Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Latest fad in reactionary religious mischief: empowering parents to destroy public education

First in Oklahoma, now Texas:

Under the Parent Bill of Rights, Abbott said any educator convicted of providing minors with "obscene" content will lose their educational credentials and state licensing, forfeit their retirement benefits and will be placed on a "do not hire" list. The state will also require schools to post the bill online for parents to access....

You can guess which books will be deemed obscene.

"Gengis Khan--Hero of religious freedom?"

And popular with the Founding Fathers too.  Who knew?

Pollitt on Srinivasan at Dissent

This is one of the more interesting reviews (both appropriately complimentary and intelligently critical) of Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex, by Katha Pollitt, the longtime feminist critic at The Nation (here writing in Dissent); an excerpt:

The Right to Sex is clever, well-written, and worth reading, but I don’t quite understand why it’s received so much attention....There’s almost nothing about marriage, motherhood, child care, equality with men in the workplace, domestic labor, political representation, reproductive rights, misogynist culture, women’s health, the medical pathologizing of women’s bodies and minds, the continuing power of sexism to shape women’s expectations and behavior from birth, and the myriad obvious or subtle ways so many women are pushed, little by little, into becoming the support system for a man. The urgent and growing threat of fundamentalist religion and semi-fascist nationalist movements around the world goes unmentioned, as do the millions of mothers who were forced out of their jobs, some permanently, when the pandemic closed day-care centers and schools. It’s a truism of reviewing that you have to permit a writer her choice of subject; you can’t blame her for not writing a different book...Still, I found myself wondering if the most important issues in the lives of most women have been around so long, with so little fundamental improvement, that we’d just rather talk about something else. Like incels and pornography and professors who sleep with their students.

Is the U.S. heading for civil war?

Informative (and appropriately skeptical) interview with political scientist Barbara F. Walter (UCSD).

"Systemic racism" as an (uninformative) Aristotelian explanation for racial disparities

Philosopher Matt Lutz (Wuhan) comments.

Supreme Court will hear challenges to affirmative action in admissions at public and private universisties

Politico has the basic details here.  As I've noted in the past, I do expect this Supreme Court to end affirmative action in higher education admissions.  And now we can say when this will happen:  in 2023.  I taught at the University of Texas during the Hopwood years (when affirmative action was unlawful in the 5th Circuit), and the state's response was to take advantage (as it were) of the state's segregated high schools to continue to insure racial and ethnic diversity in colleges by mandating that the top 10% of each high school class was entitled to admission at a public university.  This actually had the desired effect, but not every state has this kind of alternative available, and of those that do, I suspect fewer will want to utilize it now.  The elimination of affirmative action will probably help accelerate some other trends, like the de-emphasis on standardized testing, among other things.

Driverless trucks are coming

That will mean the loss of about three million well-paying human jobs that do not require a college degree.

A newly discovered 1964 speech by Dr. King about the civil rights struggle in the U.S. and apartheid in South Africa

At Democracy Now.

"Virtual reality" and reality

Philosopher David Chalmers (NYU) thinks the distinction will go away.  I'm skeptical...

Ahmed, Bertram, Bird

Philosopher Arif Ahmed (Cambridge) complains in Unherd about ideological indoctrination at the universities.  Philosopher Chris Bertram (emeritus, Bristol), who keeps track of scholars who write for publications with "incorrect" views, tweets:

Alexander Bird, a Cambridge philosopher, replies:

"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies."

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Riverside Church in Manhattan, April 4, 1967:

Unfortunately, there has been no "revolution in values," except perhaps a counter-revolution.  As a 19th-century German thinker might observe, there can be no revolution in values without a revolution in material circumstances.

The classics "boom" in China

That's the good news--the bad news is that there's also strong interest in Leo Strauss. 

(Thanks to Chris Morris for the pointer.)

Do Graeber and Wengrow know what they're talking about in "The Dawn of Everything"

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED JANUARY 6--CONTINUING, INTERESTING DISCUSSION!

When it comes to Rousseau and French Enlightenment, not at all.  Their mistakes conform to Graeber's ideological agenda, however, which has to raise a red flag about the rest of their story.   I'm curious whether readers have seen scholarly assessments of the archaeological claims in the book?

Lottocracy...

...at Vox.  An excerpt:

Representatives selected by lot don’t have to campaign and don’t need campaign funds, goes the argument, limiting opportunities for corruption. As [Alex] Guerrero [Rutgers] puts it, “Lotteries excel at preventing corruption or undue influence in the selection of representatives.”

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

U.S. Free Speech Union calls out proposed Oklahoma legislation that would turn every parent into a state-appointed censor of school libraries

Really wild, even by the standards of the ass-backwards parts of America.

Orwell on reviewing books

This is funny and apt:

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be “This book is worthless”, while the truth about the reviewer’s own reaction would probably be “This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to.”

"How Doctors Die"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 3--SOME INTERESTING COMMENTS AND  LINKS, MORE WELCOME

I recently came across this striking article from 2013; an excerpt:

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

"Universal Basic Income," Alaska-style

And it works quite well:

In 1976, the voters of Alaska approved a Constitutional Amendment establishing the Alaska Permanent Fund. Powered by investments fueled by oil royalties, the Fund pays out dividends (the Permanent Fund Dividend) annually to Alaska residents. This year, the Permanent Fund Dividend will amount to $1,114.

This puts Alaska in the unique position of having run a UBI program for more than four decades. While the program isn’t nearly as generous as Yang’s proposed UBI ($1,000 monthly for adults) or the CTC ($3,600 annually for each kid under 6 and $3,000 annually for each kid ages 6 to 17), it does offer opportunities to study the impact of unconditional government cash transfers.

That’s what Washington State University sociologist Mariana Amorim decided to do. She analyzed dividend payments between 1996 and 2015, curious about how the payments changed parents’ spending calculus. The results were published at the end of October in the journal Social Forces.

Do your own research on how to "do your own research"

Philosopher Nathan Ballantyne (Fordham) and psychologist David Dunning (of Dunning-Kruger Effect fame) comment.

What do you remember about characters from fiction (novels, films, comics, games etc.)?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM XMAS EVE:  PROFESSOR LAVOCAT WELCOMES MORE RESPONSES; THANKS TO THOSE WHO HAVE ALREADY COMPLETED THE SURVEY.

Professor Françoise Lavocat (Paris III), a distinguished literay scholar (more about her here), is undertaking a cross-cultural study of what people remember about characters they encounter in fiction (whether books or comics or games or films etc.).  You can participate in her survey here.  It should take 10 or 15 minutes.

Setting health-care priorities during pandemics and other mass casualty events

The entire conference, featuring many philosophers, is online here.  The topic, alas, is rather obviously timely!  The schedule is below the fold:

The Israeli General and Deleuze & Guattari

A strange story.

(Thanks to Aaron Garrett for the pointer.)

Harvard and the SAT

Another amusing, over-the-top rant from Freddie deBoer; an excerpt:

College admissions exist to serve the schools. Period. End of story. They always have, they always will. College admissions departments functioned as one big anti-Semitic conspiracy for decades because that was in the best interest of the institution. Guys who the schools know will never graduate but who run a 4.5 40 jump the line because admissions serves the institution. Absolute fucking dullards whose parents can pay - and listen, guys, it’s cute that you think legacies are somehow the extent of that dynamic, like they won’t let in the idiot son of a wealthy guy who didn’t go there - get in because admissions serves the institution. Some cornfed doofus from Wyoming with a so-so application gets in over a far more qualified kid from Connecticut because the marketing department gets to say they have students from 44 states in the incoming class instead of 43 that way, because admissions serves the institution. How do you people look at this world and conclude that the problem is the SAT?

So much for "artificial intelligence"

Philosopher Jeffrey Ketland (Warsaw) writes:

I made an account and had quick chat with the AI bot, GPT-3.

Here’s the output [below the fold] for the da Vinci engine, which is the smartest. Since it’s called da Vinci I asked a simple pendulum problem, which it got wrong.

It got all the answers wrong. Not very encouraging, in my opinion!

I repeated this chat one more time, getting different answers, but still basically wrong.

"Democracy or Ameri-cracy?"

This is a Chinese propaganda video, which is mostly correct about the U.S., even though its purpose, of course, is really to offer an apology for the authoritarianism of the CCP (which the CCP wants, in classic Stevensonian "persuasive definition" fashion, to dub "democracy"):

 

AI bot, GPT-3, now available for anyone to utilize

Philosopher Blake Myers (see earlier discussion) points out that the AI bot, GPT-3, is now available for anyone to use. Click on “GET STARTED” at the link, below, and quickly create an account:

https://openai.com/api/

Dr. Myers adds:  "Also, if people just want to quickly chat with GPT-3 once they make their account and sign in, they can just click on the reddish-pinkish box that says 'Examples,' then click on 'Chat,' and finally click on 'Open in Playground.' But there are also many other things people can explore that can be done now."

The decline of religion in America

Biologist Jerry Coyne (Chicago) collects the latest evidence.

Yale undergraduate calls out Yale's obscene wealth

The same story could be told about Princeton, Stanford, or Harvard of course:

When I arrived at Friday’s Sophomore Holiday Dinner, I was stunned at how the already-striking Commons had been transformed. The chandeliers that illuminate the dining hall were dimmed to set an elegant scene, and the wooden tables and chairs that usually fill Commons were replaced by massive buffet lines. Meal stations with copious amounts of food lined the walls, and a dessert table featuring an ice sculpture dragon sat in the middle of the space....

The event’s emcee...took a moment to note the sheer abundance of food at the dinner — 1,000 shrimp, pounds and pounds of fish, crab, lobster, lamb, turkey and pork and cakes with too many layers to count — all for Yale. Once his speech ended, the Parade of Comestibles began. Dining hall workers, most of whom were Black, marched around Commons carrying the flags of the 14 residential colleges and carrying elegant food displays as a local drumming band, all Black, played triumphant beats. They circled Commons several times touting, among other things, a 10-foot loaf of bread, an ice-sculpted sleigh stuffed with the aforementioned shrimp and a rack of lamb decorated with mint and berries. Students swayed to the beat of the drums, excitedly watching the performance and recording it on their cell phones.

Some predictions from Robert Paul Wolff

Here, with some resonance with my own earlier comments.

Changes in projects funded by the National Science Foundation since 1990

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 8--IMPORTANT UPDATES

This study misuses the word "politicized" in an ideologically tendentious way, but has clearly identified a surprising trend:

As of 2020, across all fields 30.4% of successful grant abstracts contained at least one of the terms “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “gender,” “marginalize,” “underrepresented,” or “disparity.” This is up from 2.9% in 1990 (Figure 2). This increase is seen in every field. As of 2020, the two most politicized [sic] fields seem to be Education & Human Resources (53.8%, up from 4.3% in 1990) and Biological Sciences (43.8%, up from 6.6%), although “diversity” may sometimes have non-political connotations in the latter. Even the fields that should be most disconnected from politics have seen a massive jump in these terms: Mathematical & Physical Sciences went from 0.9% to 22.6%, and Engineering from 1.6% to 25.4%.

The world's worst Michelin-starred restaurant?

This is extremely funny.  Perhaps one should not entrust restaurant evaluations to a tire company?

Graduate student strike at Columbia University getting ugly

There's an account from student organizers at CHE, calling on faculty for support.  The Administration is threatening to withhold Spring appointments for teaching assistants if the strike doesn't en, which, in theory, is a significant violation about NLRB rules.

"Identitarian psycho-babble" had its origins in Herbert Marcuse's third wife!

This is a truly weird story.

"Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion"

We know where "diversity" came from in the now ominpresent "DEI" slogan:    it was cooked up by corporate HR departments in the 1970s to defend affirmative action as not being about righting wrongs done to African-Americans but instead as producing "diversity" which was supposed to be good for business; it was then constitutionalized by Justice Lewis Powell of the  Supreme Court in his controlling opinion in the Bakke case in the late 1970s.

But where did the "equity and inclusion" come from?  This is a genuine question, I don't know the answer, but someone probably does.

The U.S. Supreme Court, abortion, and the 2022 midterm elections

The NYT coverage makes it sound like there's a real chance the Court will overrule Roe v. Wade next June, which would result in at least 20 states prohibiting abortion immediately (some will permit exceptions in cases of rape or incest, others will not even do that).  Public opinion in the benighted states of America decisively supports a right to choose abortion by a large margin--if not in all cases, then certainly in many.  A decision triggering abortion bans next June will make abortion a highly salient issue to voters in the November 2022 elections, and this issue ought to work strongly in favor of the Democrats.  Of course, all this assumes voted are counted and honored, which obviously isn't the goal in many of the 20 states that will ban abortion if the super-legislature permits them.

The Rittenhouse verdict explained

A useful discussion of the case by a clinical law professor at Harvard, who explains the law very simply and clearly.  His conclusion is not that different from my far briefer one:

The quarrel, I submit, is not with the jury, or with the extrajudicial commentary that preceded the trial. The better quarrel should be with Wisconsin’s gun law. Long-standing self-defense law conspired with absurdly permissive open carry laws to create the set of conditions to make the Rittenhouse affair possible. Perhaps those of us who find the verdict troubling are better served by focusing our attention on state legislatures. I see nothing in the text of the Second Amendment or its doctrinal exegesis that compels states to permit minors to stroll about town with a rifle strapped across their shoulder. It makes no sense, and the unintended consequence of such a legal regime is a Wild Wild West mentality where citizens feel emboldened to engage in private law enforcement.

Class, education and political divides across different countries

This is an interesting resource.

None of these "fictions" have anything to do with "leftism"...

...which Professor McWhorter would know if he read more Adolph Reed, but that aside, he's plainly correct and it's good to say it out loud in the NYT; an excerpt:

That selective schools regularly admit Black students with adjusted standards is undeniable. Examples include “Harvard’s race-conscious admissions program” — as U.S. Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch described it last year — and the circumstances of the well-known Gratz v. Bollinger Supreme Court decision, where this aspect of the admissions process was widely aired, as among a number of other cases over the past few decades....

A comment on the Kyle Rittenhouse case in Wisconsin

As legal positivists like to say: What the law is, and what it ought to be, are two separate questions.  The law permitted Rittenhouse to interject himself into the scene of a civil disturbance, to carry a powerful rifle openly, and to defend himself against others.  The acquittal is not surprising, quite apart from the fact that the judge in the case was not very competent and a bit of a buffoon.  The problem here was not the trial, but the law:  the law should not permit civilians to own, let alone carry, military weapons, and it should impose a much higher standard for the use of deadly force for self-defense.  But this is America, and America is a very sick country alas.

Why hasn't Rupert Murdoch's media empire destroyed Australia the way it has destroyed America?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FRIDAY (NOV. 12), SINCE IT HAS GENERATED A QUITE INTERESTING SET OF COMMENTS

The rise of Murdoch's Fox News in America since 1996 has coincided with the complete crazification of the Republican Party in the U.S., with the result that America is now ungovernable and teetering towards collapse as a democracy (I discussed some of this development in this recent paper).  Yet Murdoch's media empire has not had such deleterious effects in his native Australia.  Here's the program of the Australian Liberal Party, the party of the right in Australia.  With only a couple of exceptions, it's a set of proposals that would be associated with the more progressive end of the Democratic Party in the U.S.:  spend money on infrastructure, on the elderly, on families, on healthcare, on women.  Of course, Australian politics started from a different baseline, but the question that naturally arises is:  why didn't the Murdoch media wreck Australia too?

More "Social Justice [sic]" kittens for 2021

Here.

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

What is "Critical Race Theory" and what does it have to do with "Critical Theory" (i.e., the Frankfurt School)?

The "Critical Race Theory Scare," a bit like the old "Red Scare," has conjured up a bogeyman from a minor movement in academic legal scholarship that goes by the name "Critical Race Theory," and that is associated with law professors like Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, the late Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and others.  As is no doubt well-known to readers of this blog, the current bogeyman "Critical Race Theory" (CRT) has only a little to do with the body of writing by law professors--indeed, as this profile of the creator of the current hysteria makes clear, the real targets are the half-baked "ideas" of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi that have been put into practice in many workplaces (and some schools):  e.g., treating race as the marker of moral and epistemic status, treating disparate impact as evidence of "racism," overgeneralizing about the supposed attributes of "whiteness" (e.g., "objectivity" is white), interpreting effects of the capitalist marketplace as "racial" effects, and so on.  The DiAngelo-Kendi schtick makes the other white victims of the capitalist marketplace into agents and instigators of morally reprehensible oppression.

DiAngelo and Kendi, in any case, cite some CRT articles, and the propagandists decided that CRT was a good stand-in for the enemy.  DiAngelo and Kendi should be consigned to oblivion, and most of the objections to the CRT bogeyman are really objections to their stupidity, as any Marxist would agree.  But CRT is not by any stretch of the imagination a "Marxist" theory (and has little to do with Frankfurt School Critical Theory), so what is it about?

DEI initiatives in action in the public schools

This would be laughable if it wasn't real:

They also recommend that people read a bunch of Robin DiAngelo books and brag that “more than 2,000 DCPS staff have participated in Courageous Conversation training.” But is Courageous Conversation training a good idea? This NYT Magazine profile of the company and its founder made it sound pretty bad:

    Singleton, who holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford, and who did     stints in advertising and college admissions before founding what’s now known as Courageous     Conversation in 1992, talks about white culture in similar ways. There is the myth of     meritocracy. And valuing “written communication over other forms,” he told me, is “a     hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another     “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.” He said, “There’s this whole     group of people who are named the scientists. That’s where you get into this whole idea that     if it’s not codified in scientific thought that it can’t be valid.” He spoke about how the     ancient Egyptians had “ideas about how humanity works that never had that scientific-       hypothesis construction” and so aren’t recognized. “This is a good way of dismissing people.     And this,” he continued, shifting forward thousands of years, “is one of the challenges in the     diversity-equity-inclusion space; folks keep asking for data. How do you quantify, in a way     that is scientific — numbers and that kind of thing — what people feel when they’re feeling     marginalized?” For Singleton, society’s primary intellectual values are bound up with this     marginalization."

 

I don’t think Frankfurt School Marxists are going to take over society by injecting these ideas into K-12 schools or anything like that. What I do think is that time and money is being wasted on initiatives that are run by people who are somewhere between stupid and fraudulent.

Hope for the NY Times? A columnist discovers the Marxist analysis of racism...

...via a reading of the Marxist sociologist Cromwell Cox.  An excerpt:

Over the course of 600 pages, Cox provides a systematic study of caste, class and race relations, underscoring the paramount differences between caste and race, and, most important, tying race to the class system. “Racial antagonism,” he writes in the prologue, “is part and parcel of this class struggle, because it developed within the capitalist system as one of its fundamental traits.”

Put differently, to the extent that Cox had a single problem with the “caste” analysis of American racism, it was that it abstracted racial conflict away from its origins in the development of American capitalism. The effect was to treat racism as a timeless force, outside the logic of history.

America is mostly doomed, the latest poll evidence

Here, although it isn't all bad news.  Some excerpts:

Only 29% of Republicans today say that American culture and way of life have changed for the better since the 1950s, a substantial decrease from 46% in 2020 and a return to their opinion in 2016 (31%), prior to the election of former President Trump. Most Republicans (70%) say American culture and way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s. By contrast, a majority of Democrats (63%) think that American culture and way of life have changed for the better, much the same as in 2020 (62%). Independents closely resemble the general population (48% better) and have also declined in this view since 2020 (57% better).

Just as a reminder, large portions of the U.S. were a de jure apartheid regime in the 1950s.  Onward:

Around three in ten Americans (31%) say that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. This share has remained steady throughout 2021, in August (29%), June (30%), and March (29%).

More than two-thirds of Republicans (68%), compared to 26% of independents and 6% of Democrats, believe that the election was stolen from Trump. These shares are even greater among Republicans who most trust Fox News (82%) and essentially universal among those who most trust far-right news (97%). Less than half of Republicans who most trust mainstream news agree (44%).

A Zimbardo "prison" experiment before Zimbardo?

Philosopher John Doris (Cornell) calls my attention to this interesting piece about a high school teacher who, in 1967, turned his students into fascists over the course of five days, calling to mind the later and controversial Stanford Prison experiment conducted by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo.   Do readers knokw anything about the high school case, beyond what is reported in the linked article?

 

On the changes wrought by the neoliberal "identity politics" (fake) "left"

I agree with much (but not all) of this from the writer and critic Freddie deBoer (although the labels "universalism" and "particularism" are inapt):

If you don’t believe me, and your Twitter account occupies any kind of progressive space, go on there and tweet “I think Democrats and the left should work to improve conditions for poor white people as well. Their suffering matters.” The notion of the left working for poor people as poor people, rather than merely as an extension of some identity frame, would be totally uncontroversial among the vast majority of left-leaning people throughout the existence of the modern political spectrum. Today? Go ahead, tweet that out, if you have a lot of liberal and leftist followers. See how that works out for you....

Perhaps the most glaring change in the left, in my lifetime, has been the abandonment of civil liberties as a core left issue - or, at least, of civil liberties for anyone who does not fall into a protected identity class....Civil liberties have been a core element of liberal and leftist belief going back centuries, but have been abandoned by today’s social justice advocates, who have been educated not in organizing meetings or union halls but on Tumblr and in seminars at $80,000/year liberal arts colleges. They put free speech in sneer quotes every time they invoke it...

Virginia Gubernatorial election

The media, which always rushes to judgment, has declared the victory of a Republican in the election for Governor in Virginia as being due to his running against "critical race theory" in the schools.  Maybe that's right, the evidence so far is thin on the ground.   Unmentioned is that the Republican was running against the awful Terry Mcauliffe, a Democratic machine politician from the Clinton era who, like Bill and Hilary Clinton, stands for nothing but opportunism and some socially liberal attitudes.  Despite running against a weak candidate, the Republican barely won.

Anyway, all this reminds me that I meant to write something about the CRT Scare, which is really a DiAngelo-Kendi scare (twose two simple-minded grifters are a different matter), rather than what some legal academics called critical race theory.  Soon!

Mysteries of Twitter

This funny photo that I posted on Twitter went "viral" as they say:  more than 11,000 retweets, 65,000 "likes," more than 350 comments, and, according to the fake Twitter data, nearly 4,000,000 "impressions" and more than 330,000 "engagements."  (The "impressions" data is much inflated, and should really be called "possible impressionns"; "engagements" is a better metric of those who actually saw it.)  What a strange medium!   As I've mentioned before, you can follow me on Twitter for links to blog posts, plus some Twitter-specific comments and gags.

When the current US Supreme Court strikes down race-conscious admissions procedures...

...which they will almost certainly do in the next couple of years, the Court will, oddly enough, in this instance have majority sentiment on its side, if not elite opinion:  opposition to using race and ethnicity as factors in admissions decisions for colleges is quite widespread.  More than 60% of Blacks, Hispanics, and Democrats say race or ethnicity should not be a factor at all in admissions.   (Philosopher Thomas Mulligan [Georgetown] has called attention to this striking fact previously.)