Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) on "guilt-by-association" and the Twitter Red Guard

This is funny; an excerpt:

Last week, I published a piece on the website Quillette. Founded by Aussie Claire Lehmann, Quillette has frequently been associated with the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW). It’s not left-leaning, though if you rummage around you’ll find pieces from a number of different orientations. They’ve sparked controversy here and there: on James Damore’s once-infamous Google memo, for example. They’re pretty obsessed with attacks by the woken on free speech on campus. And the sort of reaction they’ve provoked often provides excellent examples of the intolerance they condemn....

I was surprised by the responses I got on Twitter and in a number of emails. Almost nobody wrestled with my argument; rather, they focused on the sheer fact that it was in Quillette. Actual philosophy professors seemed to argue that where it was published showed it was false, or that it doesn’t at all matter whether it is, just that it was published in Quillette and hence associates me with people they repudiate, and thus refutes my reasoning and my very person.

“Crispin,” wrote @nathanoseroff, “not a good look to publish on the pro-eugenics, pro-‘culture war’, anti-trans website started by a far-right explicitly anti-feminist Australian that previously worked for The Blaze, a Canadian anti-Muslim disinformation website.” In the course of our discussion, he added, “Guess a website dedicated to mainstreaming eugenics doesn’t cross the line.” What he objects to, he said in the subsequent discussion, is “mostly the explicit pro-eugenics propaganda, really.” I tried to get Nathan to show me the pro-eugenics editorials, but to do that would force him to link stuff that he repudiates, and that was a non-starter. Googling “quillette eugenics” produced only a review that presupposed that eugenics was wrong and disgusting.

Everything is bigger in Texas...

...including the morons.

Not even Karl Kraus could have imagined James Bennet, the NYT editorial page editor

This account is horrifying.  If the quotes are accurate, the man is both illiterate and an imbecile.  Here he is commenting on Brett Stephens, the worst NYT op-ed writer since Abe "I'm writing as bad as I can" Rosenthal:   "I just think he’s an exceptional writer and thinker.”   Only someone not familiar with writing or thinking could say this.

Vigilante justice comes to NYU...

...as a reader points out to me.  Professor Ronell was at least found to have violated sexual harassment rules on her campus, unlike Professor Hubbard, but her case was adjudicated and she was sanctioned.  Unless universities respond quickly and harshly to these student mobs (in this case, a small one), this is going to spread and eventually lead to violence and criminal misconduct.

Biologist Jerry Coyne on Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's paper on "white empiricism"

Professor Coyne is very patient in going through this stuff.  (We encountered Professor Prescod-Weinstein once before.  You can read her demand for honoraria here.)  An excerpt from near the end of Coyne's piece:

I am growing weary, for I have dissected papers like this before—papers on white glaciology, the racism of Pilates, lattes, and pumpkins, and so on. The difference here is that Prescod-Weinstein is a working physicist with respectable accomplishments in the field. It is a sad testimony to the power of ideology, though, that her interpretation of what science is has been so severely distorted by her anti-white feminism.  Instead of arguing, as I’ve said, on moral grounds, she argues that the objectivity of science itself is in conflict with the supposed dismissal of black women’s experiences of racism, and that such an attitude is not just racist but anti-science.

In view of the paucity of black women physicists with a Ph.D. (there have been only a few dozen in history), what should we do? I agree that there may be a problem here, and my solution is, as always, twofold. First, rectify any inequality of opportunity starting at the ground—the limited opportunities afforded to minorities by living conditions and poor schooling, themselves byproducts of racism. Second, for the time being practice a form of affirmative action, realizing that diversity in the physics community is an inherent good for several reasons (providing role models to eliminate roadblocks to opportunity, for one).

Deranged UT Austin students now harassing classics professor at his home

They're proud of it!   This faculty member's "crime" is his scholarship.  The students should be prosecuted under any applicable criminal statutes, and Professor Hubbard, the victim of this abuse, should bring a civil action against the students (including for defamation:  calling someone a "pedophile" when they are not is per se defamatory, meaning he won't even need to prove damages).   I will be glad to raise money for his legal action if there is one.

(Thanks to Joel Pust for the pointer.)

The author of the "1619 Project," Nikole Hannah-Jones...

...is a journalist (Karl Kraus, where are you?), not even an historian, and she puts on quite a display on Twitter (e.g., announcing that as a Black person in America she doesn't have to consider historians like James McPherson "preeminent").  Most striking is her main line of defense against the criticisms we've noted the last few days:  "there is no such thing as objective history so complaints that the 1619 is an illegitimate reframing of history deny that all history is framed."   There may be no uniquely correct account of historical events, but there are certainly better and worse ones, correct and incorrect ones, and the objections are that the 1619 Project makes a number of contentious, and indeed false, claims about the history.   It's hard to believe an imbecile like this is writing for the NYT.

(Thanks to a young philosopher on the job market for calling this to my attention.  Because of the culture of open debate and tolerance for competing views in academic philosophy, this student did not want to be named.)

Scholarship by classics professor with "incorrect" views is now as bad as sexual harassment according to students at UT Austin

I'm glad the university has rebuffed these benighted students, but it's no doubt a symptom of what's to come as the campaign against actual sexual harassment gets mixed up with the general New Infantilist hysteria about "harmful" ideas:

A group of students at the University of Texas are calling for the firing of a classics professor who has written extensively on “pederasty”—socially acknowledged romantic relationships between adult men and teen boys—in ancient Greece....

“Contemporary American legislation premised on children’s incapacity to ‘consent’ to sexual relations stems from outmoded gender constructions and ideological preoccupations of the late Victorian and Progressive Era,” Hubbard reportedly wrote in the peer-reviewed journal Thymos: Boyhood Studies. “We should consider a different ‘age of consent’ for boys and girls"....

A group called Students for Safety issued a press release last month which claimed that Hubbard “has used his position to further a community of individuals hoping to prey on underage boys” and that his writings “encourage these illicit acts.”

Siena philosophy professor Emanuele Castrucci is a Nazi sympathizer

What an embarrassment.  I am unsure of the legal status of pro-Nazi speech in Italy, although I would not be surprised if, as in many European countries, it is illegal.  In any case, it appears that academic freedom in Italy does not protect extra-mural speech.  There's more here (in Italian).

UPDATE:  Some of this maniac's creepy musings and comments are translated here.   And more news coverage (in English).

The Internet, defined

"Costless, rapid communication of lazy, angry thoughts," from philosopher Christopher Morris (Maryland).  It could hardly be more apt!

Ibram Kendi, totalitarian

Amazing:

He wants unelected “formally trained experts on racism” (presumably all from critical race-theory departments) to have unaccountable control over every policy that won’t yield racial equality in every field of life, public or private. They are tasked with investigating “private racist policies.” Any policy change anywhere in the U.S. would have to be precleared by these “experts” who could use “disciplinary tools” if policymakers do not cave to their demands. They would monitor and control public and private speech. What Kendi wants is power to coerce others to accept his worldview and to implement his preferred policies, over and above democratic accountability or political opposition. Among those policies would be those explicitly favoring nonwhites over whites because “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Philosophy graduate student at Berkeley gratuitously (and rather stupidly) insults rural Americans...

...and faces a predictable right-wing lapidation.  Having occasionally come across Mr. Kernion on social media, where he  seems a sanctimonious scold, I'm not wholly surprised by his outburst, which says more about his class position than about residents of rural America.  But I'm even less surprised that the usual suspects have pounced on this; I hope and expect Berkeley will do the right thing, and continue to make "no comment."  Mr. Kernion's speech is lawful, however foolish, and it is none of the university's business.

I'll give the final word to a correspondent from the UK who flagged this episode for me yesterday:  "Yet another junior scholar bringing shame to the profession on social media, but this one stands out for his utter ignorance of how countries and economies work. Conservatives are pointing to him as just another philosopher who is clueless about the 'real world.' And in this case they are correct!"  But let's remember that Mr. Kernion, like anybody, is a lot more than some unfortunate and ill-considered tweets.

Regarding the monster-child...

...this is perceptive.

The very sick and stupid person described in this news article...

...could kill us all in the next half-hour.  Everyone should be following George Conway who is documenting this horror show.   We have only two hopes:  (1)  General Mattis told the narcissistic idiot that Manhattan would be leveled first if he goes nuclear; and (2) the military professionals will, in fact, disregard him.

UPDATE:  A predictable response from the Turkish strongman to the fool's bluster.  But once the monster-child hears about this, I expect he'll reverse course on Syria nad Turkey.

Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Dr. Johnson noted...

...but religion is surely in the top three, as this noxious blather by the disgraced Attorney General William Barr nicely illustrates:   a mix of historical falsehoods, confusions about cause and effect, and right-wing talking points.

(Thanks to Jerry Dworkin for the pointer.)

Carrie Jenkins (British Columbia) assures readers that people in and around her generation...

...are only "speciously characterized by their narcissism and political correctness."  No further comment.

ADDENDUM:  For those newer to the clown show that is on-line academic philosophy, I want to affirm that, in fact, most millenials are not narcissists and politically correct.   Carrie Jenkins, however, was perhaps not the best witness for that purpose...hence the humor.

The moral bankruptcy of techno-elites

This is certainly true, but what shows their moral and intellectual bankruptcy is the prattle that comes out of their mouths about just about everything. But in a capitalist society, having made money is invariably interpreted as having opinions that are worth hearing, although the opposite principle might be a sounder one.

America is crazy, Florida edition

Jesus Fucking Christ.  Next up:  arm the children.  

The President of the United States is an imbecile, an ongoing saga

Why didn't General Mattis save us from this imbecile?

Philosophers behaving bizarrely in cyberspace: Dan Hicks edition

Dan Hicks has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, and is taking up a tenure-track position at the University of California, Merced this year.  Congratulations to him!  But for reasons known only to his therapist, or perhaps known to no one, he decided to attack Robert Paul Wolff (at Professor Wolff's blog) for having dinner with me.  Seriously.  Let me explain.

Philosophy's "woke triangle"

This is funny and apt about the "woke" cult in philosophy; an excerpt (but read it all, really):

As is so often the case, these recent woke outbursts were caused by something utterly ordinary and reasonable, specifically, a short piece that appeared in Inside Higher Education, in which twelve philosophers called for an end to the no-platforming and silencing of critics of contemporary gender identity theory and for a conversation on sex and gender within the discipline that is simultaneously rigorous and civil. (2) In making one’s way through the woke responses to the piece, one finds oneself confronted with rhetorical maneuvers straight out of the Oceanian playbook: repeated outrages to reason and common sense; bold inversions of reality; a constant refrain of “nothing to see here,” regarding things that are staring you right in the face; and of course, cynical manipulations of language and rejection of the ordinary, standard uses of common words.

The latest stupidity about gender critical feminists

I confess I'm amazed that even Weinberg couldn't see that this piece was pitifully stupid (or maybe he advised them to write anonymously because he did--but then why publish it?)  Philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) comments here and here.  Philosopher Jason Brennan (Georgetown) gave permission to share his apt comments from Facebook about this absurd display:

The central thesis of this anonymous piece is that certain gender-critical feminists (hereafter GCFs) are actually engaging in *activism* rather than scholarship, which presumably means whatever academic freedom should be extended to scholarly speech does not quite apply to them.

But the article doesn't even try to provide evidence for this claim (that it's activism rather than scholarly speech). Rather, all it does is list examples of things which the GCFs think and say (things which are trivially implied by their position) in their scholarly works and then complains that these things are morally wrong and bad. But it doesn't provide evidence that they are in fact engaging in activism rather than scholarship.

This kind of behavior is getting tiresome. The standard liberal theory distinguishes between speech and violence, as well as between speech and activism. In order to generate illiberal conclusions, some philosophers try to argue that speech is in fact a form of violence. It's not convincing, so now they turn to arguing that it's really activism. Also not convincing, in part because this long-winded piece contains literally zero evidence for such a conclusion.

NB: I am not endorsing GCF. I am merely critiquing the transparently bullshit behavior various philosophers exhibit toward the GCFs.

ADDENDUM:  I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that (as a reader points out) Kate Manne (Cornell) disagrees with Professor Brennan and thinks this critique of GCFs is "excellent."

Twitter is not the real world, an ongoing saga

Twitter is the only place where people think that the bloggers at the trashy on-line tabloid Above the Law are (a) reliable, and (b) authorities.  When I tell this to my legal practitioner and legal academic friends, most can't believe it's true!

UPDATE:  Since most of my readers do not use Twitter, I realize the latter was a bit opaque--sorry!  Briefly, one of the dopey bloggers at Above the Law was mocking me last week for allegedly thinking I could copyright my tweets so no one can retweet them, and then other people retweeted his mockery.  This would have been silly, but it had nothing to do with the issue I was raising.  What was omitted is that my Twitter account is protected (i.e., only approved followers can see my tweets--much better, I must say!); when your account is protected, not even your followers can retweet anything you post to your account.  Yet someone then among my followers was taking screen shots of my tweets, and then reposting them elsewhere and sending them to non-followers--which defeats the point of protecting the tweets, of course.   The Twitter terms of service do not directly address the status of protected tweets, but one extreme possible solution, suggested by my lawyer (who is an actual lawyer specializing in intellectual property and defamation for 25 years, not a failed lawyer like the ones at Above the Law), was to register the copyright for the protected tweets.  Not worth the trouble, obviously, and in any case the problem has been solved by other means since.   What's amazing is that even nominally adult tenured faculty--like Jacob Levy (McGill) and Kate Manne (Cornell)--retweeted the Above the Law nonsense (Manne makes a particular fool of herself with her commentary).  I'm not sure what explains their gullibility:  malice?  stupidity?  both?  Oh well.

ANOTHER:   One might have hoped Prof. Manne would have learned something about the risk of relying on out-of-context snippets from a protected Twitter account, but it appears not yet.  In any case, I hope she can  get over her obsessive Twitter vendetta against me (of which the above was but one example over the last few weeks) and move on to more productive activities.

IHE must be desperate for news...

...if they're organizing a story around tweets by random maniacs, ignoramuses, and self-promoters on Twitter.  And I say this as someone who doesn't much care for Professor Pinker!

I've apparently been keeping some of the lesser minds in philosophy busy "for decades"

This is Robin James (PhD, DePaul), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, writing about me:

I did a search, and couldn't find any of the papers on the connection between my rankings, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarcy.  I guess these fine scholars are still work-shopping them.  Exciting!

 

Wollongong Undergraduate Students' Association... (UPDATED)

...is a disgrace.  How can the Australasian Association of Philosophy permit such an event?  (And if the AAP isn't hosting this event, why are they permitting the use of the AAP logo?)

UPDATE:  A rather tepid response from the AAP--no condemnation of the Wollongong group or defense of Professor Lawford-Smith, the target of this abuse.  (Thanks to Mark Tushnet for the pointer.)

A screen shot of the Wollongong Undergraduate outburst below the fold:

The Internet: inspiration for murder

Yet one more reason the free speech norms that worked for the traditional media won't work for the cyber-world of unmediated insanity and nonsense.

Michael Savage is a Nazi without a swastika...

...banned from the U.K. because of his "hate speech" (it is under UK law), and yet now the NY Times has legitimized him as a merely "conservative" commentator.   Karl Kraus:  "No ideas and the ability to express them:  that's a journalist."  But this is even worse than that.  Shame, shame, shame!

"Minorities and Philosophy UK" calls for incorrect philosophical views to be punished

I don't want to make more of this disgraceful statement than it deserves; many MAP chapters are doing constructive work, and they would do well to repudiate this embarrassment from the UK chapter.  One can support equal opportunity for and dignified treatment of trans philosophers, as Professor Stock explictly does, and still disagree with how some trans philosophers understand gender.

Note that this statement is the work of a handful of individuals, including the already notorious Keyvan Shafiei and Puck Spicer,* the equally benighted spouse of Nathan Oseroff, among others.  It was apparently prompted by the fact that the Aristotelian Society, much to its credit, permitted a professional philosopher, Kathleen Stock, to present a philosophical paper on sex and gender, and even defended her right to do so.  For the Red Guard wannabes at MAP UK that was too much to bear, hence the statement, complete with the usual make-believe allegations of "harm" (that someone finds someone else's philosophical views offensive and upsetting isn't a harm:  please read John Gardner's earlier comments on this subject).

I'll conclude with the apt comments of a philosophy graduate student in Canada who sent this statement to me (I bold a couple of quite important bits):

I was hoping you'd say something about it on your blog. The statement, and the usual suspects on Twitter, often try to frame things as if most people in the discipline secretly agree with them, but for some reason aren't willing to "speak up and protect its most vulnerable members." Of course, the actual reason people aren't "willing" to speak up is that they don't think that we should ban people from talking at conferences if they have the wrong views on philosophical issues. The statement tries to frame things to sound like any philosophical discussion of issues around sex, gender, and sexual orientation that doesn't toe the party line is an attack on trans people, and that discussing these issues without saying the right things means excluding and marginalizing "vulnerable persons." But that kind of over-exaggerated language is just a transparent attempt to shut down debate -- notice that the statement doesn't include any engagement with the actual content of the talk.

I appreciate you generally drawing attention to these people's silly behavior; most other grad students I talk to think these people mostly embarrass themselves with the things they do online. I think it's important to have a voice in favor of actual academic freedom, as opposed to censoring views that don't fit with the political views of the day.

UPDATE:  Ophelia Benson dissects what she aptly describes as the "lying" statement with its "hyperbolic bullshit."

*I have been informed that Mr. Oseroff's spouse wanted to be mentioned by name; I had thought I was doing them a favor by omitting their name, which has never been noted here before, but apparently not!

Professor Stock schools the smarmy Jonathan Ichikawa

Very amusing.  (Link fixed:  click on the "3 replies" to get Stock's full response to Ichikawa's typical stupidity.)

(Thanks to Alex Parrish for the pointer.)

The quest for "relevance" by some analytic philosophers, and their ignorance of the post-Kantian traditions in European philosophy

Apt observations from a very good philosopher expert in the post-Kantian traditions in European philosophy:

We all recall the times when presenters of papers in philosophy expected an onslaught in the Q&A. It was never appealing prospect or sight, and the notion that it was stirred only by the pursuit of truth was obviously a contrivance. It did, however, have one advantage: it ensured that philosophers spoke about only what they honestly thought they had some expertise in. It was expertise gained through intensive thought and study.

We now have a kinder environment, and those, particularly from analytic backgrounds, are feeling the freedom to take off some of their armour, move from specialist areas, and to try their luck with issues of political and social concern. These efforts are met, generally, with good will. The problem, however, is that they are, with a few celebrated exceptions, mostly rubbish. The topics studied are taken from wikipedia and / or newspapers (in fact, there’s better work in those newspapers much of the time). The insights of the broader European tradition are largely unknown to them. It’s probably a lack of education or maybe an unwillingness to be slowed down in the quest for ‘relevance’, i.e. attention, that keeps them from complex texts.

(As an aside: the trendy move away from classic Anglo-American philosophical concerns hasn’t involved much reconsideration of the marginaliztion of European philosophy in Anglo-American philosophy departments. In the UK, at least, a Brexit mentality is reproduced at the higher level of philosophical prejudices.)

Receptive audiences are often emancipated analytic philosophers, and between them all they really know very little. They cheer on their own new ‘significance’ or ‘impact’. Ignorance isn’t ignorance, it seems, when the majority are ignorant. And when the majority contains senior academics ignorance wins.

"Transphobia"

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 1, 2019--STILL RELEVANT, ALAS

One of the tactics for shutting down rational discussion of the gender self-ID law in the U.K. is the accusation of "transphobia."   Because I've given attention to the important and substantive views of several feminist and gay philosophers writing about this issue--perhaps most prominently, Kathleen Stock (Sussex) (e.g, here and here), but also Leslie Green (Oxford)--I'm now being accused by the usual suspects of "transphobia."  (I suspect the additional reason for the smear is that I've also been vigorous in objecting to the harassment and defamation of Professor Stock, including by many philosophy faculty and students.) 

In any case, I thought it would help to collect examples of my horrifying "transphobia" such as here and here and here.

ADDENDUM:  This new piece in New York Magazine gives a sympathetic and clear account of some of the issues being debated about sex and "gender identity."  (It uses the term "TERF," but not dismissively or as an epithet.) 

Philosatire on Twitter

Still the funniest and most apt description of Twitter.  ("Philosatire" arose after the "site visit" fiasco at Colorado back in 2014:  for example.)

Twitter "believe it or not," part 4: juvenile jackass confronts adult on-line

This episode is unusual only because an adult, the philosopher Leslie Green (Oxford & Queen's U) intervened after this grad student at Queen's had the outburst, below, after he insulted me out of the blue on Twitter and I blocked him:

Mr. Jokic deleted his stupid tweet when confronted by an adult.  But the real question is why more faculty aren't stepping up and doing the same thing?  I realize many aren't on Twitter, but many are.   And even if you're not on Twitter, you might want to inform yourself about how your students are behaving, if not self-destructing, on social media.   Remember that twitter, which is full of a lot of clueless folks, tends to reinforce the worst behavior:  someone who is ruining his or her reputation even as a graduate student may be getting the message from the Twitterati that they're funny, wonderful, etc.  

Twitter "believe it or not" part 3: the Twitter kids can't figure out why no one is taking them seriously

I won't embarrass this individual, who seems more clueless than malevolent, but from this philosopher's Twitter feed I learned that Keyvan Shafiei (yes, the person who launched the out-of-the-blue verbal assault on feminist philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith, and who prefers the pronouns "they/their," which I honor in what follows) actually had the audacity to stand up at a panel on diversity at the Pacific APA two weeks ago to ask about the "harassment" [sic] of "junior" scholars by "senior" scholars (referring to my noting  their misconduct although presumably without mentioning their declaration that Prof. Lawford-Smith was a "vile fucking human").   The member of the Twitterati recounting the story reported, with astonishment, that no one on the panel took this part of the question seriously or responded to it. 

It did not seem to occur to this Tweeter that this is because it is not "harassment" to criticize people's gross misconduct on public social media platforms.  If you're really having trouble understanding this, try looking at this and this.  Or to quote the otherwise absurd Rebecca Kukla:  "Calling people out for their shitty behavior is not rude [or harassment]; it's morally necessary."  She apparently didn't notice that's what Professor Green did, however.

Ontario goes crazy, sets out to destroy its excellent universities

The Canadian province of Ontario has some of Canada's, and the world's, most successful research universities, including the University of Toronto, Queen's University in Kingston, McMaster University, York University  in Toronto, and the University of Western Ontario.  But the provincial government has now been taken over by neoliberal yahoos, and this is their plan for destroying the universities:  60% of funding will be tied to "performance metrics" that don't measure performance in research or teaching, but probably do track the class status of the student body and the geographic location of the university in the province.  Philosopher Rachel Barney (Toronto) has given an apt assessment on FB which she kindly gave permission to share:

Over the next three years up to 60% of Ontario govt funding to universities will be taken out of the traditional grant-per-student system and shifted into SMA's: Strategic Mandate Agreements, one for each institution. And those Agreements (which have been around for a while, but just as planning exercises with no real money or enforcement attached) will be organized around a list of ten 'performance metrics'.

Why is this terrible?

1. None of these 'metrics' actually measures how well we educate, because that would be hard. Instead they're a pig's breakfast of Stuff Govt Likes: unis will be assessed on things like our graduates' incomes (don't ask me how), partnerships with industry, experiential learning (a good in itself apparently, rather than something that could be done well or badly), and graduation rates (so don't flunk any more students, please -- and you'd better not admit any who might face financial or other obstacles and drop out).

2. So we are being incentivized to do a lot of really stupid stuff. And collecting all these garbage stats and formulating them in managerial-speak every year will obviously be a hugely expensive exercise, so that's yet more money pulled away from the classroom and set on fire. But that's far from the worst:

I had not been aware that the "American Thinker" was a racist outfit...

...until I came across this piece of craziness; an excerpt:

The Left has shown itself to be dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization itself.  We have not been faced with such an existential threat since European armies threw the Turks back from Vienna in 1529.  The fascists of the mid–2oth century, for all their loathsome policies, were not the kind of threat to the fabric of our society that we face now.  Bad as they were, they did not seek the destruction of Europeans as a people, or of European culture as a living, breathing thing.  Progressivism does.  What could be more worthy of, if you will forgive the word, "resistance"?

Some reactions from professional philosophers to the on-going saga of grad students behaving stupidly on social media

This was the most recent incident, but only the most recent.  Since the Twitterati tend to encourage each other in juvenile behavior, it might be worth sharing some representative  correspondence I've gotten.

From a senior philosopher at a top 25 PhD program:  "Great work on calling out the idiots in our profession (and elsewhere) in the TERF wars.  Stunning to observe, and mind-boggling in much the same way as watching our kakistocracy operate!"

From another senior philosopher at another top 25 PhD program:  "The current climate makes me nostalgic for [Georgetown's] Mark Lance's nastiness and virtue signaling; can one responsibly do otherwise than to strongly warn potential PhD students against considering Georgetown?"  Though as this philosopher added, it's a "shame" since "there are serious people there."

Twitter may be a cesspool, but Redditt may even be worse...

...and especially in this respect.

Philosopher Daniel Silvermint explains why it's OK to call a professional philosopher a "piece of shit" and "vile fucking human""

Good thing he earned a PhD to develop this level of insight.  And see also. 

ADDENDUM: Leave it to Justin Weinberg to show up on my Twitter feed asserting that Silvermint didn't mean what he said, and to declare the evidence adduced as "misleading."  (The link is above:  search hard for Silvermint's judgment that Shalfiei acted wrongly in deploying vulgar epithets worthy of Donald Trump at another philosopher.  The whole display is a transparent rationalization of the wrongful conduct, starting from the fabrication that there was an "attack" by Professor Lawford-Smith.)  Weinberg apparently didn't get the message last time:  I don't want to "wrestle with pigs," so I've had to block him on Twitter.

AND TWO MORE:   First, dozens of people have asked Professor Silvermint over the last 48 hours to explain or identify the "attack" that allegedly provoked the vulgar epithets directed at Professor Lawford-Smith.   There has been no response, and for the obvious reason:  there was no attack.  Second, someone discovered that during my sixteen years on social media, I once referred to an anonymous person on the Internet (seriously)--who had actually been attacking and defaming me at length and for quite awhile--as a "vile piece of garbage."  They neglected to mention I deleted the comment not long after, since it was made in anger and I thought better of it, despite their hiding behind a mask while abusing me and others (they are still pretty vile, judging from their twitter feed).  In any case, no one, that I'm aware of, defended my deleted tweet (I had no Silvermints coming to my defense) and plenty criticized it at the time.  

Your U.S. tax dollars NOT at work

Those who voted for Trump own this one.  No doubt Trump thinks the Iranian victims are vile animals.

"Anywhere out of this world," said Baudelaire.

(Thanks to Kaave Lajevardi for the pointer.)

 

Mediocre white people from around the world to gather in Finland to share delusions

Won't this be a lovely event?

Twitter "believe it or not," part 2

Philosopher Rachel McKinnon (Charleston) would like "cis" women to "die in a grease fire."  (I've been on the road, but various folks have been tweeting this at me over the last 24 hours.)

UPDATE:  Several readers report that Professor McKinnon's account has been suspended for "abusive" behavior, which is hardly surprising--the only thing that is surprising is that it took so long.   Of course, Twitter is a cesspool of such behavior, so they should probably delete the whole platform!

ANOTHER:  And now she's back (having learned nought!).

On Javanka, the brain-dead children of money

This is very funny:

[T]he first daughter and her husband remain psychologically mysterious, at least to me. Why don’t they have impostor syndrome, given that their total lack of qualifications for the jobs they are doing makes them actual impostors?

According to “Kushner, Inc.,” Gary Cohn, former director of the National Economic Council, has told people that Ivanka Trump thinks she could someday be president. “Her father’s reign in Washington, D.C., is, she believes, the beginning of a great American dynasty,” writes Ward. Kushner, whose pre-White House experience included owning a boutique newspaper and helming a catastrophically ill-timed real estate deal, has arrogated to himself substantial parts of American foreign policy. According to Ward, shortly after Rex Tillerson was confirmed as secretary of state, Kushner told him “to leave Mexico to him because he’d have Nafta wrapped up by October.”

As political actors, the couple are living exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a psychological phenomenon which leads incompetent people to overestimate their ability because they can’t grasp how much they don’t know.

Fascists in California legislature introduce bill calling for a tenured professor to be fired...

...for his constitutionally protected speech.   Nothing he said comes close to the legal test for unlawful incitement.  These legislators are a disgrace to the United States and the First Amendment.   The University of California at Davis reportedly is "investigating" the faculty member for his comments, even though it has no legal authority to do so.  (Besides being offensive, this faculty member's comments are also ignorant:  see here and here.  But that is wholly independent of his right to make them without being sanctioned by his employer.)

The American roots of actual "white" supremacy...

...although it wasn't really "white" supremacy so much as Aryan or Nordic supremacy, since Jews and Italians (among others now treated as "white") weren't welcome.  But Hitler and the Nazis were impressed, although the article includes this gem:

What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,” observes James Q. Whitman, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.” Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew...arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.”  The Nazis reviewed the infamous “one-drop rule,” which defined anyone with any trace of African blood as black, and “found American law on mongrelization too harsh to be embraced by the Third Reich.”

"Too harsh" for the Nazis!

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

Diversity blather watch: Stanford edition

Stanford set up a program whose aim was to present diverse viewpoints on various topics but the program was criticized for not being "diverse" in terms of the race and gender of the speakers.   But the two kinds of "diversity" are not the same, and the value of the first (call it Millian diversity) has almost nothing to do with the values of the second, which used to be called affirmative action before Justice Powell confused an entire nation, including its alleged intellectuals.   Sensible reasons for affirmative action include compensatory justice, social inclusion, and providing role models.  Millian diversity, by contrast, aims to promote discovery of the truth through exposure to competing ideas and arguments.

UPDATE:  Philosopher John Dupre (Exeter) writes with an interesting observation:

As a former Stanford faculty member I was interested to read and briefly follow up your blog post on Stanford’s program of presenting diverse views to its community.  While I certainly cannot argue with your distinction between Millian diversity of views and diversity of the identities of holders of the views (though both might be a good idea), you don’t mention the rather ironic fact that, at least as far as I can find out online, the failings with regard to the second point are dwarfed by the failings with regard to the first.  An opening session with two billionaire funders of Facebook, one, Peter Thiel, a well-known extreme libertarian conservative, and the other apparently a good friend of his, chaired by the notoriously right wing historian Niall Ferguson, is hardly a paradigm of diverse perspectives. 

According to the website subsequent speakers included the IQ and race theorist Charles Murray on inequality, and a conversation on sexuality and politics between the well-known anti-feminist philosopher Christina Sommers and a right-wing Catholic journalist.  Francis Fukuyama looks about the most liberal speaker mentioned.

The critics may have got their criticism confused, but they certainly had much to criticise. As the Chronicle article suggests Stanford now recognises, a more diverse (sensu 2) planning committee might well have been a good way of getting a more diverse program (sensu 1).

Indeed, that program of speakers is not exactly a triumph of Millian diversity, although the way to get that is not with affirmative action on the planning committee, but Millian diversity on the planning committee, or simply a principled commitment to speakers with genuinely competing views.   The Federalist Society in U.S. law schools is actually a good model of the latter:  Federalist Society events always involve a commentator or respondent with opposing views to the conservative speaker.  (The Federalist Society does, in my view, too often give a platform to mediocre academics simply because of their politics, but even when that happens, they still have a respondent with an opposing view.)

Twitter "believe it or not," part 1

Some guy with a PhD in comparative literature from Emory (seriously!)--who appears now to be a free-lance journalist--denounced me on Twitter as a "mediocre thinker."  The Twitterrabble loved it!  My self-esteem, alas, will never recover.

"Twitter is public"

A philosopher in California sent me this funny essay by Hamilton Nolan from several years ago:

In light of certain arguments currently taking place on the internet, we would like to issue a gentle reminder of a fact: Twitter is public.

The things you write on Twitter are public. They are published on the world wide web. They can be read almost instantly by anyone with an internet connection on the planet Earth. This is not a bug in Twitter; it is a feature. Twitter is a thing that allows you to publish things, quickly, to the public.

Most things that you write on Twitter will be seen only by your followers. Most things that you write on Twitter will not be read by the public at large. But that is only because the public at large does not care about most things that you have to say. It is not because the public does not have "a right" to read your Twitter. Indeed, they do. They can do so simply by typing Twitter dot com slash [your name] into their web browser. There, they will find a complete list of everything that you have chosen to publish on Twitter, which is a public forum.

Who is Sam Duncan and why does he think I stole his milk money?

The  sixth law of cyber-dynamics is:  on any blog with unmoderated comment threads, there will be no correlation between those who regularly post comments and those who actually have something worthwhile to say.   Weinberg's "safe space" philosophy blog suffers from several regular commenters who illustrate this law, but the only one who interests me today is the character known as "Sam Duncan."  I don't know Mr. Duncan, don't know who he is, don't even know if it's his real name, although it appears to be (I am told it is this guy, but if it's not, he should tell me [UPDATE:  He's now here.).  But Mr. Duncan, judging from his obsessive comments, seems to think I took his milk money and he's very mad about it.  I swear I didn't!