Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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.)

Texas legislator draws up list of 850 books dealing with race and sexuality...

...that could cause "discomfort" (or maybe even "feelings of exclusion" or "harm"?).

Brad Rosenheim (South Florida) and Dawn Sumner (UC Davis) are enemies of academic freedom

Two other choices quotes from the Boston Globe article about MIT faculty protesting the shabby treatment of Professor Abbot:

Brad Rosenheim, associate professor of oceanography at the University of South Florida, said EAPS did the right thing because Abbot’s opinionsconflict with the department’s official stand on diversity, equity, and inclusion. “It’s almost schizophrenic, in a way, to have a diversity statement and to invite somebody who espouses these views,” Rosenheim said.

The problem wasn’t Abbot’s political opinions, Rosenheim said. Rather, it’s the fact that he has so openly expressed them.“I could invite somebody else who has the same views as Dorian Abbot, but hasn’t written a Newsweek piece and hasn’t promulgated videos of it on the Internet,” Rosenheim said.

Cancel culture, redux

It's certainly pathetic when right-wingers only give attention to free expression issues when it's their ox being gored, but it's even more pathetic when those nominally on the left pretend that there aren't serious problems with free expression in the academy and the broader culture emerging from the neoliberal identity-politics movement.   This article is a good antidote to the latter group of dissemblers; an excerpt:

Critics of the idea of “cancel culture” have a point when they argue that pushback against speech and expression we find morally offensive is a vital part of free speech. While disinvitations should be avoided on principle, there is nothing wrong with forcefully arguing that a college campus should not extend a speaking invitation to a far-right hate peddler like Ann Coulter or a progressive [sic] white-guilt grifter like Robin DiAngelo. Likewise, while taking down published articles should be a no-no except in case of egregious factual errors, plagiarism, or other misconduct, it’s not illiberal to argue that respected media outlets should not platform certain odious views, whether they’re unabashedly racist anti-immigration tirades or arguments that sexual liberation should extend to pedophiles. But it also seems clear that in a liberal society, the range of truly “cancelable” viewpoints should remain as narrow as possible, and the lines should be very carefully drawn.

Right-wing newspapers have a selective interest in freedom of expression, part 373

The Washington Free Beacon broke a story about a diversity bureaucrat gone mad at Yale Law School, and yesterday ran a follow-up on the reaction of legal academics.  It included this quote:

Martha Nussbaum, a left-wing legal theorist at the University of Chicago, said it "would be appalling and chilling" for any administrator to suggest that "the Federalist Society is per se racist," as Yale Law School diversity director Yassen Eldik alleged. Nussbaum's Chicago colleague Brian Leiter—who has argued that future generations are "doomed" if America does not one day embrace socialism—agreed, telling the Free Beacon that "Yale has some serious academic freedom and free expression problems."

What I actually told the reporter was this:  "Between DEI administrators running amok, and rich donors meddling in courses,  I would say Yale has some serious academic freedom and free expression problems!"  No mention of the latter in the story, which is, in fact, the much more serious recent violation exposed at Yale.

Carl Schmitt in China...

...or why the CCP is interested in Schmitt.

(Thanks to Matt Kramer for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  A PhD student with a special interest in China writes with some useful perspective:

Contra Ibsen, the majority isn't *always* wrong

And this is a majority in the Benighted States of America, no less:

A broad majority of Americans — more than 6 in 10 — believes the Supreme Court bases its decisions more on the justices’ political views than on the Constitution and law, a national survey released Wednesday shows....

Lord Devlin's elderly daughter accuses him of sexually abusing her as a child

Story here.  Devlin is best-known in philosophical and jurisprudential circles for defending the view (against H.L.A. Hart) that the criminal law should concern itself with "immorality," even when no one was harmed.  At issue then was the criminalization of homosexuality, which was legalized shortly thereafter in Britain.  In  light of this revelation, one might surmise that there was more than a little reaction formation going on with Devlin's side of the debate.

Regarding General Powell

A useful reminder.

Social Epistemology, and the Epistemology of the Media and the Internet

Philosopher Joseph Shieber (Lafayette) has a fair-minded and interesting discussion of my recent paper.  I agree with a number of points he makes, including, as I argue in the paper, for the need for a restored Fairness Doctrine in the traditional media. I think Professor Shieber understates the distinctive contribution of the Internet to mayhem and ignorance (which I discuss, in particular, at pp. 20-23), but that's certainly arguable.

2nd assassination of an MP in Britain in five years!

That's pretty ghastly, and a very bad sign.  If guns were more readily available, one suspects there would have been even more incidents.  The UK, like the US, is in trouble.

The ideas of Wang Huning, one of the most influential people in the CCP

I'd never heard of this scholar turned powerful political advisor before a Chinese scholar elsewhere called this piece to my attention.

ADDENDUM:  A philosopher elsewhere points out to me that reactionary Catholics in the U.S. are very fond of this guy's ideas!

The power of the "woke" and the impotence of the left in America

There is much to agree with in this essay by Freddie DeBoer; some excerpts:

The left-of-center is in a profoundly strange and deeply unhealthy place. In the span of a decade or less a bizarre form of linguistically-radical but substantively-conservative identity neoliberalism descended from decaying humanities departments in elite universities and infected social media like Tumblr and Twitter, through which it conquered the media and entertainment industries, the nonprofit industrial complex, and government entities as wide-ranging as the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights and the brass of the Pentagon. That movement now effectively controls the idea-and-story generating power of our society, outside of explicitly conservative media which exists in a large silo but a silo all the same. On any given day the most powerful institutions in the world go to great lengths to mollify the social justice movement, to demonstrate fealty, to avoid its wrath....

Happy Columbus Day...

...from Howard Zinn.  Or as Nietzsche says:  "the start of everything great on earth [is] thoroughly and for a long time soaked in blood" (GM II:6).

Albania, before and after Stalinism

Political philosopher Lea Ypi (LSE) talks about her autobiographical book at The Guardian.

"Uprising" on Amazon Prime

I'll take the liberty  of sharing another recommendation of an eye-opening documentary (at least for an American, maybe Brits knew all this) that may interest some readers, this one on Amazon Prime from director Steve McQueen.  "Uprising" recounts the horrific fire at a "house party" that killed thirteen Black teenagers in South London in a neighborhood of West Indians ("the New Cross fire"), setting the event in historical context and exploring its aftermath.  The context was the rise of the basically fascist and openly racist National Front party in Britain, which called not just for an end to immigration but for "repatriation" of all "colored" people!  (Seriously:  watch the film, this is 1979!) Thatcher pandered to National Front voters while soft-peddling their racism, as the film shows.   Was the New Cross Fire a racially motivated attack on a "house party"?   The film's treatment of this question is nuanced.  But the disgusting level of public racism, by ordinary people and police (including the police official who explained that it was a matter of "opinion" whether use of the N-word by police was derogatory), is breathtaking.

"Social media as the 'false representative class'"

Another amusing essay by philosopher Justin Smith (Paris VII); an excerpt:

It is of course fitting for politicians to say something when, e.g., the president of the US has a military opponent assassinated by drone strike. By contrast it is troubling when ordinary private citizens are expected to withhold whatever they might have planned to tweet about their recent Netflix experiences because something big just happened in Afghanistan, and some nebulous pressure obliges them to speak only of this, or, if they are aware of their own ignorance, to simply remain silent. But what is the nature of this pressure? It cannot be noblesse-oblige, because they are not nobles; it cannot be the dignity of the office, because they hold no office.

On Macroeconomics, in the NYT

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 1--INTERESTING DISCUSSION, MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

From an article today:

In effect, many of the key ideas underlying economic policy during the Great Moderation — the period of relatively steady growth and low inflation from the mid-1980s to 2007 that also seems to be a high-water mark for economists’ overconfidence — increasingly look to be at best incomplete, and at worst wrong.

It is vivid evidence that macroeconomics, despite the thousands of highly intelligent people over centuries who have tried to figure it out, remains, to an uncomfortable degree, a black box. The ways that millions of people bounce off one another — buying and selling, lending and borrowing, intersecting with governments and central banks and businesses and everything else around us — amount to a system so complex that no human fully comprehends it.

Nothing is too trivial to nonetheless inspire a grievance

Many in the STEM fields now use "JEDI" as the acronym for "justice, equality, diversity, and inclusion."   This, however, is offensive according to these academics (mostly from education schools).  One mathematician who sent this to me, singled out this passage from the article:

[T]he Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work. They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.). The Jedi are also an exclusionary cult, membership to which is partly predicated on the possession of heightened psychic and physical abilities (or “Force-sensitivity”).

The mathematician added:  "At first I was certain it was Onion-style parody. But the rest is too sanctimonious. Maybe we *are* in end-times?"  Characteriznig the Jedi as "white" makes about as much sense as characterizing Plato as "white."  Vide Professor Reed.

German election results are encouraging

A full breakdown here:  the Greens and the Social Democrats both saw significant increases in their share of the vote, while the crypto-fascist AfD lost ground.  Some of the gains for the Greens probably came from losses for The Left, the democratic socialist party.   The Greens are not as progressive, but the Greens, thanks to their electoral gains, will have more impact this time around than either they or The Left had in the previous parliament.  Or so it looks to me, an outsider to German politics!  (Merkel's Christian Democrats are somewhat more conservative than the Social Democrats, but one should not look at German politics through an American lens:  most Christian Democrrats wouldn't be welcome in today's Republican Party in the U.S.)

What if the earth was cut in half?

I'm sure many readers have been worrying about this; remarkably, there's a site with an answer.

A. Philip Randolph and Vernon Jordan: an anecdote

A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was the great civil and labor rights leader of the last century, whom I've occasionally mentioned here before.  When I was a high school student, my father had given me a biography of Randolph by Jervis Anderson, which made a profound impression on me at the time:  this was a great man.  Randolph had organized, in the face of many obstacles, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the first half of the last century, a union that represented the overwhelmingly Black porters who tended to passengers on interstate trains (when trains were still the primary form of long distance transport).  During WWII, Randolph forced FDR to outlaw racial discrimination in the defense industries; after WWII, Randolph forced Truman to integrate the military.  He and Bayard Rustin, another great figure of the last century, organized the 1963 March on Washington, at which  Martin Luther King, Jr. made his famous "I have a dream" speech.  Randolph, like Rustin, always emphasized the intersection of labor and civil rights, a view that MLK came around too in the years proceeding his assassination. 

The philistinism of the philosophers

From an essay by philosopher Justin Smith (Paris VII):

The political philosopher Jake McNulty reminded me recently of a wonderful observation of Adorno’s: that it was not the artists with firm political convictions expressed through their art, such as Bertolt Brecht, who ended up truly revolutionizing their historical moment, but those such as Samuel Beckett, whose work is infinitely ambiguous, non-committal, and open to endless interpretation. The one gave us Tin Pan Alley retrofitted with revolutionary slogans, the other gave us his own sort of revolution. One fears that the closest thing we have to intellectuals today are so disengaged from even the ideal of an avant-garde that they know only how to scan a work for its manifest content, and thus today’s descendants of Brecht are deemed good because they are “on message”, while today’s descendants of Beckett, if there were any, would be deemed irresponsible for failing to state explicitly enough their commitment to antiracism.

"The Need for Socially Distanced Citizens"

Philosopher Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) comments.

Classical violinist comes to the defense of Hendrix

God bless him.

Political orientation, science denial, and COVID vaccinations

Philosopher Adrian Bardon (Wake Forest) comments.

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz on the "1619 Project" and the muted professional response to it

We covered the response of historians to the 1619 Project extensively here--most of it occurring on the World Socialist Website, one of the few venues willing to seek out distinguished historians for comment.  The "Project" and its reception is the subject of this instructive essay by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz; some excerpts:

I began feeling uneasy a few minutes into reading the lead essay, by the project’s chief contributor, the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, and then I read a key paragraph so fallacious and dogmatic that it hit me between the eyes. With a tone of absolute assurance, flagging the matter as crucial, the essay informed readers of what it called a „fact“ – a fact „conveniently left out of our founding mythology“ – specifically that „one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence“ from Britain „was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.“  I instantly wondered how anyone even lightly informed about the history of either slavery or the American Revolution , could write that sentence….

"Democrats Sick Of Being Blamed For Cowardice On Issues They Actually Just Don’t Care About"

The Onion, of course:

“I’ve had it with being labeled spineless simply because, at the end of the day, I really don’t give a shit whether we tax the rich to help poor families or hungry children or whatever,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), stressing that his complete lack of interest in passing tough regulations for the financial services industry, supporting a Green New Deal, and ending the War on Terror hardly meant he was weak-willed or timid. “That’s so unfair. If these were issues Democrats truly cared about, then we’d fight the Republicans tooth and nail on them. We’d even have the guts to risk the lucrative relationships we’ve formed with powerful corporations, defense contractors, and billionaire donors. But for something like an eviction moratorium, Medicare for all, or a fracking ban? No fucking way.”

(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

After a decade of litigation, appeals court orders reinstatement of transgender professor who was victim of discrimination in tenure decision

The right outcome, but it sure took a long time!

The prudent wing of the ruling class behaving badly...

...or behaving, in any event, like the ruling class.  Greenwald rightly lambasts "the normalization of maskless elites attended to by faceless servants."

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

Peter Boghossian's resignation from Portland State University

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 9--UPDATED WITH SOME MORE INFORMATION

Various readers sent me this letter from Professor Boghossian describing his alleged reasons for resigning.  If, in fact, he was treated in the ways described, that is pretty outrageous, but it would be good to have independent confirmation from another source.  (He has been an assistant professor since 2014, which is a rather long time at that rank, so it would be good to know what the story is with that as well.)  Some of the "illiberal" campus environment is obviously real at many places, although rarely to the extent he describes.   On the other hand, a professor at Portland State revealed in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education that she literally has no idea what academic freedom is, so maybe things really are that bad there?

UPDATE (9/14/21):  A faculty member at Portland State writes with some useful context and perspective:

Peter was not a tenure-line faculty at PSU. PSU has an unusual status for non- t-t faculty that they can apply for the same titles as tenure-line faculty. I believe it was 2014 that he got that title (after having been an Instructor for I believe six years before that), but because he is not on the tenure track, he could have kept it indefinitely. In fact, he did decide to apply for promotion to "Associate Professor" last year, but was denied.

On mention of the N-word in a pedagogical context

Sensible analysis, as usual, from law professor Randall Kennedy (Harvard); an excerpt:

I am skeptical of some of the claims of hurt. I suspect that some of them are the product of learned strategic ripostes. It is now well known that in certain settings, particularly those that strive to be socially enlightened (like colleges and universities), you can effectively challenge speech to which you object by claiming not only that it is socially abhorrent (racist, sexist, transphobic, etc., etc., etc.) but that it makes you feel insulted, offended, or endangered.

"Against Effective Altruism"

Philosopher Alice Crary (New School/Oxford) comments. What Professor Crary calls "the institutional critique" is the really decisive one it seems to me; here is her useful summary of it:

This critique attacks effective altruists for operating with a damagingly narrow interpretation of the class of things that are assessable as right or wrong. It targets effective altruists’ tendency to focus on single actions and their proximate consequences and, more specifically, on simple interventions that reduce suffering in the short term. Advocates of the institutional critique are on the whole concerned to decry the neglect, on the part of EA, of coordinated sets of actions directed at changing social structures that reliably cause suffering. EA’s metrics are best suited to detect the short term impact of particular actions, so its tendency to discount the impact of coordinated actions can be seen as reflecting ‘measurability bias’. A leitmotif of the institutional critique of EA is that this bias is politically dangerous because it obscures the structural, political roots of global misery, thereby contributing to its reproduction by weakening existing political mechanisms for positive social change

9/11 Anniversary

It's 48 years since the events in Chile, and 20 years since the events in America.  I have vivid memories of the latter, none of the former.  I'll just post links to what I wrote on the 5th anniversary in 2006:  a personal recollection of that day which readers too young to remember the events may find interesting (I was teaching at the University of Texas at Austin on 9/11/2001); and some reflections on the catastrophic political and cultural fallout from the crimes of 9/11.  It's perhaps a good day to remember that George W. Bush was a far worse President than the otherwise appalling Donald Trump:  he inflicted death and suffering on millions and millions of people because of the criminal war of aggression against Iraq, which Bush's "bestiary of madmen" (as I used to call them) used 9/11 to justify.

Philosopher Peter Singer to donate all of $1 million prize to charities

This, of course, is what he should do, given his ideas and arguments, so kudos to him.  If he were not a proponent of "effective [i.e., measurable in the short-term] altruism," he might choose different beneficiaries for the money, but that's a separate debate.  

United States sues Texas, seeking an injunction of the anti-abortion legislation

A good move. 

Is radical political action like brain surgery or a landslide?

Robert Paul Wolff comments; an excerpt:

Let me begin with the distinction, which I am sure I have several times drawn before on this blog, between two very different images of progressive or transformative political action: brain surgery and a landslide. If you think that radical political action is like brain surgery, then you will suppose that it is a precise and delicate matter in which it is desperately important to perform the operation in precisely the correct manner – one wrong move can leave the patient paralyzed or, worse still, dead. For the past 200 years, a good deal of debate on the left seems to have been motivated by this image of political action. I saw this up close at the University of Massachusetts almost 50 years ago when five young Marxist economists were hired simultaneously into tenured positions in the economics department and almost immediately split into three factions.