Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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.

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.

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.

Tennessee school teachers may now carry guns

Remarkable.  When I think about what I hate most about this country, the gun craziness looms large.  No civilized society makes it so easy to carry guns.  If you think your kindergarten teacher needs to be armed to protect the little kids from mass murder by a gun-carrying maniac, that is decisive evidence that your gun laws are too lax.

Introducing Peter Tonguette, fascist lapdog

They're all coming out of the woodwork now.

Ibram Kendi: we need a new definition of intellectuals...

...that includes grifters!

UPDATE:   A longtime reader writes:

Thank you for sharing the take-down of Kendi’s Atlantic piece. He is even more wrong than the comment assumes. The term intellectual as we use it dates back to a racist scandal, the Dreyfus affair, and, meant, from the beginning, writers/thinkers who search for truth and advance social justice. Emile Zola and other defenders of Dreyfus used it for themselves to characterize their public intervention in this political affair. And they were ridiculed as intellectuals because they took a political stance. In German, the term was more often used as an insult for progressive thinkers until 1945. Here are some resources that are easily accessible via a Google search:

https://intellectualsandthemedia.org/2021/12/11/the-dreyfus-affair-and-the-image-of-the-intellectual/
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230006096_2

The German resources are especially informative:
https://www.bpb.de/shop/zeitschriften/apuz/32481/intellektueller-schimpfwort-diskursbegriff-grabmal/

https://edoc.unibas.ch/5607/1/%5BHistorische%20Anthropologie%5D%20Emile%20Zola%20%20oder%20die%20Erfindung%20des%20Intellektuellen.pdf

"Not everything is about gender"

Katha Pollitt, the longtime feminist critic and commentator at The Nation, on the latest blather from Judith Butler (in The Atlantic, not The Nation, which tends to tread rather lightly on this topic); an excerpt:

The central idea of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is that fascism is gaining strength around the world, and that its weapon is what Butler calls the “phantasm of gender,” which they describe as a confused and irrational bundle of fears that displaces real dangers onto imaginary ones. Instead of facing up to the problems of, for example, war, declining living standards, environmental damage, and climate change, right-wing leaders whip up hysteria about threats to patriarchy, traditional families, and heterosexuality....

Butler is obviously correct that the authoritarian right sets itself against feminism and modern sexual rights and freedom. This nothing new....But is the gender phantasm as crucial to the global far right as Butler claims? Butler has little to say about the appeal of nationalism and community, insistence on ethnic purity, opposition to immigration, anxiety over economic and social stresses, fear of middle-class-status loss, hatred of “elites.” If I had to say why Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is so popular, it would be less his invocation of the gender phantasm and more his ruthless determination to keep immigrants out, especially Muslim ones, along with his delivery of massive social services to families in an attempt to raise the birth rate. He neatly combines anti-feminist rhetoric about women’s duty to produce more Hungarians with policies that aim to make it easier for mothers to hold jobs, which is, however tacitly, feminist....

Introducing Jen Royle, the nutty chef and owner of TABLE restaurant in Boston

I first came across this on Twitter (where it's been seen millions of time), and this news item writes it up.  Short version:  customer cancels at last minute dinner reservation at TABLE restaurant when he has to go to the emergency room; restaurant won't waive its cancellation fee ($250, the full charge), so the customer uses his travel insurance to cover it; the restaurant owner Royle then sends the cusotmer an abusive and insulting email, which goes viral.  It's hard to imagine anyone who reads through all this ever setting foot again in one of her establishments:  as someone joked on Twitter, "you don't want crazy cooking your food."

The "cosmic inquisitor"

Speaking of nuts in cyberspace, this is an amusing profile of a very loud one, whom we've encountered before.

From the bowels of right-wing crazyland

Apparently they've convinced themselves the Minneapolis officer who murdered George Floyd acted legally.  One thing I learned from the preceding takedown of their pathological weirdness is that being able to speak doesn't mean you're able to breathe!

American gun craziness, aided and abetted by Supreme Court craziness

Law professor Eric Segall comments.   The Governor of Texas is currently defying the Supreme Court, it's time for civilized governors in civilized states to ignore the Supreme Court's deranged Second Amendment jurisprudence and enact and enforce sensible gun control measures.   (On the general topic of ignoring the Supreme Court, see this discussion.)

Self-destructing on Twitter, a continuing saga

A few weeks ago, a senior philosopher elsewhere emailed me:

I thought you might be darkly amused by the fact that Christa Peterson is every bit as vocal, and one-sided, on Twitter about Israel/Gaza as about trans issues. That’s not to express any overall take on the Gaza war – I think it’s hideous, as any reasonable person does....[b]ut that’s a long way from minimizing the original atrocities, or spinning Hamas as noble freedom fighters, or denying clear facts on the ground [as Peterson has been doing on Twitter].

I’m not suggesting you post about this...But I found it interesting in a perverse way because Christa is good at generating a blizzard of research ‘facts’ on any given issue, and it can be hard work to unravel them. I know the Israel/Palestine issue quite a lot better than the trans-rights issue: seeing the tendentiousness in the arguments on the former is at least very suggestive as to the latter.

I had, indeed, planned to ignore this, but then, more recently, a philosophically-minded economist, Itai Sher, whom I follow on Twitter, began highlighting increasingly bizarre posts from Peterson:

Or, more recently:

Speaking of the Wokerati...

...even broken clocks are right twice a day:

It’s become increasingly evident to me that American adolescence and young adulthood — especially for those who wind up at elite schools — now happen within a specific kind of ideological atmosphere.

It centers on a hard-edged ideological framework that has been spreading in high school and college, on social media, in diversity training seminars and in popular culture. The framework doesn’t have a good name yet. It draws on the thinking of intellectuals ranging from the French philosopher Michel Foucault to the critical race theorist Derrick Bell. (For a good intellectual history, I recommend Yascha Mounk’s recent book, “The Identity Trap.”)

The common ideas associated with this ideology are by now pretty familiar:

• We shouldn’t emphasize what unites all human beings; we should emphasize what divides us.

• Human relations are power struggles between oppressors and oppressed groups.  [BL:  this of course is true in all human societies to date, which have been class-based societies; what is distinctive of the Wokerati, is that they focus mostly on epiphenomena]

• Human communication is limited. A person in one group can never really understand the experience of someone in another group.

• The goal of rising above bigotry is naïve. Bigotry and racism are permanent and indestructible components of American society.

• Seemingly neutral tenets of society — like free speech, academic freedom, academic integrity and the meritocracy — are tools the powerful use to preserve their power.

There are many teachers and administrators who believe that they best serve society not by being open and curious and searching for the truth but by propagating this ideological framework.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire...due to homosexuality

According to the new Republican Speaker of the House, fundamentalist fanatic Mike Johnson from Louisiana:

“Many historians, those who are objective, would look back and recognize and give some credit to the fall of Rome to, not only the deprivation of the society and the loss of morals, but also to the rampant homosexual behavior that was condoned by the society,” Johnson told a radio host in 2008.

(Thanks to Chris Morris for the pointer.)

Did you know empiricism was "white"?

Alan Sokal once again wades into a cesspool of stupidity.  (Previously.)

Time to close "American Studies" programs?

First we have Zareena Grewal in American Studies at Yale, now we have Jemma Decristo in American Studies at UC Davis.   If the tweet is real, and if Decristo is not having an actual mental health crisis, then that tweet is arguably a "true threat," and so unprotected by the First Amendment (or academic freedom), in which case it could constitute grounds for termination.  Although the title of this post is a bit of a joke, one does wonder why some of the more unhinged or simply vicious comments are emerging from the feebler area-study fields?

Annals of academics with no decency or judgment

The atrocities and resulting war in Israel and Gaza has certainly brought them out of the woodworks.  Zareena Grewal (an anthropologist it appears, teaching in American Studies and other area-study fields at Yale), who apparently has three children but no capacity for empathy for non-Paltestinian people's children, has brought a firestorm of protest down on her head for her chillingly stupid and cruel tweets.  (Naturally, some benighted undergraduate started a petition calling for her to be fired for her lawful speech.)  Meanwhile, a contributor at Dissent wrote about some of the other depraved responses only to elicit this utterly witless rejoinder from Gabriel Winant, whom I'm sorry to see is an assistant professor of history here.   The author of the original piece responds appropriately to this sorry display by Professor Winant.

One certainly learns a lot about the moral emptiness and emotional depravity of people at moments like this.

Again, I encourage readers to sign this letter which takes seriously the idea that human lives matter, and matter equally, even during war.

(Thanks to Brian Morton for the pointer to the first Dissent piece.)

America is not a civilized country, a continuing saga

The two culprits are religious fundamentalism and, of course, guns:

[A]cording to an analysis published on Thursday, the rate of firearm fatalities among children under 18 increased by 87 percent from 2011 through 2021 in the United States. The death rate attributable to car accidents fell by almost half, leaving firearm injuries the top cause of accidental death in children.

The finding underscores additional data showing that firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death among Americans under 20, after excluding deaths of infants born prematurely or with congenital abnormalities.

Some 2,590 children and teenagers under the age of 18 died of firearm injuries in 2021, up from 1,311 in 2011, according to the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics. In other industrialized countries, guns are not even among the top three causes of death for children.

An amusingly clueless review of Dennett's memoirs

This review has generated a lot of (mostly well-deserved) ridicule on Twitter, especially for this:

The 1970s was the decade in which nutty professors such as Dennett regularly dreamed up thought experiments to explore the limits of what it is to be human. Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat? mused on whether we could still be human if we had bat-like features such as the ability to echolocate. 

Anthropology conference will not permit a panel on "biological sex"

What an embarrassment for a field which already has a terrible reputation for political bias interfering with scholarship.   Let's hope philosophy doesn't go the same way, but I must note that the tenured philosopher who sent this to me said, "If you post about this please don't say I sent it to you, for obvious reasons."

For an actual biologist's take on biological sex, see this (and the other embedded links).

Mindless jurisprudence-bashing on Twitter (updated)

Speaking of "impotent rage" and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, there was an amazing display of both on Twitter last week, all prompted by Stephen Sachs, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard, sharing on Twitter his syllabus for his "reading group" in jurisprudence, whose stated aim was to address "the nature of law and legal obligation, the relationship between law and morals, and the role that philosophical issues can or should play in the actual practice of law."   His syllabus was completely reasonable (as any expert could tell you), although it certainly included texts I would not assign, and omitted some I usually do assign:  but that is hardly surprising.  The point is the syllabus was perfectly appropriate for the topics and the level of instruction (i.e., this was not meant to be an advanced course in jurisprudence).

The syllabus, however, provoked an orgy of online stupidity and anti-intellectualism because most of the authors were (guess what?) "white men."  Most of the authors, of course, were actually Jews, many of whom lived through the period in academia when no one considered them "white men," but we put this little irony to one side.   Alex Green, an international lawyer on the law faculty at the University of York, got things started with this remarkable outburst:

 

As I observed on Twitter:

The giveaway is that Green actually has the audacity to say that the topics Professor Sachs is covering do not constitute "real jurisprudence," which is tantamount to confirming he knows nothing about the subject.  I take it what he really means to say is he's not interested in the core topics in general jurisprudence, but in something else that he thinks of as jurisprudential.  That's fine, and not notable, but then he should avoid smearing those who are interested in general jurisprudence

Nathan Oseroff-Spicer still defaming philosophers: this time he falsely accuses a philosopher of plagiarism

Susan Neiman wrote a book, Left is not Work, that we noted here.  Mr. Oseroff-Spicer, familiar to longtime readers as a paragon of crazed wokeness in philosophy, was bound not to like this book.   That's not notable.  What is notable is that his review falsely accused Professor Neiman of plagiarism!  This led the editor to append the following to the review at the end (below the fold):

Katja Thieme gets her moment of Internet fame

In a charitable spirit, I once described Professor Thieme--an Associate Professor of Teaching in the English Department at the University of British Columbia--as "rabid and deranged," and people like that inevitably become Internet famous at some moment given their lack of self-control.   Professor Thieme's moment has arrived, in a predictable context no less.  She also had the misfortune to make The Daily Mail.  Needless to say, her remarks provide no basis for her university to sanction her, even under Canadian law as I understand it.

Man stabs instructor and two students in philosophy of gender class....

...at University of Waterloo.  The assailant is in custody and no one was seriously injured, fortunately.  Of course, in the U.S. the misogynistic assailant would have had an assault rifle, not a knife....

(Thanks to Paul Raymont for the pointer.)

An amusing review of what sounds like a very bad book critiquing "Effective [sic] Altruism"

Richard Yetter Chappell is a partisan of "Effective [sic] Altruism" (i.e., measurable short-term effects altruism), and I am not, but he certainly does a good number on what sounds like a very weak collection of criticisms; an amusing excerpt:

At the end of the first chapter (p. 7), we’re told that:

"[failing to fund] work being done by a Black activist in Black communities is upholding white supremacist ideas about which communities are worthy of support and which ones aren’t. In other words, it’s racist, plain and simple."

The second chapter tells us that featuring endorsements from attractive celebrities constitutes “body shaming, ableism, and sexism.” (p. 13)

From the third, we learn that “Normative Whiteness is cooked into the ideological foundation, because it focuses on maximizing the effectiveness of donors’ resources.” (p. 28)

And so on.

It’s like a caricature of delusional humanities professors invented to provide fodder to Tucker Carlson. Except it’s real. Apparently some people really think this kind of thing passes for argumentation.

America is not a civilized country

The latest easily preventable gun massacre should confirm that, at least for sapient beings.  The odds, currently, of being massacred by random maniacs in America is relatively low:  1 in 16,0000.   Of course, in civilized countries, the odds are more like 1 in a million.  As we learn from decision theorists (they do serve a purpose, right?), we should consider both the risk of a bad event and how bad the event is.   In the latest easily preventable gun massacre in Texas, a 6-year old boy lost both his parents and his 3-year-old brother.  Maybe I'm weird, but that seems to me catastrophically bad.  Another set of parents lost both their daughters, who were 11 and 8.   Again, that seems to me catastrophically, life-wreckingly bad, but maybe I'm not good at decision theory.

In normal, civilized countries, when grotesque events like this occur, the government changes the law.  That's what happened in Australia, which shows that these incidents can easily be prevented.  In America, these incidents are not easily preventable because the country is not civilized:  many of its elected leaders are barbarians.  It is not complicated.

I do fear this country is sick beyond repair.  I would be glad to be wrong.

UPDATE:   Reader Jonathan Turner reminds me of these routines about America's gun craziness by Australian comedian Jim Jefferies:  here and here.

ANOTHER:  look at the lifetime odds for gun deaths in the U.S.!

Masks actually work for reasons we have long understood

This essay makes an important point:

For masks, are randomized trials an appropriate way of evaluating a basic engineered safety system in the first place? We don’t rely on such trials for seat belts, bike helmets or life jackets, and the oft-cited randomized trial of parachutes is an old running joke. Why is that so hilarious? What do the engineers know that doctors don’t?

 

In many scientific disciplines randomized trial methods are fundamentally inappropriate—akin to using a scalpel to mow a lawn. If something can be directly measured or accurately and precisely modeled, there is no need for complex, inefficient trials that put participants at risk. Engineering, perhaps the most “real-world” of disciplines, doesn’t conduct randomized trials. Its necessary knowledge is well-understood. Everything from highways to ventilation systems—everything that moves us, cleans our air and our water, and puts satellites into orbit—succeeds without needing them. This includes many medical devices. When failures like a plane crash or catastrophic bridge collapse do occur, they are recognized and systematically analyzed to ensure they don’t happen again. The contrast with the lack of attention paid to public health failures in this pandemic is stark.

 

Dumb and dumber: Twitter on the OUP/Byrne fiasco

Dr. Rebecca Colesworthy, an acquisitions editor (!) at SUNY Press (authors, take note!), thinks a pattern of possible editorial decisions based on an author's controversial viewpoint is not worrisome, but "nonsense"!  (She was prompted, it appear, by Alex Bryant's clueless comments on the earlier post [Mr. Bryant, another benighted PhD student, was last seen demanding that Kathleen Stock be excluded from a volume].)

Mr. Bryant's tweet also inspired Professor Benjamin McKean, a political theorist at Ohio State, to offer this profound insight:

Aly Corey, "Associate Director for Inclusive Learning" in the DEI office at Williams College, has apparently resigned from my fan club

Admittedly Dr. Corey must have led an exemplary life if having an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in music is the most embarrassing thing they have ever done.  Good to know "diversity" at Williams is in the hands of such a mature, balanced individual!

 

Will the attack on tenure unite the Republicans and the "diversity" Democrats

There's a real risk it will, as this report about the Texas Senate vote to abolish tenure for new hires suggests:

A little more than a year after Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick declared war on faculty tenure at the state’s public universities, the Texas Senate approved a bill Thursday that would bar schools from granting the benefit to newly hired professors.

Senate Bill 18 passed 18-11, largely along party lines, with Sens. Brian Birdwell and Kevin Sparks absent. Notably, Sen. César Blanco, D-El Paso, broke from his party to join Republicans in supporting the measure, arguing that tenure is a historical and discriminatory barrier for professors of color and pointing to racial disparities among faculty awarded tenure at Texas universities.

“I cannot and I will not defend the status quo to maintain the historic discriminatory barrier that tenure is within higher education for minorities,” he said.

Perhaps Senator Blanco will come to his senses, if he has any.

Georgia secedes from civilization

The Governor has signed a law permitting folks to carry handguns without a license or a background check.  That should work out really well!  Apparently if the Constitution had mentioned a "right to drive," there would be no licensing requirement for drivers either.

America is doomed.

Jesus didn't rise from the dead, because no one rises from the dead

So why is a secular newspaper running an interview that treats this as a serious possibility? It's one thing for a Church newspaper to feature such an interview, but the New York Times?  Maybe they should now run an interview with a Hume scholar on Hume on miracles and the comparative worthlessness of "testimony" in this context.

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

Enemies of academic freedom watch: Michael Berube edition

Professor Berube is a partner-in-crime with another serial enemy of academic freedom, Jennifer Ruth (we noted awhile back a critical discussion of their terrible [indeed, incompetent] book putatively on academic freedom).   A mutual friend on Facebook alerted me a few days ago to the fact that at a recent talk at Smith College, Professors Berube and Ruth took issue with some comments of mine back in 2009 about calls to fire John Yoo at Berkeley (longer discussion here).  Professor Berube, who teaches English at Penn State, assured his friends that this was "a colossally bad argument by philosopher Brian Leiter."   Do read what I wrote then, which was and is still correct, at least if you're not an enemy of academic freedom.

Here is Professor Berube's contribution to the Dunning-Kruger Effect literature (I intersperse some comments):

[Leiter's] argument is one of those blog-standard and now-ubiquitous conflations of academic freedom and free speech, under which academic freedom covers work that is "implausible, badly argued and morally odious" so long as that work does not involve research misconduct or intellectual dishonesty.

This is itself an absurd conflation of two separate issues:  one concerns what academic freedom protects; the second concerns the grounds on which Berkeley will sanction a faculty member.  Regarding the latter, Berkeley is explicit that it can  sanction a faculty member based on a finding of research misconduct or dishonesty (e.g., plagiarism), as well as a court judgment involving certain kinds of criminal misconduct.  There were no such findings against Yoo:  he engaged in no plagiarism, research misconduct, or legally adjudicated criminal misconduct.  The calls to fire him were calls for Berkeley to adjudicate the question whether he violated any laws, which universities are not equipped to do (thankfully).

I do wish certain humanities professors would stop embarrassing the academy with pointlessly inflammatory social media posts

The latest culprit is Steven Shaviro, an English professor at Wayne State, who posted on Facebook his view that it would be better to kill bigoted speakers rather than simply protest them, offering this analogy:

The exemplary historical figure in this regard is Sholem Schwarzbard, who assassinated the anti-Semitic butcher Symon Petliura, rather than trying to shout him down. Remember that Schwarzbard was acquitted by a jury, which found his action justified.

The idiot right (like the site linked above) glossed this bizarre post as Shaviro advocating murder "for those he disagreed with," but as the analogy with Schwarzbard suggests, "disagreement" is not sufficient:  after all, he murdered someone who was a butcher of Jews in Ukraine.  What's slightly nuts about Shaviro's post is analogizing mass murder to the expression of racist views:  speech and action aren't the same, despite the best efforts of many folks to confuse the two.  (Being an English professor, Shaviro throws in "transphobic" views to the list of views that warrant murder!)  Anyone who decides to kill a bigot will not be acquitted.  So Shaviro's post is idiotic and ignorant on many levels.

QAnon continues to thrive in the heart of the Republican Party

This is just bizarre; here's a small taste:

ReAwaken America is sort of - it's a very popular pro-Trump road show, essentially, that travels the country. And it's all of these conspiracy theorists under the banner, as you said, of Michael Flynn and a guy named Clay Clark, who's a Tulsa radio host, who's sort of a - slash sort of entrepreneurship guru. And so it's stocked with a lot of - it's a lot of kind of COVID quacks, a lot of people, you know, pushing ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and a lot of leading QAnon figures. I went to its first event for the book in Tulsa in 2021. And I, you know, I kind of slipped past security. They said they were going to have a lot of security to keep out media and antifa because they were convinced that, you know, antifa would travel to suburban Tulsa to wreak havoc.

When the yahoos take over the community college

This is a warning about what may start to happen elsewhere.

(Thanks to Gregory Mayer for the pointer.)

What happened to the Twitter maniacs from a couple of years ago?

The good news is that many of them have left academia (e.g., this one, this one, and this one), some self-destructing in a way consistent with their online antics, others just failing to find academic positions.   Alas, some of the juvenile jackasses remain in the academy, at least for now.  Let me add that the only ones who ought to have their online stupidity held against them are those who are openly hostile to academic freedom.  There are enough threats to the latter without multiplying them from within the academy.

MARCH 18 UPDATE:  A reader just flagged for me that the aforementioned juvenile jackass, Dallas Jokic, offered this response (on Twitter of course) to the original post:   "It is very strange indeed that a prominent philosopher is gloating about his graduate student critics having left academia following his bullying of them. Stranger still that he seems to view this as a victory for 'academic freedom.'" There really is no bottom to dumb with these pathetic people: none of the three who have left academia were critics of me, let alone "bullied" by me or anyone else, and all three made clear their hostility towards core academic freedom values, which is why their departure is good news for the academy.

Montana Taliban trying to wreck science education

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 24--UPDATED    

Religiously inspired stupidity isn't dead yet, as a new draft bill in Montana makes clear, which states that, "a scientific fact is observable and repeatable, and if it does not meet these criteria, it is a theory that is defined as speculation," and can't be taught in the public schools.  Oy veh!  Does the draft bill have any chance of enactment?   Comments from knowledgeable readers welcome.

(Thanks to Bradley Wood for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  I learn from comments by Glenn Branch, below, that this mischief has died in committee.

A Black professor "trapped in anti-racist hell"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FRIDAY, FOR THOSE WHO MAY HAVE MISSED IT

This is a pretty wild story:  it's like Lord of the Flies meets Ibram Kendi.

Charlie Kirk "solves" the Euthyphro dilemma

It's not fair to idiots to observe that Mr. Kirk is one, but this video certainly drives it home:

(Thanks to David Livingstone Smith for the pointer.)

Hamline University's disgracefully stupid violation of academic freedom

This is really breathtaking in its stupidity:

On October 6, during a class on Islamic art that was part of a global survey course in art history, a professor at Hamline University offered students an optional exercise: Analyze and discuss a 14th-century Islamic painting that depicts the Archangel Gabriel delivering to the Prophet Muhammad his first Quranic revelation.

Before showing a slide of the painting, the instructor issued a content warning and spent over two minutes providing context about the controversies surrounding depictions of Muhammad. “I am showing you this image for a reason,” the professor explained. “There is this common thinking that Islam completely forbids, outright, any figurative depictions or any depictions of holy personages. While many Islamic cultures do strongly frown on this practice, I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture.”

A senior in the class, who is also president of the Muslim Student Association at Hamline, later complained that pictorial depictions of Muhammad offended her Muslim sensibilities....

[T]he complaint set in motion the DEI bureaucracy on campus, and on November 7, David Everett, associate vice president for inclusive excellence, called the classroom exercise “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful, and Islamophobic.” Just days later, on November 11, Everett told the student newspaper in an interview that because of the incident, “it was decided it was best that this faculty member was no longer part of the Hamline community"....

What better way to start the New Year than with the news that...

...the Thomist legal and moral philosopher John Finnis has been made a Commander of the British Empire.  Being Finnis, he uses the opportunity to opine:  "It is good that this award bears the name of a great and essentially beneficent institution which was conceived and pursued in a spirit of service..."  Although his bigoted views about homosexuality are well-known, it seems to me this whitewash of two centuries of imperial rape, exploitation and bloody murder is far more appalling, admitting of no rationalization in terms of Catholic dogma.  What an embarrassment for Oxford.

Republicans and Covid deaths

This is really stark evidence of the pathological dysfunction of this benighted country, in which one of the two major political parties is openly hostile to de minimis public health measures (recall that Americans died of Covid at a rate two to three times that [or more] of other normal countries):

[B]y far the single group of adults most likely to be unvaccinated is Republicans: 37 percent of Republicans are still unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated, compared with 9 percent of Democrats. Fourteen of the 15 states with the lowest vaccination rates voted for Donald Trump in 2020. (The other is Georgia.)

We know that unvaccinated Americans are more likely to be Republican, that Republicans in positions of power led the movement against COVID vaccination, and that hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated Americans have died preventable deaths from the disease. The Republican Party is unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of many of its own supporters, a phenomenon that may be without precedent in the history of both American democracy and virology....

We know that as of April 2022, about 318,000 people had died from COVID because they were unvaccinated, according to research from Brown University. And the close association between Republican vaccine hesitancy and higher death rates has been documented. One study estimated that by the fall of 2021, vaccine uptake accounted for 10 percent of the total difference between Republican and Democratic deaths. But that estimate has changed—and even likely grown—over time....

The point of education according to Democrats in America

On Twitter, the Secretary of Education in the Biden Administration wrote this:

Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.

Remember that this is a Democrat speaking, thus confirming, once again, that the Democrats are simply the party of the prudent (rather than insane) wing of the ruling class in America.   Humboldt where are you when we need you?  Not in the Biden Administration obviously!

Who said it: Adolf Hitler or Kanye West?

This is from 13 years ago (so long before the current grotesque behavior):

 

Kanye West and Hitler

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

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

Socialism lite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twitter is a cesspool of stupidity, ignorance, malice, ressentiment, and virtue-signalling, part 319...or Kripke was not a plagiarist

What's irresponsible is to accuse someone who just died of plagiarism without having any idea what one is talking about.  Quentin Smith did not cover himself in glory with this nonsense, and it was dispatched years ago by serious philosophers of language.  Stephen Neale's authoritative assessment of the debate is perhaps the most accessible account, and is certainly decisive.

Realism about democracy, part 192

According to a recent study of the American electorate:

Americans’ understanding of basic facts about the U.S. government declined for the first time in six years, as fewer than half in a new survey could name all three branches of government..... 

About a quarter of Americans surveyed could not name a single branch. 

The survey also found a decline in the number of respondents who could name any of the five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment.  

Freedom of religion was named by 24 percent of those surveyed, falling from 56 percent from the previous survey. Those who named freedom of the press also declined sharply down by 30 percentage points from 50 percent in 2021.  

Around 26 percent of respondents could not name any First Amendment freedoms. And the percentage of respondents who listed the right to bear arms — a right protected under the Second Amendment — as a First Amendment protection tripled from 2021 rising to 9 percent.