Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The online Republican party has merged with fascists and racists...

...can the real party be far behind?  An excerpt:

The key ingredient to this online soup is extremism: from nativism to racial science, to casual neo-Nazism and textbook misogyny. Presented to followers via livestreams, memes and X posts, this deluge of far-right content has been called “slopulism” — a vibes-based politics designed for social media and born from social media. These vibes, of course, are harsh. They’re anti-democratic. And they’re increasingly being embodied in the presence of figures staffing the second Trump administration.

In May, an NPR report identified three administration officials with clear ties to alleged neo-Nazis, holocaust deniers or misogynist trolls. There are now a half-dozen confirmed cases of Trump staffers either linked to far-right extremists or those pushing extremist views, among them Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and Kingsley Wilson, the Defense Department press secretary....

And then there’s the case of Paul Ingrassia, the Trump staffer nominated to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, who may be the best example of a conduit between the online right and the White House. Mr. Ingrassia, 30, a former far-right podcaster, has been an outspoken supporter of one of the online right’s most visible figures, Nick Fuentes.

RFK Jr's plan to kill us all: measles edition

If he depresses vaccination rates further with his pathological ignorance, then we're in big trouble:

Measles was eliminated in the U.S. decades ago, but millions of new measles cases could pop up across the country over the next 25 years if vaccination rates continue to fall, new modeling suggests.

In a study published Thursday (April 24) in JAMA, scientists forecasted the number of measles cases that might be seen in coming decades if state-level vaccination rates stay steady, decline or increase. If vaccination rates drop by 10%, they found, there could be 11.1 million cases of measles across the U.S. in the next 25 years.

If vaccination rates stay the same as they are today, 851,300 cases of measles could occur in the same timeframe. In that scenario, the disease could feasibly "reestablish endemicity" within about two decades, meaning it could start to spread consistently in the U.S. once more.

If vaccination rates dropped as low as 50% of current levels, 51.2 million cases of measles could occur in the coming 25 years.

Assuming the rates of all routine vaccinations fell across the board, that would come with upticks in cases of other diseases, like rubella and polio. All told, this could lead to 10.3 million hospitalizations and 159,200 deaths, the model predicted, along with thousands of cases of post-measles neurological complications, rubella-related birth defects and polio-triggered paralysis. (Like measles, both rubella and wild polio have been eliminated in the U.S.)

"We're already on the precipice of disaster," study lead author Mathew Kiang, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Stanford University, said in a statement. "There really shouldn't be any cases at this point, because these diseases are preventable. Anything above zero is tragic. When you're talking about potentially thousands or millions, that's unfathomable."

UPDATE:  Reader Henry Cohen writes:

I appreciate your post, “RFK Jr's plan to kill us all: measles edition, but I would have made it, “Congressional Republicans plan to kill us all: measles edition.” RFK Jr. is insane, after all, whereas Congressional Republicans allow him to act out his insanity because they’re afraid that Trump would have them primaried if they didn’t. They are cold-blooded killers.

They bear primary responsibility for every crime and every unconstitutional action of the Trump administration. I know that I’m not telling you anything new; I just think that we should emphasize their responsibility more. For them to not impeach Trump is to violate their oath to uphold the Constitution.

 

RFK Jr's plan to kill us all: vaccine approval edition

The dangerous imbecile strikes again:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health secretary, on Monday fired all 17 members of the advisory committee on immunization to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, saying that the move would restore the public’s trust in vaccines....

The C.D.C.’s vaccine advisers wield enormous influence. They carefully review data on vaccines, debate the evidence and vote on who should get the shots and when. Insurance companies and government programs like Medicaid are required to cover the vaccines recommended by the panel....

This is the latest in a series of moves that Mr. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, has made to dismantle decades of policy standards for immunizations. An advisory panel more closely aligned with Mr. Kennedy’s views has the potential to significantly alter — or even drop — the recommendations for immunizations to Americans, including childhood vaccinations.

The decision directly contradicts a promise Mr. Kennedy made to Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, during his confirmation hearings, when he said he would not alter the panel, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices....

Public health experts reacted strongly to Mr. Kennedy’s announcement, calling it an extreme and reckless decision.

“I don’t think there’s any way to put this, other than saying that this is an unmitigated public health disaster,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The lunatics are running the asylum, and putting all normal people at danger.  Senator Cassidy is a disgrace for enabling this fiasco.

RFK Jr's plan to kill us all: bird flu edition

Unbelievable:

The Trump administration has delivered its latest blow to vaccines, canceling a nearly $600-million contract to the drugmaker Moderna that was intended to develop a shot for humans against bird flu.

The decision also forfeited the U.S. government’s right to purchase doses ahead of a pandemic, and canceled an agreement set up by the Biden administration in January to prepare the nation for a potential bird flu pandemic. The Moderna contract built on a previous government investment of $175 million last year.

Hopefully a coalition of civilized countries will invest in this pretty basic preparedness measure.

The imbecile RFK Jr. ramping up his war on vaccines, one of the great public health triumphs of the 20th-century

He's interfering with vaccine development (which may interfere with updated Covid shots in the fall, unbelievably); and instead of a massive vaccination campaign for measles, the imbecile is directing a study for miracle treatments, including vitamins.  Of all the awful and unqualified Cabinet appointees, I still suspect RFK Jr. is the most dangerous.  Just horrible. 

The media's mostly incompetent coverage of Trump's illegal rampage against the universities

Josh Marshall makes the key point, using the New York Times as his target:

I wanted to point your attention to this recent article from the Times on the battle between Trump and Harvard University. It captures the Times’ feature quality. It contains good factual detail, but it radiates what I can only describe as a Chernobyl-level condescension and contempt, not so much for anything “liberal” but anything not conservative, or not in line with what it terms the “rightward shift of the country” — anything that can be construed as a posture of opposition to Donald Trump. The Harvard board is portrayed as reflexively and out-of-touchedly liberal, repeatedly shocked in a weak-kneed sort of way and yet also, paradoxically, headstrong in its inability to resist outmoded Trump I-era “resistance” thinking. In a few words, weak, out-of-touch and contemptible.

 

There’s not a single mention of the fact that the entire campaign is illegal on its face and an unprecedented and corrupt power grab with no antecedent in the U.S. government’s almost 80-year research-focused partnership with the country’s leading university. But why get stuck in the nitty gritty?

 

The NYT has found the courage to refer, correctly, to Trump's repeating lying about the 2020 election.  Every article should begin by noting that Trump's demands on the universities violate both Title VI and the Constitution, that just as Trump lies he also makes unambiguously unlawful demands on universities, law firms, and othres.  He is a serial law breaker, and always has been (he is, after all, the Holmes Bad Man).

 

(Thanks to Keith Nightenhelser for the pointer.)

 

UPDATE:  Today's NYT, as luck would have it, at least has a strong piece in the opinion section on Trump's lawlessness.  This qoute from Columbia law professor David Pozen sums things up quite well:

More important than any specific example of unconstitutional conduct is the overall pattern. The depth and breadth of this administration’s disregard for civil liberties, political pluralism, the separation of powers and legal constraints of all kinds mark it as an authoritarian regime. That is the crucial thing to see.

Tariff humor

As most readers will know, the monster child, who is as ignorant as he is depraved, imposed tariffs on island countries inhabited mostly by penguins.  Hence this amusing item making the rounds on social media:

Brown University has a lot of staff (and some faculty) doing DEI work

A Brown undergraduate put together this list--since he's a bit clueless, he thinks these positions are "illegal" (they are not:  just because the Trumpistas don't like DEI, doesn't make it illegal).  What's stunning is how many there are.

Top FDA vaccine expert resigns in protest of the ignoramus RFK Jr. running Health & Human Services

Pathetic and alarming.   Of all the awful Cabinet appointments made by the monster child, the imbecile RFK Jr. at HHS may prove to be the most dangerous over the long term.  No doubt it is inexcusable stupidity like this that prompted the resignation.   And this is a good example (research into vaccines for infectious diseases) of how these awful people are putting all our lives in danger.

UPDATE:  Actually, it's even worse:  the FDA's vaccine expert was ousted by the ignoramuses.

The imbecile RFK Jr. (perhaps aided and abetted by the imbecile Elon Musk) setting the stage for everyone to die in the next pandemic

Unbelievable:

[N]ews that the Trump administration is reconsidering a government-funded study of an experimental H5N1 vaccine is generating fears that it may be on the chopping block, and that could take the fast-track option off the table, at least for one of the manufacturers of messenger RNA vaccines — the fastest vaccines to make and the easiest to mass produce.

At a time of elevated concerns about the potential for an H5N1 pandemic, the Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed that it is re-evaluating a nearly $600 million contract issued to Cambridge, Mass.-based Moderna by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a division of HHS. The contract, signed in the final days of the Biden administration, is designed to help Moderna develop and test the safety and efficacy of vaccines to protect against five subtypes of influenza that could prompt pandemics, including H5N1.

The war on public health begins

The imbecile leading the Department of Health & Human Services has ordered the CDC to stop advertising flu shots (flu shots!!!), in favor of encouraging "informed consent" to vaccines.

Of all the awful nominees Trump has put forward...

...I still think the ignorant Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. may be the most dangerous.  And he is now Secretary of Health & Human Services.  Why is this so dangerous?  As the NYT notes, he has spent years trafficking in junk science:

As the nation’s health secretary, Mr. Kennedy “would have wide powers to advance his favored research studies, publications, or scientific data,” according to Lawrence O. Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University. Mr. Kennedy’s critics fear that the public will have neither the time nor the training to sort through a war that seems to pit one study against another, and that the result will be a rapid decline in confidence in vaccines.

“The Mawson paper [on vaccines and autism] epitomizes Kennedy’s consistent inability to distinguish junk science from reliable information,” said Dr. John P. Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College, who said that study and some of the others Mr. Kennedy has cited in the past are published by “fringe journals.”

Whether this buffoon destroys public health in America will now turn on whether Senator Cassidy, the cowardly MD from Louisiana, actually exercises oversight.  State health departments, at least in the civilized states, will now have to take the lead.  

There is no bottom to dumb: Elon Musk edition

Ross Hyman, a computer scientist here at UChicago, writes:

I have not seen this mentioned anywhere, probably because it is impossible to keep up with all the wrong things that Elon Musk has been saying

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1888022189984858476

But when Elon says “Can you believe that universities with tens of billions in endowments were siphoning off 60% of research award money for “overhead”?”, this is conflating the indirect rate with the percentage of the award.

The simplest way to show that these are different is to consider the extreme case of a university with a 100% indirect rate. That would mean that for each dollar that the NIH is awarding to a PI for direct costs, their university is receiving one dollar in indirect costs so the percentage of the award going to indirect costs is 50% not 100%.

For the 60% rate that Elon refers to, for every dollar to the PI’s direct costs, 60 cents goes to indirect costs. So, the percentage of the award going to indirect costs is 60/160 = 37.5%

Some of the indirect cost goes to a University’s Research Computing Center, which provides computing services to the grantee as well as all researchers on campus with or without grant awards. If Research Computing Centers were not funded by indirect costs, then researchers would need to pay for computing time out of their grants and computing time would not be available to people who are working on projects without grant money, which is necessary to develop successful pilots to get grant money, and would deprive the world of a lot of interesting research.

The Trump order "pausing" federal government payments...

...has been rescinded, as most readers will know (one court had already enjoined it, another was poised to do the same).

The "pause" was outrageous, as we already noted, so what is going on with the monster child and his fascist minions?  Here's my best interpretation.

We know that Trump wants to contest the constitutionality of the 1974 federal law that prohibits Presidents from impounding funds appropriated by Congress.  The Monday "Veath memo" was such a badly written piece of work that those advising Trump pointed out that it would never survive legal challenge (a point Professor Vladeck made).  Round two will involve a much more limited "spending pause" that complies with the rules, and will set a factual record that may support a more plausible legal challenge.   The new "spending pause" will not be across the boards, and I doubt it will target NSF and NIH expenditures broadly:  it will instead target expenditures that give off the odeur of DEI, or "transgenderism," or some other powerless bogeyman Trump & his henchman think is ripe for targetting.  A "pause" memo written by an adult (not Veath, who will soon be known as Darth Veath), that is narrowly tailored at programs that are not in line with Trump priorities, will make a much better case to bring up to the Supreme Court of the U.S.  

We shall see soon enough.

The bigger issue right now is whether the Senate rejects the RFK Jr. bozo as Secretary of Health & Human Services.  Unlike Trump, RFK Jr. is mature enough that he could be hired to look after one's pets!  He is, however, less competent to run public health in the U.S. than my dog.

The three most alarming Trump Cabinet picks (so far)

Two obvious ones have gotten much attention:  Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, and Kash Patel for FBI Director.  Both evince a fascistic or authoritarian temperament and ambitions.  Putting either in charge of people with guns and authorized violence would be very dangerous in the extreme.  Ironically, as of this writing, Hegseth seems likely to be rejected not for being a Christian nationalist and authoritarian, but for being a sexist and a drunk.  I'll take that if that's the reason.  That may allow attention to shift to Patel, who is quite unhinged.

At least as dangerous, but in a different way, is the prospect of an ignoramus like RFK Jr. becoming Secretary of Health & Human Services.  Public health is the kind of social good it's easy to take for granted, until it's gone.  RFK will accelerate declining uptake for vaccines, and promises to direct research funding away from infection diseases--God forbid there's another pandemic.  Fortunately--at least for those in civilized states--the states still set legal requirements for mandatory vaccinations, but even if Illinois has 21st-century public health policies, it will be a problem if neighboring Missouri or Iowa do not.  Viruses don't respect state lines.

Unless the U.S. is very lucky, the next four years could see massive outbreaks of infectious disease, with no coherent federal response; political arrests and prosecutions (maybe murders?); and a politicized military occupying Democratic cities in search of immigrants and "preserving law and order."

J.D. Vance on the universities

Here's the infamous speech.   Zieg Heil baby!

(Thanks to Rob Kar for the pointer.)

The impending Trump disaster

As things stand now, Trump may legitimately win the election next month; he will definitely win if the polls are again under-estimating his support as they did in 2016 and 2020.*  If he does, it will be because every visit to the supermarket is a reminder about inflation, which, combined with the "correlation is causation" principle of the ignorant, will lead to Republican votes.  

A second Trump term will be a disaster in many ways.  We have already noted the threat to the universities, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.  Public health, already weak (recall the Covid fiasco in this benighted country), will likely be destroyed: expect the return of measles, whooping cough, maybe even polio.  His tariff obsession, if enacted, would wreck the economy.   The endless corruption we have already seen will return with a vengeance (literally!). And then there is the endless vicious craziness he riles up, from the ugly attacks on Haitians in Ohio, to conspiracy theories involving metereologists!  A country can't function with this nuttines being regularly inflamed by the unhinged President.  Of course, he isn't just unhinged, he's a "fascist to the core" in the words of the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley.  That may make itself felt when he begins rounding up "immigrants" in concentration camps, which will be costly, inhumane, and have very bad spillover economic effects.  Or when he sends the military into New York and Chicago to "control" crime and illegal immigration.

Philosopher Michael Huemer vs. Internet blowhard Ben Shapiro on voting for Trump

This is pretty funny, especially the final bit:

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro is still planning on voting Trump, even though he knows that Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. Shapiro explained that there is no cause for concern because “the guard rails held”, and Trump can’t do the same thing again since he’s not eligible to run again after his second term.

Let me tell you how I view this. Say you’re on a bus ride on a winding mountain road. You see the driver suddenly swing the wheel to the right, trying to send the bus over the cliff. Fortunately, the guard rail on the side of the road holds, and the bus bounces back onto the road. The bus driver does this repeatedly during the drive, but every time, the guard rail holds the bus back.

When you finally get off the bus, one of your fellow passengers declares that this was an excellent bus driver. He proposes hiring this driver to drive the same group to another city.

“What are you, out of your f—ing mind?” you reply. “He tried to drive us off a cliff!”

“Oh that,” says the other passenger. “The guard rail held, so what’s the big deal? Don’t worry, this next drive won’t go by a cliff. Since the rest of his driving performance was fine, we should hire him.”

That guy is Ben Shapiro.

Why is this race so close? There is no mystery

The "undecided" or "waivering" voters have no idea what's going on and do not understand cause and effect.  Consider this from the latest NYT polls showing an essential tie in the key Northern battleground states:

The polling results fit a recurring theme with voters in battleground states: Many tend to believe that Mr. Trump’s time in office helped people like them, and they worry that Ms. Harris’s policies would hurt people like them.

For these voters, economic correlation is causation:  if the economy was good under Trump, Trump caused it.  In fact, Trump's policies were not good for people of average income, but to know that you'd have to know something about his actual policies (e.g., his tax cuts).  (Interestingly, voters give Trump a pass on the pandemic:  they know he didn't cause that.  On the other hand, they apparently don't know how badly he handled it, but, again, that would require actually paying attention to his malign influence on health policy.)  (Achen and Bartels in Democracy for Realists discuss various cases in which correlation is treated as causation by voters, including some pretty bizarre ones.) 

Conversely, because substantial inflation occurred under Biden, he caused it:  correlation is causation and thus responsibility.  The role of the pandemic and the disruption in supply chains in producing inflation is a consideration unavailable to the ignorant.

The problem for Harris is that every time voters walk into the supermarket they are reminded that prices of most stuff they buy is 15-20% higher than under Trump.   (I'm not an especially alert shopper, but even I am astonished at times.)  As the NYT also reports, "As for the issues that matter most to swing voters, pocketbook economics is No. 1 by far." There's just no way around that, and it may be enough to return the monster child to office.  Harris's pitches to the prudent wing of the capitalist class won't change this.

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.