Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Condescension from below watch: Matt Taibbi edition

It's clear the silly Taibbi--who is sometimes an amusing polemicist but is equally obviously a lightweight--did not understand a word he read, and didn't even read the "Repressive Tolerance" essay in its entirety (he doesn't realize that Marcuse is a Millian, and that his dispute with Mill is about the background conditions under which liberty actually produces good consequences).   I do not recommend reading the essay, unless one wants to be reminded that anti-intellectual hatchet jobs are not wholly proprietary to right-wing pundits.

(Thanks to Prabhu Venkataraman for the pointer.)

America is doomed, part 499: the Republican Party is crazier now than it was even before Trump

The new target is Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, daughter of the former Vice-President and an extremely conservative Republican--but not as crazy as some members of her party:

As she watched Mr. Trump and his supporters peddle conspiracy theories and promote what she called “the big lie,” Ms. Cheney became deeply unsettled by how many of her colleagues seemed so cavalier about Mr. Trump’s actions, friends and associates said. She was also bothered by the way Republicans cheered and mimicked the kind of behavior she expected of a foreign authoritarian leader but never from an American president....

“We control the true spirit and identity of America,” said [Representative Matt] Gaetz (Fascist-Florida), who is leading the effort to oust Ms. Cheney from the House leadership.

After his speech, Teresa Kunkel, a retired state employee, said that she had attended the rally because, as a Christian, she did not believe Ms. Cheney was being an honest representative for Wyoming. “She didn’t represent what we voted for,” Ms. Kunkel said. “She betrayed us — big time.”

The second impeachment of Mr. Trump last month, which Ms. Cheney supported, was an injustice, Ms. Kunkel added. “It’s like: ‘I didn’t like what you did, so you’re out. And we’re in the majority, so we can do that.’ That’s cancel culture,” she said.

Bear in mind that the majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against certifying legitimate election results.   The majority!   Ms. Cheney was one of just ten Republicans in the House to support impeachment of the monster-child for the January 6 stormtrooper riot.

 

Is anyone surprised that a Trump-appointed commission about how to teach American history...

...produced reactionary garbage?  I assume not!

Chapman law professor and right-wing activist John Eastman spoke at the rally before the stormtrooper riot...

...and now some faculty want him fired.   The problem is he didn't commit a firing offense (as the University President recognizes).  He has not been convicted of a crime, only of world-historic stupidity and venality.  Lisa Leitz, a Chapman professor of peace studies, is calling for him to be fired because "his appearance at the rally and his past Trump campaign activities have scarred the university's reputation...it undermines the credibility of every faculty member."  Professor Leitz has obviously not thought very carefully about what she is saying.   No one, including her, would enjoy any academic freedom were the standard for termination "speech that, when it enters the public eye, 'scar[s] the university's reputation.'"   That standard would have surely justified the illegal firing of Steven Salaita, to take but one example.

Chapman has since announced that Eastman is retiring, and has agreed not to take legal action against the university.  (Eastman is 60 and has taught at Chapman for about 25 years.)   In other words, he and the University reached a settlement involving mutual release of legal claims, his agreement to retire, and in all likelihood a financial payout to Eastman to get him to retire.

 

There is no bottom to dumb, again

A friend of mine in New York City sent me this e-mail from the actual head of an investment firm.  It is below the fold.  No comment needed, the message speaks for itself.

Texas congressman: if the Georgia Senate seats go to Democrats...

...we'll go from "cold" to "hot" Civil War.

The Dunning-Kruger effect: just statistical noise?

With a whole blog category devoted to the phenomenon ("the less they know, the less they know it"), it would be disappointing if this is true.   But I'm sure it isn't, so there!

Some observations about Twitter, esp. philosophy-related Twitter

Max Noichl, a graduate student at the University of Vienna, made a map of philosophy tweeters (based on followers and retweets) which is making the rounds on Twitter.  I'm not really sure what it means, but it looks neat!  (Mr. Noichl offers some explanation here.)

Friends and colleagues like Leslie Green at Oxford and Queen's, and Eric Posner here at Chicago, used Twitter for awhile, but then gave up (Green later returned, but, wisely, doesn't engage).   I don't abandon the medium because I know some folks now follow the blog through Twitter links (my main activity on Twitter), and some of those I follow also post interesting material.   Prompted by the new Twitter map, herewith some observations about this strange medium:

1.  Putting aside those already famous, "success" on Twitter (i.e., lots of followers) seems to track three things:  actual expertise (e.g., about infectious diseases, about criminal law) which one shares on Twitter on a regular basis in long threads; championing a political or partisan cause on a regular basis, which attracts a flock of like-minded partisans; or extensive tweeting and extensive engagement with others (e.g, retweeting, responding, entering "dialogues" on Twitter).   There are outlier cases (e.g., Scott Shapiro, the funniest academic on Twitter, with his serial shticks), but most of the Twitter users with substantial followings (e.g., 30k or more followers) seem to fall into at least one of these categories, and sometimes more than one.

2.  Blocking nuisance Twitterati is, itself, a nuisance.  Twitter basically has all the worst features of an unmoderated comment thread on a blog or anywhere else in cyberspace, and so all the laws of cyber-dynamics apply.  "Condescension from below" is the primary form of expression for the average active Twitter user which, combined with the Dunning-Kruger effect, makes for a mess.

"Killology" and "sheepdogs"

Philosopher Susanna Siegel and a Harvard colleague comment.  If there were any doubts that large parts of America are nuts, this essay will eliminate them.

Now ZAS Berlin is flat out lying about the no-platforming of Professor Stock

Here on Twitter they have the audacity to claim: 

@ZASBerlin

Replying to

@Docstockk

ZAS had to retract the abstract because it did not fit to the scientific theme of the workshop (oppressive speech & communication) and contained language that was inconsistent with the values of the ZAS. We regret that the abstract went online.

11:38 AM · Dec 10, 2020·Twitter Web App

This is really shameless dissembling:   as we saw, Professor Stock's abstract was squarely on the theme of the session on "Bodies, Gender Identity, and Misogyny"; contained no inappropriate language (though apparently expressed a verboten point of view); and, in any case, Professor McCready has admitted to complaining about Professor Stock's participation which resulted in her being no-platformed (Professor McCready has now deleted her tweet confessing her role in this; being an innocent fellow, I didn't bother to take a screen shot, but I quoted it accurately in the prior post).  [ADDENDUM:   The Wayback Machine captured Professor McCready's tweet here.)

What is wrong with people in Boise, Idaho?

They're watching too much Fox TV I guess, but this is still grotesque:

In Boise, Idaho, public health officials about to vote on a four-county mask mandate abruptly ended a meeting Tuesday evening because of fears for their safety amid anti-mask protests outside the building and at some of their homes.

One health board member tearfully announced she had to rush home to be with her child because of the protesters, who were seen on video banging on buckets, blaring air horns and sirens, and blasting a sound clip of gunfire from the violence-drenched movie “Scarface” outside her front door.

“I am sad. I am tired. I fear that, in my choosing to hold public office, my family has too often paid the price,” said the board member, Ada County Commissioner Diana Lachiondo. “I increasingly don’t recognize this place. There is an ugliness and cruelty in our national rhetoric that is reaching a fevered pitch here at home, and that should worry us all.”

Artist sues Vermont Law School to prevent destruction of murals depicting the underground railroad

The murals were deemed "offensive" by benighted students flexing their muscles, and the school caved, hence the lawsuit. As Nietzsche observed:  the "secret desire to be tyrants is [often] wrapped up in virtuous words!"

Here is the image in question (not sure it will all fix here, but enough will):

Students at McGill demand the university revise and restrict its notion of academic freedom

At least these not so crypto-fascists are direct about what they want!   Since McGill's status as a serious research university would evaporate over night were they to heed these demands, I assume nothing will happen...this time, anyway.  But that the students are not ashamed by their demands is stunning.

GPT-3 bot posts on Reddit for a week, and no one realized it was a bot

This may tell us more about Reddit than AI, however.

(Thanks to Blake Myers for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: when Robin James reported some important "theorizing"...

...that still hasn't seen the light of day alas.

The Governor of California should resign

What a disgrace.  It's pretty easy not to have a dinner in a restaurant while people are dying from an infectious disease and you're requiring everyone else to not do this.   He should be crucified for this selfish stupidity.

What is wrong with the people in Farmington, Missouri?

Their local public health official  received threats because she is trying to implement simple measures to reduce the spread of COVID.  It got so bad, she resigned and moved.  Farmington is about 75 mile from St. Louis.  What is wrong with the people there?  I hope to God I never have to set foot in that place, or any place so benighted.

Lord Kilclooney of Northern Ireland refers to Senator and VP-Elect Kamala Harris as "the Indian"

Old habits die hard.   But seriously:  what happens if the Mick loses his peerage over this?  Who gets it?  An Indian? A Colored?  A Yid?

The wrong "Four Seasons"

This is too perfect a mistake by the monster-child's minions; if it weren't real, no one would find it plausible.

Philosophy PhD didn't know Australia is a country, fails student for knowing that it is

Oy veh!

QAnon and age-old anti-semitic tropes

Great news that millions of Americans believe this stuff now!  I'll have more to say about this later, but right now I have to get on a conference call with other members of the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy to make some decisions about what kind of economy we want for 2021.

1987 NYT editorial appeals to a "consensus among economists" that there should be no minimum wage

A good reminder for whom the NYT really speaks. 

(I saw this gem via Alex Gourevitch's FB page.)

PGR haters are strangely self-unaware

Here is philosopher Udo  Schuklenk (Queen's/Canada) declaring that "no serious academic would...lend their time to" the PGR.

You can see a complete list of the several hundred "unserious" academics who "lend their time" to the PGR:  it includes Brian Skyrms, Anthony Appiah, Ernest Sosa, Penelope Maddy, Cristina Bicchieri, Paul Guyer, Timothy Williamson, John Hawthorne, Alex Byrne, Gregory Currie, Martha Nussbaum, Terence Irwin, Jennifer Lackey, Cheryl Misak, Calvin Normore, Ian Rumfitt, Carolina Sartorio, Susanna Siegel, Allen Wood:  "no serious academics"!

More on the U of Southern Maine's "Anti-Racism" Pledge

Philosopher Jason Brennan (Georgetown) has some pretty funny observations here; an excerpt:

This kind of thing generally cheapens the idea of anti-racism. Universities are rather sad and pathetic places, in general. They're the kinds of places where, when people claim to get worried about racism, rather than using their ample resources to combat serious problems of racism out there in the world, they instead just hire a bunch of diversity officers who then create milquetoast programming for their student bodies, who already tend to be relatively non-racist and anti-racist. It's like getting worried about starvation, so you then distribute extra snacks to your generally well-fed student body rather than trying to feed actual starving people in refugee camps. You have to wonder whether the point is not to combat racism, but instead to be seen as anti-racist.

One does wonder that, doesn't one?

Legal remedies for libel are not instances of "cancel culture"

I was astonished a couple of weeks ago when a British lawyer actually took J.K. Rowling to task on this score; lawyers, at least, shouldn't be so stupid.   Rowling was a signatory to the Harper's letter about "cancel culture." She didn't thereby forfeit her legal right to be protected from unlawful speech, such as libel.   "Cancel culture," of course, as we saw yesterday, has nothing to do with legal remedies for unlawful speech or action.

President of the University of Southern Maine understands neither academic freedom nor the First Amendment

You can't call on members of the community to sign an "anti-racism pledge," just like you can't call on them to sign a loyalty oath to American capitalism.   Of course, this isn't quite as bad as mandating as a condition of employment a profession of loyalty to the ideology of anti-racism (whatever that is:  "I won't join the Klan," "I won't use racial epithets"?, "I won't disagree with Black Lives Matter?"), but it comes to the same thing:  after all, the President has issued a public call for signatures, his staff has duly signed, so who would want to risk being branded a "racist" for failing to be counted?   But there are plenty of non-racist reasons not to sign:  e.g., doubts about what will count as "the conditions and structures" that allegedly support bigotry, doubts about who one is being asked to "stand in solidarity" with and doubts about their conceptions of "justice."   No one, least of all this blowhard President (who sounds more like the former politician he is), knows what it means to be an "antiracist...in all aspects of your life."   That the President goes on to quote the totalitarian wannabe Ibram Kendi certainly does not inspire confidence.

Jared Kushner eviscerated

God, if he existed, would bless the Lincoln Project!

 

Nematodes are no joking matter!

This story is bizarre, even by the standards of the Twitter Red Guard!

(Thanks to David Velleman for the pointer.)

Matt Drudge's turn against Trump

I know most readers have better things to do than spend time in America's right-wing crazy media land; I do too.   I don't have TV any longer, so can't watch Fox (thankfully), and I can't imagine actually listening to deranged morons like Rush Limbaugh.  But I do follow the on-line "Drudge Report," which has had an outsized influence on the right-wing media for two decades, basically setting the terms of discussion and making issues salient (think of it as a much, much bigger version of this blog but affecting more than academic philosophy!).  

Run by Matt Drudge, an eccentric recluse and high school dropout with a stable-full of standard know-nothing prejudices, Drudge championed Trump in 2016, and for most of his tenure.  But starting earlier this year, Drudge began to sour on Trump--and this coincided with the arrival of the pandemic to America's shores.  My hypothesis is that Drudge is, in addition to his other eccentricities, a hypochondriac for whom the arrival of a genuine health threat, together with Trump's obviously incompetent response to it, was the straw that broke the camel's back.   This is good news for civilization, of course, since Drudge's steadily negative coverage of Trump will influence a segment of the benighted populace that neither Democrats nor the Lincoln Project will reach.  At a minimum, it should dampen their enthusiasm for turning out to vote for the monster-child in November.

UPDATE:  Reader Henry Cohen writes:

In "Matt Drudge's turn against Trump," you refer to Trump's "incompetent response" to the pandemic. Like "bungling," which I often see used to describe it, it seems inadequate because it is consistent with a good-faith response, which Trump's has never been. He covered up warnings he'd been given, seized PPE from blue states that needed it, urged people not to wear masks or practice social distancing, urged cities and businesses to reopen prematurely, and pushed the potentially fatal remedies of the malaria drug and drinking disinfectant. A sane person would know that all these acts would result in large numbers of deaths. Admittedly, Trump is not sane, but that doesn't mean that he was trying to prevent OR minimize the pandemic but botched it because of his incompetence.

Rather than "incompetent response," I'd say that his response has been to commit 156,000 reckless homicides, or words to that effect.

When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail

That was one reader's prior gloss on the remarkable tunnel-vision of Twitter's favorite feminist philosopher, but this latest public intervention confirms the myopia.  Biden, given his age and his decrepit cognitive condition, is likely picking the next President of the United States by naming his VP candidate, given the huge advantage "name recognition" confers in the charade known as American democracy and given the real probability that Biden can't discharge the duties of office for four years.  To miss all of that in order to hit your old nail (and promote your new book!) is amazing.

Lawyer Wendy Kaminer on the unhinged responses to the Harper's letter about "cancel culture"

I was amazed to learn that the letter (referenced in passing earlier today) was actually controversial, albeit among the usual herd animals, who never met an independent thought they could abide.   The lawyer Wendy Kaminer, who signed the letter, has a suitably stinging rebuke:

‘I rest my case’, I’m tempted to say, reviewing the unhinged responses of cancel-culture fans intent on cancelling the judicious defence of free speech in our ‘Letter on Justice and Open Debate’, published by Harper’s this week. I signed emphatically, which makes me one of ‘the worst people in the world of public intellectualism’, according to In These Times. What’s so bad about defending ‘the free exchange of information and ideas’ and critiquing ‘intolerance for opposing views’ and ‘a vogue for public shaming and ostracism’? In doing so we were not really defending the right to debate and criticise, according to In These Times: we were trying to squelch debate and censor our own critics, exhibiting a ‘bizarre aversion to being argued against … [that] now borders on the pathological’.

This is what citizens of cancel culture have apparently learned from Donald Trump: confound your critics by accusing them of precisely the sins you’re busy committing. Social-justice warriors have long demanded protection from the ‘trauma’ of hearing speech they deem offensive, calling for suppression of the speech and shunning of the speaker. So, employing Trumpian tactics, they accuse free-speech advocates of the censoriousness and psychic fragility that’s the raison d’être of their movement.

"Anywhere out of this world," said Baudelaire.

And with that I'm going back on hiatus to work on the book on Marx, as well as the drearier tasks presented by post-mortem bureaucracy in the modern world.

There is no bottom to dumb, part 392: protesters in Madison tear down statue of an abolitionist

Yikes.

David Hume statue targetted by protestors in Edinburgh

Who knew there were so many Kantians in Edinburgh?  Joking aside, if holding the same view as your 18th-century contemporaries is grounds for being de-statued, not many will last.

(Thanks to Filippo Contessi for the pointer.)

Australian government decides to destroy humanities in higher ed

What a disaster.

UPDATE:  Philosopher Antony Eagle (Adelaide) has more details about this mischief, which has ramifictions beyond the humanities.

The self-destruction of the American press

Very amusing and mostly right too!

(Thanks to Mark Couch for the pointer).

Another one bites the dust at the NYT...

...James Bennet, the opinion page editor responsible for Senator Cotton's now notorious "bring in the troops" op-ed, but who should have been fired long ago for other crimes against intellectual decency and literary good taste.

Yet another charlatan in the Trump administration

But at least he thought pretending to have a PhD in philosophy was better than having a PhD in management!

(Thanks to John Casey for the pointer.)

Looks like Illinois will need to build a border wall with Wisconsin...

...given this bizarre decision.  Hopefully most people will continue to take precautions.

Federal government turned down offer from private company to produce millions of N95 masks

People really should hang for this.

Pulitzer Prize for "Commentary" has gone to...

...Bret Stephens, Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer and, this year, Nikole Hannah-Jones.   (The Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting have a better history, fortunately.)

New Infantilism at Oxford

This is more pathetic than alarming:

A motion which mandates the Oxford University Student Union (SU) to condemn the use of “hateful material” in mandatory teaching was passed in Student Council this Thursday....

Named the ‘Academic Hate Speech Motion’, the motion sets to establish a new policy on hate speech within the University to include ‘incitement of hatred on the grounds of gender identity, disability, and socio economic status, including to trans, non-binary, disabled, working-class, and women*’.

Current University policy on academic free speech protects most academic speech as long as it is within the law. The motion notes that hate speech which is ableist, misogynistic, classist or transphobic is not criminalised but believes that the University should amend the relevant policy to ‘ensure that trans and non-binary people, women, and disabled people receive equivalent protection from hateful speech within University contexts as groups which are protected by the criminal law’.

A committee member of the Student Union’s Disabilities Campaign, who seconded the motion, told The Oxford Student “....The University’s current policy towards such issues falls short of protecting many students who are particularly vulnerable to hate speech due to the shortfall in legal protection – the examples given in the motion are particularly concerning for student wellbeing...."

The motion also mandates the SU to lobby for trigger warnings on readings lists and for lectures, tutorials, and examinations with content deemed prejudicial against the aforementioned groups to be non-compulsory for students....

Under the new policy set by the motion, courses that contain ‘prejudicial content’, such as the FHS Medical Law and Ethics course- which was noted as the sole example in the motion- should revise their course content and reading lists. The motion states that articles on the Medical Law and Ethics reading list are ‘ableist content’. An article entitled “Why We Should Pick the Best Children” [by the philosopher Julian Savalescu] advocates for a moral duty not to have disabled children whilst another advocates for the ‘murder of disabled children after they have been born’, the motion noted.

This came to my attention on FB from a colleague at Oxford (not Professor Savalescu) who teaches in the "Medical Law and Ethics" course who was contemplating legal action given the defamation of the professional competence of the teachers of this course.  Perhaps a libel judgment would wake these New Infantilists up?

ADDENDUM:  Several readers point out that philosophy's leading champion of New Infantilism, Justin Weinberg, has a typically convoluted rationalization for this display (as usual, it's mostly unreadable, but for those with morbid curiosity, I include the link).  You would think a philosopher at a public university in a reactionary state would be motivated at least by prudence, if nothing else, in actually defending academic freedom for a change.

America is nuts, part 732: Michigan State Capitol edition

Is there any civilized nation on the planet that would permit heavily armed morons to parade about in a state government building like this (with the result, by the way, that state legislators are wearing bullett proof vests)?

A drink for our times

(Thanks to Gregory Mayer for the pointer.)

Who has been more incompetent in dealing with the coronavirus: Trump or Boris Johnson?

Johnson is giving the monster-child a run for the money!

Mentally ill raving reactionary happens to be right about coronavirus...

...and so is featured in the NYT, thus effectively legitimizing someone who belongs in a cell.

Fucking moron watch: Louisiana pastor to hold Easter services for 2,000...

...and he's even explicit about his "thinking":

“Satan and a virus will not stop us,” Rev. Tony Spell told Reuters. “God will shield us from all harm and sickness. We are not afraid. We are called by God to stand against the Antichrist creeping into America’s borders. We will spread the Gospel"....

“Like any zealot or like any pure religious person, death looks to them like a welcome friend. True Christians do not mind dying. They fear living in fear,” Spell told TMZ in an interview this week.

In one California county, 30% of COVID-19 cases are traceable to church gatherings...

...and yet one religious crazy is ready to fight for the right to sicken his parishioners!

(Thanks to Jill Landowski for the pointer.)

The morbid reactionary fantasies of Adrian Vermeule

The latest.  Do note that Professor Vermeule is a "moral realist"!

As usual, religious zealots are a threat to human well-being

Unbelievable.  And some of these morons think that the First Amendment protects their right to endanger public health:   it doesn't.

UPDATE:  Good news, one of the pastors breaking the law has been arrested.  A few civil suits down the line for reckless indifference to human life would be appropriate too!

Even in the midst of a pandemic...

...Chris Bertram (Bristol) still can't stop his petty sniping. Amazing!  (More on Bertram for the uninitiated; new readers can safely ignore:  academic philosophy has a lot of resentful pests on its margins.)   Meanwhile, in the real world, here's a representative nice message I got from a non-philosopher:

I discovered your blog just about a week ago. In my search for people who were asking big questions about the virus and humanity, I googled "philosophers" and "corona virus."  And there you were!  Your blog is that welcome breath of sanity in a cluttered universe of internet claptrap. I have a round of sites I visit when I'm feeling especially powerless about our lives, and I've moved you right up to the top tier (between the Guardian and the Boston Globe). Bravo!