wealthy among other proposals.  Dopey members of the ruling class, like Bill Ackman, are having meltdowns (scroll down his feed) about this unexpected triumph of someone critical of capitalism, which is itself rather amusing.  The New York Times editorial board, ever loyal to the prudnet wing of the capitalist class, went so far as to editorialize that voters should not even rank Mamdani (NYC has a ranked voting system)--so it's additionally satisfying to see the irrelevance of the NYT editorial board rendered so palpable.

All this being said, if Mamdani wins the election (Cuomo and others may still run as independents), I am not optimistic that he will be successful.  The problem is that NYC, although the biggest city in the country, is still far too small a stage on which to enact a successful redistributive agenda, especially when there will be a race to the bottom in competing jurisdictions to recruit the wealthy and businesses from NYC with the kind of tax giveaways that make redistribution impossible.  The NYC mayor's power is also limited by the NY Governor, who is mostly a pathetic centrist, and Mamdani's past trafficking with "defund the police" childishness is likely to put him at odds with the powerful police union and the rank-and-file.  Add to that the fact that he thinks Palestinians are human beings, and he will find the still powerful conservative Jewish community aligned against him.  So while Mamdani's victory is satisfying, and might perhaps inspire other Democrats to run on actual economic issues instead of identity politics, I doubt it's going to lead to the realization of his agenda, and could lead to an economic collapse in NYC.   But one step at a time, and hopefully my pessimism is misplaced.

Iran, Trump, Thucydides

As the Athenians spoke to the Melians, so too does Trump speak to Iran:  "Let’s work out what we can do on the basis of what both sides truly accept:  we both know that decisions about justice are made in human discussions only when both side are under equal compulsion; but when one side is stronger, it gets as much as it can, and the weak must accept that."

Can there be a "theory of everything"?

Philosopher Stephan Hartmann comments. 

Philosopher Alex Guerrero talks about lottocracy...

...at Brain in a Vat.

The imbecile RFK Jr. ramping up his war on vaccines, one of the great public health triumphs of the 20th-century

He's interfering with vaccine development (which may interfere with updated Covid shots in the fall, unbelievably); and instead of a massive vaccination campaign for measles, the imbecile is directing a study for miracle treatments, including vitamins.  Of all the awful and unqualified Cabinet appointees, I still suspect RFK Jr. is the most dangerous.  Just horrible. 

Art of the aphorism, part 2

"We are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we end by disguising ourselves from ourselves." --La Rochefoucauld

Art of the aphorism

"Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily." --La Rochefoucauld

What if AI is making our lives worse?

Philosopher Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin discusses.

If you could change one thing in the world...

...what would it be?  Academics, including philosophers, discuss on this podcast.

NEH grants cancelled

It starts.  Garbage people like Musk and the Trumpistas have no use for culture, of course.

Trump's war on transgender people

This seems exactly right:

Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, later wrote that long before Jews, Roma, gays, Communists and others could be herded into death camps, they had to be “denationalized” — excluded from the society that guaranteed their legal rights. Enlightenment thinkers had posited that just by virtue of existing, each person has inalienable rights. Arendt, however, observed that the “right to have rights” could be guaranteed only by a political community. Without a state to claim them as their own, people have no laws, no courts and no political mechanisms for protecting rights....

A country that has pushed one group out of its political community will eventually push out others. The Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place. In his Inaugural Address and one of his first executive orders, President Trump asserted that only two sexes exist: male and female, established at conception and immutable. Trans people, in other words, do not exist. Executive orders aimed at banning any mention of transgender people in schools, banning trans athletes from women’s sports, ordering a stop to gender-affirming medical care for people under 19 and barring trans people from serving in the military followed.

The State Department stopped issuing passports with the “X” gender marker and began issuing passports consistent with the sex the applicant was assigned at birth, even if the person had legally changed gender....

Last month, despite the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling that trans and nonbinary people are protected from workplace discrimination, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission started dropping lawsuits it had brought on their behalf.

The rights the Trump administration is taking away from trans people are relatively new. Only in the past few decades, for example, have clear legal procedures existed for changing the gender marker on identity documents, and only in the past few years have federal and some state authorities made the process fairly easy. But before transgender, gender-nonconforming and intersex people were recognized as a group — or groups — of people who had rights, many could blend in, fly below the radar. Now, in their new rightlessness, they are exposed.

 

 

"The singularity is bullshit"

An interview with Oxford's Michael Wooldridge on the history of AI.

(Thanks to Tanmay Khale for the pointer.)

J.D. Vance vs. the Pope

Philosopher Steven Hales comments.

Trump's surprisingly sane position on nuclear weapons

In the midst of the disaster his Administration produces every week, at least there's this.

Cruelty is not the point; subjugation and silencing is

An interesting interview with political theorist Corey Robin about Trump, Musk, McCarthyism and more.

The political economy of immigration

Not the paranoid propaganda, but the reality.

More on the monster child's obsession with Canada

Suitably cutting, especially about those pathetic American media ideologists who treat this grotesque display seriously.

(Thanks to Evan Thompson for the pointer.)

Trump's war on Canada: Canadians are not amused

Quite understandably:

(Thanks to Paul Russell for the pointer.)

 

The sociologist Randall Collins on Elon Musk's personality and management style and its relevance to the present

Interesting read.

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

The real threat to Canada? America is falling apart

Probably right.

(Thanks to Charles Bakker for the pointer.)

In defiance of Trump's persecution of transgender people...

...Michigan's largest healthcare provider resumes treating them.

Ontario's "Trumpian" premier punches back at the US

Amusing and apt.  Doug Ford, like Trump, is a street brawler without any scruples, which may be what the situation calls for.

Life expectancy in the U.S. and educational attainment (a fairly good proxy for economic class)

What one would have expected:  the "educated" live longer.

"Colonialism and Fascism"

Videos of Jason Stanley's lecture course at the Kyvi School of Economics on this topic are now available online here.

"China, Feminism, and the Legacy of Confucius"

Philosopher Sor-hoon Tan comments.  This seems to me an optimistic take, but perhaps it's right.

The wildfire catastrophe in Los Angeles

MOVING TO FRON FROM JANUARY 9--SEE ESP. THE VERY INFORMATIVE COMMENT FROM PHILOSOPHER CHRIS HITCHCOCK, BELOW--MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

Good luck to readers in the Los Angeles area; from the media reports, it looks very frightening indeed.  Comments are open for anyone who wants to post information or updates.

Trump is not even President yet, and he's threatening military force against Greenland and Panama...

...and economic coercion against Canada.  We're in for four years of this childish imbecile!  The threats against Canada prompted these striking observations from philosopher Rachel Barney (at the University of Toronto), which she kindly gave permission to share here:

Trump is now promising to use 'economic force, not military' to annex Canada. In response to a question from a reporter which treated those as perfectly sane, normal alternative plans a President might have.

I overcame a revulsion of many years standing and for the first time clicked on the link and heard his voice. And it's by no means the demented word salad I'd expected. All the economic grievances are familiar rightwing talking points, and the underlying theory is just what many on both sides have thought since before Confederation, that the border is just an economic impediment and union the rational, mutually beneficial option. And I have zero doubt that a US government which sought to do so, and didn't mind its own people being collateral damage, could inflict so much damage that a lot of Canadians would change their preferences fast and cry uncle. We're not Finland, never have been.

 

There's no legal or constitutional path forward to annexation, but with a bit of brutality it would be easy to create enough of an internal constituency for a US military action to be colorable as 'aid to the oppressed Albertans' or enforcement of some forcibly imposed trade deal, or emergency help or whatever. The Conservative political leadership would stampede each other for quisling roles. In short it's absolutely a doable project, and I would imagine that saner people than Trump have been looking at water resource projections and gaming out scenarios for years.

It is really really bad that so many Canadians are still being blithe about this (looking at you, Toronto Star, and your creepy new owners). We need to get past the denial stage stat. The most obvious practical response is to rally round some Liberal leadership candidate who gets it, and has what it takes to lead a kind of National Patriotic Front of all but the right. I would rejoin the Party for that.

Curious to hear from Canadian readers what they make of this latest craziness, and whether they agree with Professor Barney's assessment.  Signed comments (full name, valid email address [which will not appear]) will be strongly preferred.

Jimmy Carter: his "private virtues were public vices"

An intelligent assessment of his life and career:  he was the Democrat who initiated the retreat from the New Deal consensus, one then destroyed by Reagan.

The risks of neurotechnology

Philosopher Karina Vold and colleagues comment.

What should be done?

Adolph Reed comments in the wake of the electoral disaster:

To the extent that the totality of politics, including among those who see themselves as the “left” or even advocates of a working-class agenda, has reduced to winning this election or preparing to win the next one, there’s no impetus to break with what passes for “sophisticated” political understanding that people like Kornacki, Ezra Klein, et al. peddle and the others who seek to join and follow them in that breathless, oh-so-serious Conversation swallow and regurgitate. And this isn’t to suggest that we need to disengage from electoral politics. We must engage; the everyday world and its concrete challenges don’t go away just because we want to transcend them. And we have to relate to that domain through the Dems, not consider it a platform for “Here I stand; I can do no other” performances of individual righteousness. We have to face up to the fact—finally—that all we can expect from Dem success is kicking the can of confrontation with fascism down the road for four years. But for that approach to make sense someone, and only the labor-left can lead it or maybe even do it, has to spend another four years between elections organizing a real constituency for a different way of talking and thinking about and doing politics. To put it bluntly, we won’t be able to face up to the fascist juggernaut without working to build an actual popular constituency for a different, openly working-class-based politics.

Luigi Mangione, the suspected killer of the UnitedHealthCare CEO

The right-wing media (starting, I believe, with the New York Post) has dubbed him an "anti-capitalist," despite no evidence of that.  Before his Goodreads page went private, you could see that on his list of books he'd read were drivel by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and that on his list of books he was planning on reading soon was Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged--pretty standard fare for a bright young "tech" person.  As one NYT opinion writer, Michelle Goldberg, observed, Mangione is no "leftist; he appears to have had pretty typical heterodox podcast guy politics."  (His "manifesto" makes clear that this is specifically about the health insurance industry, not capitalism.)  Goldberg made some other apt observations about what this whole incident has revealed:

A huge number of people feel — with good reason — that they’ve been personally injured by the insurance industry, and by coverage decisions that seem highly arbitrary, impenetrable and unfair. So people feel like Mangione’s avenged them....

Whenever I’ve had a health scare, or am waiting for the results of routine tests like mammograms, I tend to be as panicked about all the potential paperwork as about, you know, dying. And the thing is, these companies are purely extractive. Relative to a single-payer system, they create no value whatsoever....

I think the reaction to the assassination shows there is a political opportunity for anyone who can harness all this free-floating fury toward the health care industry and plutocracy more broadly. Right now it has nowhere productive to go.

If only Clinton and the Democratic Party hadn't sabotaged Bernie Sanders in 2016....

UPDATE:  As Walter Benn Michaels points out to me, Goldberg herself, at the time, was part of the pro-Clinton Sanders smear marchine, for example.  What we now know, of course, is that tens of thousands of Demcratic Sanders voters from the primaries flipped to Trump in the general.  We also know (vide Achen & Bartels) that at the end of the day most voters vote for their party's candidate (witness Trump and Republicans), regardless of their views (or, in  Trump's case, conduct).  That means the whole fight is over issues that are genuinely salient to "flippable" voters, like bread-and-butter economics and healthcare:  on those issues, Clinton was very weak (and an obvious fake), while Sanders was a winner.

Nobel Laureates opposed to the ignoramus RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services

Of course they're opposed.  It would have been better if they had limited the signatories to those in relevant sciences, rather than including Nobel Laureates in physics and recipients of the fake Nobel Prize in economics..

The therapeutic power of placebos?

Philosopher Dien Ho comments.  Curious what those knowledgeable about this topic make of this.

Whoever murdered the CEO of UnitedHealth in midtown Manhattan the other day...

...has brought out into the open how much people hate health insurance companies, many of which are extremely predatory and exploitative.  The Facebook post announcing the CEO's death (murder) has some 50,000 "laugh" emojis on it.  That's pretty gross, of course, but it is also telling about how deeply people resent being denied coverage for their medical problems, which is what insurers do a lot (UnitedHealth has a particularly bad reputation).   The immediate effect of this assassination will be an increase in security for CEOs but perhaps it will even have an effect on the public discourse about healthcare in the benighted states of America.

UPDATE:  Wow!

The three most alarming Trump Cabinet picks (so far)

Two obvious ones have gotten much attention:  Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, and Kash Patel for FBI Director.  Both evince a fascistic or authoritarian temperament and ambitions.  Putting either in charge of people with guns and authorized violence would be very dangerous in the extreme.  Ironically, as of this writing, Hegseth seems likely to be rejected not for being a Christian nationalist and authoritarian, but for being a sexist and a drunk.  I'll take that if that's the reason.  That may allow attention to shift to Patel, who is quite unhinged.

At least as dangerous, but in a different way, is the prospect of an ignoramus like RFK Jr. becoming Secretary of Health & Human Services.  Public health is the kind of social good it's easy to take for granted, until it's gone.  RFK will accelerate declining uptake for vaccines, and promises to direct research funding away from infection diseases--God forbid there's another pandemic.  Fortunately--at least for those in civilized states--the states still set legal requirements for mandatory vaccinations, but even if Illinois has 21st-century public health policies, it will be a problem if neighboring Missouri or Iowa do not.  Viruses don't respect state lines.

Unless the U.S. is very lucky, the next four years could see massive outbreaks of infectious disease, with no coherent federal response; political arrests and prosecutions (maybe murders?); and a politicized military occupying Democratic cities in search of immigrants and "preserving law and order."

Australia bans social media for those under 16

We can now run a natural experiment and see if rates of depression and anxiety change in young people there.

An amusing polemic about the academy by an ex-academic whose specialty is...

...pissing on academia.  Some of it, admittedly, is self-serving and stupid, but some of it has enough truth in it to be amusing.  For example:

Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.

It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.

Clearly some truth to this, though this stuff is mostly confined to the feebler parts of the humanities and social sciences [sic], plus of course the schools of education and social work, and the various "studies" programs.  It has made inroads, sadly, into philosophy over the quarter-century, as we have had occasion to document on many occasions.

Historian Mazower on European fascism and its aftermath...

...and how that history marks an important difference between the U.S. and Europe.  Historians like Timothy Snyder have given the profession a bad reputation in many intellectual circles with their crude simplifications; Professor Mazower's nuanced analysis should help redeem that reputation!

 

If you are staying on Twitter/X, why?

Philosopher Jc Beall raised a question which I also wonder about:  "It would be very interesting to know whether any philosophers are staying on Twitter and -- this is what I'm curious about -- *why*."  So readers who use social media, if you're staying with X, what are your reasons?  This is asked out of genuine curiosity; I can imagine reasons, but would like to hear what philosophers are thinking.

 

Political theorist Paul Sagar on adjusting to severe paralysis after a climbing accident

A gripping read about a horrible situation.

Steven Walt on Chomsky and U.S. foreign policy

Mostly laudatory, as one would expect from a realist.  On the other hand, a standing weakness of internationa relations realism is its failure to investigate the "elite" who decide the nation's "interest."  Chomsky can be right about the role the capitalist elite in America play in defining the nation's interests, while a different elite determined Soviet foreign policy.  Walt's piece is, in any case, worth a read.

The psychology of "the woke"

Not implausible, via Kenan Malik's review of a new book by Musa al-Gharbi:

[T]he language of social justice – “wokeness” if you will – is not about social justice at all but acts rather as an ideological glue binding together a section of the elite that want to keep climbing the ladder of privilege but don’t want to see themselves as part of the elite....

The key to understanding wokeness, Al-Gharbi insists, is the struggles of “symbolic capitalists” – “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”. In other words, writers and academics, artists and lawyers, museum curators and tech professionals. It is a social stratum that attempts to entrench itself within the elite, elbowing out others already there, by using the language of social justice to gain status and accrue “cultural capital”. Theirs is a struggle within the elite presented as a struggle against the elite on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed.

This is not simply cynicism or hypocrisy, Al-Gharbi argues. Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers. The consequence is that the language of social justice has helped “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing sections of the elite to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.

Robert Paul Wolff on the election

He correctly puts the emphasis on class politics.

Blast from the past: election post-mortems from 2020

Here and here are perhaps interesting.  I'll no doubt have more to say when I'm awake (this is pre-scheduled).

Wenar on "effective [sic] altruism" and his critics

Philosopher Leif Wenar wades into the fray again, responding in part to critics of his earlier piece.  I'm sympathetic to much that Professor Wenar says, although it touches only indirectly on the main difficulty, namely, that "effective [sic] altruism" really only concerns "altruistic actions with fairly immediate and measurable short-term effects," which is not the same as making people better off, regardless of one's motive.  (Wenar's criticism of the unintended effects of aid on non-recipients is relevant to this issue, but it's just the tip of an iceberg of consequences that are never considered by members of the church.)

Why are Democrats having such a "hard time beating Trump"?

That's the question posed by the official publication of the prudent wing of the ruling class, i.e., The New York Times.  I'll return to the NYT article in a moment, but a rather different answer is found in this paper that philosopher Gordon Barnes called to my attention:  globalization has been good for both the prudent and imprudent wings of the ruling class; it has not been so good for millions of working class people in the U.S.

But back to the NYT:

The Democrats’ challenge appears to be part of a broader trend of political struggles for ruling parties across the developed world. Voters appear eager for change when they get the chance. The ruling parties in Britain, Germany, Italy, Australia and most recently Japan all faced electoral setbacks or lost power. Mr. Trump himself lost four years ago. France and Canada might well join the list.

"Roadmap to the official count in the 2024 Election"

A useful resource from NYU's Brennan Center.  Of all the grotesque deformations of politics and national life since Trump came on the scene, the idea that there is a problem with election integrity may be the most outrageous and the most dangerous.

Meanwhile, as this NYT guide makes clear, we may not know the outcome of the election until the end of the week, if we're lucky!

"Computers plainly can't think"

Philosopher Alva Noe comments; an excerpt:

[T]here is another origin of our impulse to concede mind to devices of our own invention, and this is what I focus on here: the tendency of some scientists to take for granted what can only be described as a wildly simplistic picture of human and animal cognitive life. They rely unchecked on one-sided, indeed, milquetoast conceptions of human activity, skill and cognitive accomplishment. The surreptitious substitution (to use a phrase of Edmund Husserl’s) of this thin gruel version of the mind at work – a substitution that I hope to convince you traces back to Alan Turing and the very origins of AI – is the decisive move in the conjuring trick.

What scientists seem to have forgotten is that the human animal is a creature of disturbance. Or as the mid-20th-century philosopher of biology Hans Jonas wrote: ‘Irritability is the germ, and as it were the atom, of having a world…’ With us there is always, so to speak, a pebble in the shoe. And this is what moves us, turns us, orients us to reorient ourselves, to do things differently, so that we might carry on. It is irritation and disorientation that is the source of our concern. In the absence of disturbance, there is nothing: no language, no games, no goals, no tasks, no world, no care, and so, yes, no consciousness....

Reasons for pessimism, reasons for optimism

On the pessimism side, the familiar confusion of correlation with causation:

For many Donald Trump supporters, it is a simple matter of dollars and cents.

Late this summer, I left my home in New York City to talk to dozens of working-class people in the South, the Midwest and the West. I had no agenda except to hear what they were saying and try to understand the world from their point of view. I interviewed hairdressers and retired sawmill workers, bakers, truck drivers, laundromat managers, pit barbecue cooks, casino card dealers and even a former professional rodeo rider.

The most common term people used to describe the economy was “horrible.” A close second was, “It sucks"....

Everyone wanted better material conditions for themselves and their families, and everyone was struggling to obtain them. Some didn’t want to talk about politics. Others felt so ignored by politicians that they have disengaged from the process altogether. Everyone who offered an opinion was for Mr. Trump....

The worst inflation and the fastest rise in interest rates since the early 1980s — to well-off people, these are headlines. To working people, they are fundamental challenges to their daily lives. Working people worry much more about payday than they do Jan. 6.

Fair enough: But why turn to a lying, abusive billionaire to help them solve their economic problems? Their explanation is simple. Times were good when Trump was president. Now eggs cost nearly three times what they did four years ago, the rate on a car loan is more than 50 percent higher, and some companies are cutting hours. Mr. Trump, they think, is the candidate to turn things around.