Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Millions to die from anti-microbial resistant infections in the coming years

Isn't this cheery?

More than 39 million people will die due to antimicrobial-resistant infections over the next 25 years, a major new study has predicted.

Known as the ‘silent pandemic’, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) happens when bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens evolve to evade the drugs used to treat them.

The new study, which was partly funded by the British government, found that AMR is now responsible for 1.14 million deaths every year – higher than the combined toll of HIV/Aids and malaria.

It predicts the number of annual deaths will almost double by 2050 to 1.91 million.

Driven in part by the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture, the exponential rise in ‘superbugs’ puts modern medicine at risk.

The unusual case of Barrington Jones: from elite philosophy to plumbing

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 2:   Dr. Jones's widow has kindly comented, below, both confirming and clarifying the story.

A scholar of ancient philosophy, Jones taught at Princeton in the 1970s, then at Oxford, and then according to various sources (for example), quit philosophy to become a plumber.   This seems a bit like the famous story about Tolstoy, who when asked what work he was most proud of, displayed a pair of shoes he had made himself.  Is the Jones story true?  Does anyone know?

Alex Byrne's "Trouble with Gender" reviewed...

...at The Philosopher's Magazine.  The review concludes with some comments of more general professional interest:

Trouble with Gender is proof that Byrne’s nerve has not failed him. He is one of few philosophers who can exhibit such proof (other monographs that take a broadly sex-realist approach include Material Girls by Kathleen Stock and Gender-Critical Feminism by Holly Lawford-Smith). According to orthodoxy in the philosophy of sex and gender, the sex-based account of woman is not a live option. It is not even allowed as a good approximation to the truth. Rather, it is widely treated as unacceptable to rely on even as a simplifying assumption. From an outsider’s perspective, it is as if physicists had collectively adopted a ban on ever explicitly invoking Newton’s first law of motion. As would probably happen in the physical case, much orthodox theorising about sex and gender thrives on implicitly reasoning in a way which subverts the ban.

Frick on Singer

These remarks were given by philosopher Johann Frick (now at Berkeley) at a Princeton conference in honor of Peter Singer, and make some interesting points.  For example:

Peter has been an avowed utilitarian for most of his career, and his commitment to utilitarianism no doubt played a major role in leading him to adopt many of the ethical stances for which he is known.

And yet, it is rare that you will find Peter, in his published work, making arguments of the form: “You should believe p, because p is entailed by utilitarianism, and utilitarianism is true”.

Much more commonly, you will find him skillfully appealing to mid-level principles that he expects will command the assent of people with widely divergent ethical outlooks. This genius for making his arguments as ‘ecumenical’ as possible is one of the major reasons for Peter’s success as a public intellectual.

This seems right, although it seems an incomplete account of his success as a public intellectual (surely he has been the perfect public moralist for the neoliberal era?).  Professor Frick also makes some interesting observations about Singer's "esotericism" as a public moralist.  I am not a fan of Singer's philosophical work, but I found this short essay quite interesting and illuminating.  

Human-to-human bird flu transmission in Missouri?

Oy veh, let's hope there's a more neutral explanation.  And if there's not, let's hope the Biden Administration acts quickly to produce and distribute vaccines.  (Bird flu is unrelated to the coronavirus, but I may have to expand this blog category--I hope not!)

Trump-Harris debate last night, and the polls

I watched a little last night, and a bit more today.   Harris was, of course, lightyears better than Biden, and she did make some good points.  But the monster child was not as bad as the gloating on social media would have led one to think (of course, the gloating is partisan, although even some Trump loytalists have admitted Trump lost).  He, in fact, hammered Harris on some real vulnerabilities (e.g., she has no policies), and some of her responses were substantively pretty feeble.  When she hammered him for his crazy tariff ideas, he replied, correctly, that Biden-Harris have left the China tariffs in place.  She never responded to that point.  I can only conclude that the gloating is a result of how despicable Trump is, and what a relief it is to have a moderately competent "debater" on the stage, rather than Mr. feeble-minded.  (Putting his psychological health to one side, the monster child is clearly not as cognitively feeble as Biden:  he is quick on his feet, and quick to lie on point.)

I gather as time went on, Trump became more unhinged, but the fact that Harris scored what seem to anyone sapient good points doesn't mean the election will be anything but obscenely close.

Richard Hofstadter's commencement address at Columbia in June 1968

Lots of it is still relevant to our own time, unsurprisingly.  His conception of the university is also essentially that of the Kalven Report, which despite the current fad of lying about it or misrepresenting it, is still the only viable conception for a research university.

(Thanks to Chris Haufe for the pointer.)

More bad press for Wiley

Wiley's reputation among philosophers (and other academics) has been in free-fall with the various journal disasters that we have noted here, and this latest development won't help: "Academic publisher Wiley has revealed it is set to make $44 million (£33 million) from Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnerships that it is not giving authors the opportunity to opt-out from." 

"Universality over diversity"

Philosopher David Lobina discusses.

"The Future of Free Speech"

A special issue of Daedalus:  Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, with contributions by leading First Amendment scholars (e.g., Vincent Blasi, Robert Post), constitutional law scholars (e.g., Keith Whittington), philosophers (Robert Mark Simpson, yours truly), and non-academics from various professions (e.g., Nick Clegg).

Is it a "problem" that there are so few political "conservatives" in the American academy?

Most contributors to the interesting CHE symposium seem to agree it is, which by my lights is tantamount to admitting that they don't think their academic fields are Wissenschaften.  My essay takes a rather different approach:

That someone is a “conservative” is as relevant to a faculty appointment as the fact that they prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, or rock climbing to chess. Political tastes deserve as much consideration as other personal characteristics when it comes to hiring scholars, which is to say, they deserve none. (Indeed, to consider political tastes at all is illegal at public universities, one of the problems with “diversity” statements.) I’ll return, below, to the possible exceptions to the preceding, but the rule is clear enough.

The Humboldtian ideal of the university, to which we in the U.S. are self-consciously heirs, is one in which the only subjects taught are those that are “scientific” (wissenschaftlich), in the German sense of that term. Scientific fields involve rigorous and teachable methods for investigating and acquiring knowledge about their subject matters. In the Humboldtian university of the 19th century — when Germany was the world leader in almost every academic discipline — Wissenschaft included not only the natural sciences, but history, classics, and many other “human” (or social) sciences. Max Weber’s plea for “value neutrality” in the human sciences was made against this background: A scientific method, Weber argued, is not a politically partisan method.

These days there is a tendency, especially in the feebler parts of the academy, to scoff at the Weber/Humboldt ideal, which draws a bright line between science and politics. This is a mistake, even if the relationship between partisan political values and Wissenschaft is more complex than Weber allowed. Political and moral values, for example, can influence the choice of what to study with scientific methods: Should a scholar investigate the role of the capitalist class in Hitler’s seizure of power, or the relationship between race and intelligence? Political and moral values may also affect tolerance for the weakness of supposedly scientific methods (think of the methodological intransigence of neoclassical macroeconomics despite decades of predictive failures)....

Reforming those defective scientific disciplines is difficult, given academic freedom, but it should not be done in terms of parochial and highly context-sensitive "conservative" and "liberal" categories.  As Mark Lilla, a humanities professor at Columbia, candidly admits:

Today genuine conservatives who fit within the long tradition of thought that includes Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Michael Oakeshott are increasingly rare birds. Conservatism, in the old sense, has not changed. Rather, Republican politicians, many think tanks, and right-leaning young people who live online have abandoned the tradition and embraced instead Trumpian populism and far-right reactionary influencers who recycle many old fascist ideas.

It's true that fascists are underrepresented in the academy.  Is that a problem to be fixed?

"Women, Peace and Security Index"

This report is interesting.  The metrics include years of education for women, employment, cellphone use, parliamentary representation, absence of legal discrimination, access to justice, maternal mortality ratio, community safety, and political violence targeting women.  Only one Asian country makes the top 20 (Singapore), although Japan is in the top 25, and the U.S. ranks 37!

 

Trump can still win this election (lawfully)

Those who are big consumers of "election news" and "polls"--which probably includes many readers of this blog--probably have the sense that Harris is going to win this election.   God knows (if S/He existed, that is) I hope the monster child is defeated, and Harris/Walz prevail.   But the reality is that this is very, very far from a sure thing.  The NYT "poll tracker," whose averages are weighted towards polls with more reliable track records, shows Harris leading Trump by just two points nationally, and shows her leading by similarly small margins, or just tied, in all the key battleground states.  2020 polls badly underestimated Trump's support, despite having been burned in 2016 for the same problem.  Are they now accurate?  I have no confidence they are, especially if the underlying problem (as many suspect) is that more Trump voters don't respond to polls.  In 2020, the gold standard NYT/Siena poll had Biden up by 14 points nationally right before the election; Biden's actual margin of victory was 4.5%.  All the good TikTok vibes for Harris are nice and happy, but they don't mean much, since TikTok is not, shall we say, representative of the population at large.  I'd be a lot more comfortable if Harris's margin were more like 5-6%, rather than 2%.   The fact that it is still close is, by itself, appalling, but telling about the pathological condition of the United States.

Viktor DeSantis appointed a Republican crony, former Sen. Ben Sasse, to run the University of Florida...

...and he enriched his own cronies with state money.  Good job by the student journalists at UF!

The election will be decided by people who haven't a clue...

...who don't understand cause and effect, and don't understand the candidates or their policies--like the people regularly interviewed by the NYT in their "American in Focus" series (read a few of those, and weep).  Recall the revealing anecdote from longtime reader S. Wallerstein:

Shopping in an open air market, Mr. Wallerstein was chatting with a Chilean woman about the U.S. election: he expressed his preference for Biden, she expressed that she liked Trump. As the conversation went on, she also revealed that her truly favorite American political figure was Michelle Obama. As Mr. Wallerstein observed: "I realized that for her and for many others, Trump, Biden and Michelle Obama do not represent political positions on the left and right spectrum, but are simply celebrities who appear on TV: some appeal to her and some don't for completely non-political reasons."

Achen & Bartels provide the evidence for the anecdote.  It's all pretty horrifying, of course, but that's the reality:  our fate will be decided by some of the most uninformed and witless people in the electorate.

NBA star Jaylen Brown talks about Foucault (esp. Discipline & Punish)...

...and its relevance to his life as a professional athlete!

(Thanks to Cheyney Ryan for the pointer.)

A good "beginner's" introduction to the history of Europe in the long 19th-century (1789-1917 as it were)?

I'm looking for recommendations of introductions suitable for a good high school studnet, or a college freshman.  It's fine if the book also treats 20th-century European history beyond 1917.  (Just to be clear, Hobsbawm is not introductory enough for this purpose.)  Thanks for any advice you folks can share!

Walz as VP

Following up on this, as all readers will likely know, Harris has picked the Minnesota Governor as her VP candidate.  (VP Harris is a longtime reader of the blog, did you know?)   I was worried about choosing the Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro; he is certainly popular in Pennsylvania, but his selection would have thrust Israel/Gaza to centerstage given his outspokenness on this issue, and alienated some younger "progressive" voters.  I'm not sure America is ready for a Black/Asian woman as President, although I'm hopeful, but I would worry even more about asking "low information voters" to vote for a ticket that also includes a Jew.  (Judging from the vulgar Twitter abuse being directed at Harris, most of it is focused on her sex, not her race or ethnicity, which is telling about how deep-seated that pathological prejudice runs.)    As i said the other day, Walz is a good talker, and getting him maximum exposure should have a positive effect.  Positive enough to win in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania?  I'm far from confident, although I think given the geography, choosing Walz should be enough to tip Wisconsin solidly to the Democrats.

Sadly, the race is still very close, which itself is horrifying given the monster child and his not-so-crypto fascist running mate.  Although the Democrats now have a chance to prevail, it's very far from a sure thing at this stage.  To make matters worse, Netanyahu seems hell-bent on provoking a total war in the Middle East, no doubt on the (correct) supposition that another Trump Administration would give him an even freer hand.   As we also know from Achen & Bartels, events right before an election have a disproportionate impact, so if the current signs of a recession mature into a real economic downturn, that will be big trouble for the Democrats.

UPDATE:  I was pleased to see he has a strong pro-labor record as well.  This will hopefully help with the union vote in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which is important.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz

He's in the news as one of the contenders to be Harris's running mate, and I've now watched some clips of him:  he's a good talker, with a good pitch and interesting background (rural Minnesotan, public school teacher, Army National Guard, defeated a Republican incumbent in a rural congressional district, highly progressive and successful Governor).   Here's an example.  He'd make mince-meat with "weird" JD Vance.  Like Harris, he also likes to laugh, a nice contrast with the monster child.

The good news is that the race with Trump is now competitive, but Trump still leads by a point or two nationally and in many key states.  But he's also presumably still benefitting from the proverbial "convention bounce" and the aftermath of the assassination attempt.  Still, this race will be close, and the monster child could still prevail.

Teamsters union president speaks at Republican convention

This is actually worth watching, once you get past the pablum about Trump:  it's pure class war and pro-union advocacy  The look on the faces of some of the Republican stalwarts in the audience is amusing--I'm sure the old-timers have never heard anything like this.

ADDENDUM:  This was amusing too.   The Democrats ought to dump Biden and nominate this guy.

Happy July 4th to my American readers!

Celebrate freedom, burn the flag.

The Trump immunity decision

Two views:  less alarmed, very alarmed.  The DC Circuit decision in the same case represents the (sensible) road not taken.  Suffice it to say, the U.S. is doomed, especially if Biden doesn't drop out of the race--if he does, we still might not dodge the Trump bullett (or bomb).  But the next civilized President really needs to wage war on the current super-legislature.

Sleepwalking into disaster: the response to learning that Emperor Biden has no clothes

I've been tweeting various things about this all weekend, but let me summarize here:

1.  Biden was always a middling speaker with limited brainpower, but the disastrous debate performance took that to a wholly new level:  he has been hobbled by his age more than the Democratics had let on.  This was not just a "bad" or "weak" debate performance (like Obama's anomalously weak performance against Romney in 2012), this was a revelation about the extent of his cognitive decline.  A majority of the population has been concerned about his mental competence for months, and it turns out that concern was wholly warranted, and the attempt to dismiss it was a con job.   There's a reason Biden has given fewer interviews than any President in history; there's a reason his staff has been hiding him.  Now we all know.

2.  The day after the debate fiasco, Biden asserted:  “I would not be running again if I didn’t believe with all my heart and soul I can do this job.” What Biden believes is wholly irrelevant, a case study in self-serving biases.  Anyone who has tried to get an elderly parent to give up driving has heard this spiel. It's meaningless:  one has to look at the evidence.  We had 90 minutes of evidence that his mind isn't working, and he can't do the job, which includes advocating for your agenda in public, sometimes without a teleprompter.   That his policy achievements have been substantial for a Democrat is neither here nor there:  most of the work in making that happen is not done by the President.

3.  The repeated blather that "Joe and Jill will have to decide" is an insult to democracy:  this is not a fucking monarchy, this is a democracy, and it's the job of the Democratic Party, Biden's party, to get him to step aside given that the secret is now out.   The Democratic Party, so far, is proving itself as supine to its leader as the Republicans are to theirs.  That's a rather disturbing parallel.

4.  The reason this matters is precisely because a second Trump Presidency will be a disaster, a bigger disaster than the first was.  The Democratic Party effectively suppressed democratic opposition during the primaries, with the result that we have a Democratic nominee most don't want (as poll after poll reveals).  Polls also reveal that Biden is losing, not just nationally, but in almost all the key swing states (when he leads in some swing states in some polls, the leads are not reassuring, and they aren't consistent). 

2016 deja vu all over again (UPDATED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 12 OF THIS YEAR, UPDATED

It was obvious to me in 2016 that Hillary Clinton was an awful candidate--an opportunistic fake (like her philandering husband), whose only real qualification was her name and resulting institutional connections--and yet it seemed to me inconceivable that Trump could beat her, given how awful the monster-child was (and is).   Duly chastened by that bitter experience, I confess I'm now getting deja vu that we're walking into another, probably worse disaster.  Biden was always a congenial empty vessel, filled with whatever the Democratic consensus du jour was, but he hasn't suffered from decades of vaguely misogynistic demonization as Clinton did.  His problem is different, one exacerbated by the special prosecutor's report about his walking off with classified materials, namely, his age.  It won't do to point out that Trump is not only cognitively impaired, but psychologically disturbed, even though that is obviously true.   Biden looks his age (he's 81), while Trump does not (he's 77); and Biden's verbal and cognitive mistakes do seem to be getting worse.   With most of the electorate, appearances are everything.  The polls probably are not lying about this problem eitehr.  Sure Biden can run on the slogan, "Not a pathological narcissist and fascist like the other guy," but will enough voters notice or care?

Another decision by the super-legislature that contributes to the U.S. being unlivable

What a disgrace to civilization.  Read the dissent to see how disgraceful and unnecessary this is.

A long interview about Nietzsche and free will

Johnathan Bi, a graduate of Columbia University who loves philosophy and 'great books,' has put together a very professionally done set of videos about "the Western Canon" (here's his introuction to the series).   Here's the first of two long interviews Mr. Bi did with me, this one on Nietzsche and free will.  I was impressed by the care with Mr. Bi had read my books, and enjoyed the conversation with him, and I hope others will too.  (Mr. Bi has also recorded a lecture on the Genealogy, which draws in part on my reading of Nietzsche.  I haven't watched all of this one, however.)  Among other interviews coming in this series will be conversations with Frederick Neuhosuer on Rousseau, Katharina Volk on Roman philosophy and politics in the age of Caesar and Cicero, and Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare, among others.

Trump, a lifelong de facto criminal, now a de jure one

Thank goodness the New York prosecutors knew what they were doing, and secured a conviction against the monster child, now making him officially a convicted felon.   A quick jury verdict is almost always a finding of guilty, and this case was no different.  The monster child will appeal, and who knows, the conviction might be overturned on appeal.  But that process will take many months, and so the stain of being a convicted criminal may affect the 'independent' voters (those who cannot tell the difference between night and day) come November.

The outcome is gratifying, of course, especially since an acquittal would have been a huge boost for the monster child.  The irony is that this case was not nearly as significant or as strong as two other cases:  the election interference case in Georgia and the federal prosecution for making off with classified materials.  The latter has been derailed by the Trump-appointed hack judge Aileen Cannon, who is a unique embarrassment to the federal judiciary; the former has been derailed by the hack state prosecutor in Georgia, Fani Willis, whose world-historic bad judgment in appointing her unqualified boyfriend as one of the prosecutors now seems to guarantee that this case will not get to trial before the election.   (The third case, the federal prosecution for election interference, has been delayed by the super-legisature, i.e., the Supreme Court, but that case strikes me as far less sturdy than the Georgia and classificed documents cases.)  So everyone owes thanks to the New York prosecutors for moving with dispatch and success to secure a conviction.  (Trump is very unlikely to get a jail sentence, but that won't change the fact that he is a convicted felon.)

Diversity and viewpoint diversity: from Weber to Haidt

This CHE essay was quite interesting; an excerpt:

Where did viewpoint diversity come from? In the 2010s, American social psychologists began to argue over how to deal with the fact that most of them were liberals (in the American sense) and looked at human social behavior and cognition through that ideological lens. The quarrel had been triggered by Jonathan Haidt’s argument that, for epistemological reasons, their field needed more political diversity. Only a system of ideological checks and balances would enable them to rein in the otherwise-unquestioned prejudices of the majority.

This intervention represented a challenge to the discipline’s hitherto dominant epistemic value of value neutrality because it requires the identification of researchers with a political stance. Amid the widely discussed replication crisis of psychology and other scientific fields, many of Haidt’s colleagues took seriously the concern that their moral and political biases could be part of the reason that so many of their findings could not be reproduced. The liberal-bias controversy contributed to a larger push for reforming the institutions of science to curb the inherently biased thinking of human beings.

That the proponents of viewpoint diversity focus on science does not mean that their project is free of moral-political views. In fact, their political epistemology is very much rooted in the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill and emerged in response to the American culture wars. Part of their political mission is to emphasize scientific knowledge production rather than the reallocation of status and power among different social groups. Beginning in 2015, the nonprofit advocacy group Heterodox Academy carried the demand for more viewpoint diversity into the wider moral economy of higher education....

Analogical reasoning by AI systems compared to humans (albeit humans paid on the Internet)

This is interesting, although the "human" comparison class is not the strongest one.  The humans still outperform AI, but AI is not that far behind.  Curious to hear how informed readers (not random passersby!) interpret these results.

On the "upside down" flag outside the house of SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito

This is a sharp and informative commentary by law professor Michael Dorf; an excerpt:

Using a symbol of support for Trumpist political violence as a means of responding to a personal insult accusing one of having supported Trumpist political violence is a way of identifying with Trumpism at its most repugnant. It aligns the Alitos with Ginni Thomas and other Trumpist conspiracy theorists. And it works as a rejoinder to the neighbor only insofar as it invokes the crude bullying of Trump and his movement.

Where does that leave us? To my mind, this event is part of a larger pattern I discussed earlier this month: as Trump has taken over the Republican Party, people who continue to identify with its policies increasingly normalize him and his authoritarian movement. One sees a version of this in the suggestion by Professor [Josh] Blackman (in the post linked above) that calling out Alito reflects a "double standard" in light of the fact that Justice Ginsburg didn't face nearly the same level of outrage for her (entirely accurate but nonetheless inappropriate) criticism of Trump in 2016.

Respectfully, that's not a double standard.

The Israel/Gaza catastrophe--(plus the question of 'academic boycotts')

The NYT, which used to be an almost shameless apologist for any US-funded Israeli crimes, has turned a corner, it appears:  this article about the rise of the religious crazies in Israel (in the immortal words of the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan, "Fundamentalism is the mortal enemy of civilized humanity") and then this opinion piece revealing what is increasingly obvious to the whole world:

America’s romantic mythology and wishful thinking about Israel encourage a tendency to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the main cause of the ruthlessness in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 35,000 people. The unpopular, scandal-ridden premier makes a convincing ogre in an oversimplified story.

But Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the creeping famine, the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods — this, polling suggests, is the war the Israeli public wanted. A January survey found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis said the force being used against Gaza was appropriate or even insufficient. In February, a poll found that most Jewish Israelis opposed food and medicine getting into Gaza. It was not Mr. Netanyahu alone but also his war cabinet members (including Benny Gantz, often invoked as the moderate alternative to Mr. Netanyahu) who unanimously rejected a Hamas deal to free Israeli hostages and, instead, began an assault on the city of Rafah, overflowing with displaced civilians.

(The failure of Israeli leadership to secure the freedom of Israeli hostages, or even to priotize their freedom, is really quite extraordinary.)

I recommend this talk by my colleague John Mearsheimer about what a disaster all this is for Israel.  John is from New York City, and he has a slightly disarming way of speaking about atrocities, but he is a realist:  his basic view is that morality has nothing to do with the behavior of states, which live in the proverbial Hobbesian state of nature (notwithstanding the recent arrest warrants for Netanyahu and various Hamas criminals--but no one will be arrested, unless Israel captures the Hamas criminals).  As John says, there are four options for Israel, given that they control land (the West Bank, Gaza) that includes over seven million Palestinians: a democratic state for everyone (the benign meaning of "from the river to the sea"); a two-state solution; the existing apartheid; or ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.  As John says, quite correctly, the first two options are off the table as far as Israel is concerned (barring a political revolution there:  see the NYT article, above, about the rise of the religious zealots in Israel), so the media blather about a two-state solution is just pure propaganda:  no one with political power there wants it.  I seem to recall Steve Salaita saying on Twitter (I don't have the energy to track it down), that the real problem for Israel is that the Palestinians still exist.  And that means apartheid (which is tough to maintain), or ethnic cleansing--with the conduct of the war on Gaza suggests ethnic cleansing is the real goal by making Gaza uninhabitable and driving out the population. 

More fun with Judith Butler

Here; an excerpt:

Butler’s 320-page long manifesto-cum-call to arms...should have been desk rejected by any editorial board or publisher worthy of the name had it not been written by an academic celebrity with an iconic status, and a brand that is highly sought after by the niche clientele of the ever-flourishing identity economy (the book was #1 in LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies, #2 in Literary Criticism and Theory, and #2 in General Gender Studies on Amazon at the time of writing). And that’s probably what led Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the so-called “Big Five” dominating the publishing industry, to turn a blind eye to the text’s egregious errors, distortions and omissions tirelessly documented by a number of sharp critics since the day it hit the shelves.

"The NY Times doesn't cover college"...

...it covers a small number of elite, mostly private, universities.  Apt and amusing.

Most campus demonstrations about the war in Gaza have been peaceful

From The Guardian:

An analysis of 553 US campus demonstrations nationwide between 18 April and 3 May found that fewer than 20 resulted in any serious interpersonal violence or property damage, according to statistics from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled).

Over the same period, Acled documented at least 70 instances of forceful police intervention against US campus protests, which includes the arrest of demonstrators and the use of physical dispersal tactics, including the deployment of chemical agents, batons and other kinds of physical force.

"Behind the Ivy Intifada"

Some interesting points in this essay; an excerpt:

In most cases, the successful pursuit of political goals requires building broad coalitions by appealing to superordinate identities, shared goals, and common values, while de-emphasizing points of contention. People often have to make compromises, deal with difficult tradeoffs, and adjust their aims, strategies, and goals in light of realities “on the ground.” Effective political action requires discipline, patience, and persistence, to the extent that Weber famously likened it to the “slow boring of hard boards.” 

Because the denizens of elite institutions are largely insulated from the consequences of politics, however, they often feel free to approach politics as a combination of a sport, a holy war, and a means of self-expression. For instance, one of the few people arrested at Hamilton Hall with no ties to the university was a multimillionaire lawyer descended from wealthy ad executives, who is married to a model, lives in a $2.3 million townhouse, and regularly engages in violent agitation for sport.

Among the Columbia students, we could see this dynamic at work when the writer and activist Norman Finklestein warned demonstrators that, even if slogans like “From the River to the Sea” and “intifada” aren’t anti-Semitic, they are nonetheless highly polarizing. So if the goal is to bring in people who aren’t already on board, Finkelstein warned, then protesters should probably tone down this kind of rhetoric in favor of more broadly appealing language. The students responded by doubling down on their “From the River to the Sea” chant the moment Finkelstein handed off the mic.

This is how to handle Republican Representatives in their fake hearings

Watch NYC Public School Chancellor David Banks deal with the appalling Rep. Stefanik and another bozo.  Thank God for New Yorkers!  He should have prepped the university Presidents on how to handle these posturing charlatans.

You can learn a lot about people by how they treat janitors

From a NYT report about the student takeover of a building at Columbia University:

Mariano Torres, a maintenance worker at Columbia University, was cleaning on the third floor of Hamilton Hall in his signature Yankees cap one night last week, when he heard a commotion downstairs. He said he figured it had something to do with the pro-Palestinian encampment on the lawn outside and kept working.

He was shocked, he said, when he suddenly saw five or six protesters, their faces covered by scarves or masks, picking up chairs and bringing them into the stairway.

“I’m like, what the hell is going on? Put it back. What are you doing?” he recalled.

He said he tried to block them and they tried to reason with him to get out of the way, telling him “this is bigger than you.” One person, he recalled, told him he didn’t get paid enough to deal with this. Someone tried to offer him “a fistful of cash.”

He said he replied: “I don’t want your money, dude. Just get out of the building.”

It was the beginning of what would be a frightening time for Mr. Torres, who goes by Mario, and two other maintenance workers in Hamilton Hall, who were inside when pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia took over the building....

 

Mr. Torres and his colleagues called for help from the police and the school’s public safety officers, but no one arrived in time to assist them. The university eventually asked the police to clear the building and other protesters around campus, but they did not come until nearly 20 hours later.

That meant the workers, who were briefly trapped inside, had to make their own way out.

Some thoughts about the "encampment" at the University of Chicago (and its end)

(I started drafting this on the evening of May 6--the "encampment" was disbanded in the early hours of May 7, a topic I will address, below)

For a week (since Monday, April 29), there has been an "encampment" at the University of Chicago protesting a variety of things (more on that, below), but primarily, the University's "involvement" with Israel  given the atrocities it is committing in Gaza.  The encampment violates what are known as "time, place, and manner" regulations regarding speech and protest:  e.g., there is a bar on "encampments" on university grounds (for fairly obvious reasons, or they would proliferate, and not only by students!) that is general, and applies to all political points of view.  Despite that, the University President Paul Alivisatos (a very eminent chemist, who was previously Provost at Berkeley) took the view last Monday that, "Given the importance of the expressive rights of our students, we may allow an encampment to remain for a short time despite the obvious violations of policy," the policy being the aforementioned content-neutral prohibition on encampments.  I think that was the right decision, since the expression at issue involves speech on matters of great political importance right now, so unless the encampment posed serious problems it should be allowed to remain.

By Friday of last week, the President asserted that the time had come for the encampment to end because,

The encampment has created systematic disruption of campus. Protesters are monopolizing areas of the Main Quad at the expense of other members of our community. Clear violations of policies have only increased. Our students have issued a torrent of reports of disrupted classroom learning. Other disruptions include repeated destruction of an approved installation of Israeli flags, shouting down speakers they disagree with, vandalism and graffiti on historic buildings, incorporating walkways into the encampment, and co-opting the University flagpole to fly the Palestinian flag.

The most serious consideration here concerns "disrupted classroom learning," and I'll return to that in a moment.  Those responsible for removing Israeli flags or vandalism should be subjected to university disciplinary proceedings as individuals; such incidents do not justify ending the protest and encampment, except under an indefensible principle of collective punishment.  (That is one reason I did not sign this letter calling for the University to end the encampment; drafted, I am told, by Dorian Abbot [whose earlier maltreatment by a "woke" mob we discussed], the signatories are mostly part of UChicago Free, a group started by Professor Abbot and which I quit when it became clear many (vocal) members had no principled commitment to free speech or academic freedom, but were instead utilizing the group and its listserve as a grievance and self-pity forum for conservatives--the exceptions to the latter characterization among the signatories  [including some friends I respect] are those moved, I suspect, by their loyalty to Israel.)

The "Executive Unbound": University President edition

Law professor and public law scholar David Pozen (Columbia) uses recent events at Columbia to look at university governance, drawing some striking analogies with problems familiar from American constitutional and administrative law.

Exactly as predicted months ago, there is now famine in parts of Gaza...

...and even U.S. officials are saying so.    It's clear that Israel, which is now an international pariah because of its butchery in Gaza, should have followed Thomas Friedman's advice last fall, if only for prudential reasons.

Most Black Americans want to increase police presence and spending on police

Striking findings, but consistent with the complete lack of political support, including among Black politicans, for the "abolish the police" nonsense of recent years.  The idea that a country awash in guns and extreme economic inequality could afford to do away with the police is quite remarkable.  For a very different perspective, see this essay by a legal philosopher and scholar at Harvard.

"No one buys books"

This is depressing, based on data revealed during a DOJ suit opposing a book publisher merger.

Federal antidiscrimination law does not require campus crackdowns

This piece by Cornell law professor Michael Dorf is worth reading.  The Title VI arguments are spurious.

How Netanyahu's government is endangering Israel's survival

This rings true to me, alas; some excerpts:

War is a military means for achieving political aims, and there is one key yardstick by which to measure success in war: Were the political aims achieved? Following the horrendous massacre of October 7, Israel needed to liberate the hostages and disarm Hamas, but these should not have been its only aims. In light of the existential threat posed to Israel by Iran and its agents of chaos, Israel also needed to deepen its alliance with Western democracies, strengthen cooperation with moderate Arab forces, and work to establish a stable regional order. However, the Netanyahu government ignored all these aims, and instead focused on revenge. It has failed to secure the release of all the hostages, and has not disarmed Hamas. Worse, it intentionally inflicted a humanitarian disaster on the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and thereby undermined the moral and geopolitical basis for Israel's existence....

After six months of war, many of the hostages are still in captivity and Hamas is still on its feet, but the Gaza Strip is devastated, many thousands of its people have been killed, and most of its population are now famished refugees. Together with Gaza, Israel's international standing is also in ruins, and we are now hated and ostracized even by many of our former friends....

The actual William F. Buckley, Jr.

A good corrective to the recent whitewash documentary.

Some curious--and some alarming--facts about the U.S. Supreme Court...

...courtesy of law professor Eric Segall (Georgia State).

AI comes full circle in education

First, the worry was that students were using it to write their papers; now it turns out instructors are using it to evaluate them!  What do readers think?  Have any of you used AI this way?

Only 1.6% of *state* legislators are working-class people

Not a surprise, but still a stunning figure.

Euthanasia in the Netherlands...

...for mental health reasons:

Please watch the video before commenting.  I would be interested to hear from philosophers who have thought about these issues, or from those knowledgeable about the practices in the Netherlands.

 

More fun with Judith Butler...

...whose latest book was pretty carelessly thrown together, as Alex Byrne shows.