Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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!

Uncomplicated

Here's something that's not complicated:  Justin Weinberg (South Carolina) has been a consistent opponent of academic freedom and freedom of speech, from the case of Laura Kipnis at Northwestern to the case of John McAdams at Marquette.   As the cyber-cheerleader for the New Infantilism, he consistently favors punishing people for speech offensive to the children, the law and principles be damned.  The Finnis case is only the latest in that series.

Fascist Bolsonaro's foreign policy will be anti-Wittgensteinian!

Who would have guessed?

(Thanks to Chris Bertram for the pointer.)

Mattis and the monster-child and Syria

So the last emotionally mature adult has left the monster-child's cabinet.  If he left over the decision to withdraw the troops of the imperial army form Syria, then I have less sympathy for his decision.  Mattis may be an adult, but he is still a victim of the ideology of his time and place.

I am hopeful Secretary Mattis explained to the monster-child that if a nuclear war started, Manhattan, and the monster-child's real estate holdings, would disappear first, which may be our salvation.   All joking aside, our situation is apocalyptic and bizarre:  the one person in the world who can kill us all in the next ten minutes is not someone any adult would hire as a baby-sitter.   Secretary Mattis should have orchestrated a coup while he could, but now it's too late.  Let's hope the monster-child's love for his island keeps us alive.

The Twitter cesspool

I wasn't surprised to learn that philosopher Kate Manne (Cornell) had given up on Twitter; I'm amazed she could bear it for as long as she did, since mindless ad hominem abuse is the normal form of interchange, conjoined with particular interest in abuse aimed at gender, race and religion.  Professor Manne had the particular misfortune to become the target of the "Jordan Peterson twitter army," which can't have been pleasant.

I was amused, though, to discover that Kant had written about Twitter in 1784:   "despite the apparent wisdom of individual actions here and there, everything as a whole is made up of folly and childish vanity, and often of childish malice and destructiveness."  (OK, actually he was talking about world history.)

I'm thinking of giving up on the medium myself; at a minimum, I'm going to stop engaging, it's pretty hopeless.  On one occasion, I attracted the Twitter Nazis (literal ones), who discovered my "Jew" article on free speech, and I then received more than a thousand abusive tweets over a day or two.  (These folks definitely didn't think I was "white"--more on that in a moment.)  I responded to no one, and blocked no one, and they moved on.  This is clearly the right approach.  

Ever since I had the temerity to call attention to Kathleen Stock's critical writings about issues raised by the gender recognition law in the U.K., I've been exposed to what seems to me an equally unhinged part of twitter:   the self-annointed "trans activists."  The rabid and unhinged Katja Thieme (British Columbia), for example,  declared me an "anti-trans activist" the other week.  Apart from calling attention to views she clearly deems unacceptable, whether those of Kathleen Stock or Leslie Green, my "anti-trans [sic] activism [sic]" is on full display here and here and here and here.   But she outdid herself more recently by comparing me to the sexual harassers and anti-semites I discussed here.  Unhappy, frenzied zealots and mediocrities like this thrive on Twitter.

That article of mine, on citation practices, produced a remarkable set of outbursts on Twitter, disproportionately focused on my (alleged) race and (actual) gender; some examples:

Nikki Usher, Associate Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, called me "a generic University of Chicago white-dude scholar who defends honorifics for Nazis."  I pointed out to her that citations, at least in real disciplines, aren't "honorifics." 

Rose Casey, Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University, after first mocking and insulting me on Twitter, responded to my blocking her by stating that, "We need less of this white male gatekeeping in academia."  When challenged by another tweeter what she meant, she explained that "he blocked me" and that, "He is gatekeeping my access to the institution in which he wields power (incl tenure) & in which I do not."  Put aside that I'm not in her field or at her institution, as someone else amusingly quipped in response:   "Who knew that blocking someone on Twitter could derail the tenure track."  Professor Casey's own social media performance is far more likely to gatekeep her out of the academy. 

Patrick O'Connor, the Chair of Temple's Board, is a disgrace...

...and a fascist.

Is this a joke?

Even by the ordinary passive-aggressive standards of the "safe space" philosophy blog, it seems hard to believe that this could be meant seriously.  But more than one reader has sent it along expressing varying degrees of incredublity, so maybe it's not a joke?   

University of Reading, in accordance with a foolish U.K. law, "warns" students about an essay by politics professor

When last seen around here, the late Norman Geras was shilling for the criminal war of aggression against Iraq.  Prior to disgracing himself, he had been a politics professor at the University of Manchester and author of some decent articles on Marx and other topics in political theory.  But one of them has now garnered a "warning" to students at the University of Reading, who might be led down the road to terrorism by reading an article justifying political violence in some circumstances.

(Thanks to several readers for sending this along.)

On 'harassment': a guide for beginners (and cry-babies)

If someone is criticized for their public actions or speech, that is not "harassment":  that is criticism.   

Examples of harassment would include, e.g., becoming the target of on-line mobbing by hundreds of philosophers; being targetted with verbal abuse, such as obscenities, sexual or sexist remarks, racist or other ethnic slurs, and other derogatory epithets; being framed for or falsely impliciated in wrongful or criminal acts; receiving death wishes ("I can't wait until you're dead") or threats of death or violence ("You better watch your back, we're gonna get you").

I have been harassed in all these ways, and others, and I am not alone in having been so harassed.  To the other victims of actual harassment, my sympathies.  To those confusing criticism with harassment:  grow up!  Criticism will continue.

Co-author of APA Code of Conduct violates it, without embarrassment

The APA Code of Conduct, with its violation of the academic freedom rights of faculty, was always an absurd document.  But one might have thought at least those responsible for it would care about it.  Apparently not!

One co-author of the Code, philosopher Yolonda Wilson (Howard), while disagreeing with my views about the APA, decided she also needed to do so by deeming me a "mediocre-ass white man."  (We shall bracket the inaptness of the characterization, apart from the "man" bit.)  Let's note some of the provisions of the Code Professor Wilson helped write which this seems to violate:

1.  Section IV, regarding "Electronic Communications," provides that "it’s best to avoid ad hominem arguments and personal attacks, especially if they amount to slander, libel, and/or sexual harassment and "Language used in professional electronic communications should use the same kind of inclusive language and reflect the same kind of mutual respect as is expected in the classroom or other face-to-face interactions."  Professor Wilson might defend her use of personal attacks and lack of mutual respect and inclusive language by noting that this was not a professional communication (although its subject was a matter of professional concern) and perhaps it was not made from her Howard University computer.  (I note in passing that in response to my pointing out her hypocrisy, she offered as a defense the claim that she would "say it to my face."  I admire that forthrightness, though if anything would violate the APA Code of Conduct, surely it would be face-to-face abuse with epithets...one hopes!)

2.  Section V, on "Bullying [sic] and Harassment," purports to apply to conduct by APA members not simply towards colleagues and students but "others in the profession."  This is specifically said to prohibit "any degrading, hostile, or offensive conduct or comment by a person towards another that the person knew or reasonably ought to have known would cause the target to be humiliated, intimidated, or otherwise gratuitously harmed. Typical examples of bullying and harassment include verbal aggression" and "calling someone conventionally derogatory names or using derogatory stereotypes to describe them."  Obviously Professor Wilson is in plain violation of this provision of the Code.  Professor Wilson, however, explained that she was not being hypocritical in her conduct because, "Truth-telling is not hypocritical."  Now in the Code as written, there is clearly no exception for "truth-telling" via verbal aggressionn and the use of derogatory names and stereotypes.  But for those originalists out there, please take note:  according to one of the framers, none of these provisions apply when one takes onself to speak truthfully!

Shall we hold our breath to see whether any officer of the APA deigns to condemn this violation of the Code by an APA member involved in drafting it?  Of course not!

Saudi Arabia should hire a more experienced Mafia lawyer...

...before putting out transparent bullshit press releases like this.   Even John Gotti would have been embarrassed!

A reality check on the Oseroff scandal and the APA Blog (UPDATED)

Given that the Twitter Red Guard continue to dissemble and moan about Professor Stock's and my expose of the APA blog scandal, perhaps a reality check is in order.

Nathan Oseroff, a man in his late 20s, who has a prominent on-line position with the American Philosophical Association (that he continuously advertises), took it upon himself to launch a jihad against feminist philosophers, especially philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) who held what he, in his superior wisdom, deemed to be a "morally unacceptable" opinion about the proposed gender self-ID law in the United Kingdom (this law would permit anyone to redesignate their gender for all legal purposes without any medical or other oversight, evaluation or waiting periods).  This man used his role at the APA blog to post a comment attacking Prof. Stock on the APA's blog that violated blog guidelines (the editor in charge of the blog apologized to Prof. Stock, removed the comment and briefly suspended the offender--remarkably, he has not been removed entirely). 

This adult male also took to social media to defame Prof. Stock as someone who directed "hate" at her students and colleagues.  Doing so would be grossly unprofessional conduct, but this man's only evidence for his libelous charge was that Prof. Stock had a different view about the gender self-ID Law in the UK than he did.   In addition, it turns out that this man also abused his role at the APA to "police" the conference practices of a philosophy society that had actually accepted one of his papers, even though the APA, let alone its blog or its editors, has no authority about how professional societies referee papers.

This adult man, who is almost 30 years old, objected that no one should criticize him since he is a PhD student in philosophy. Some of his fellow Twitteratti, endorsed this view (unsurprisingly, they are all similarly situated:  adults in school engaged in stupid on-line conduct!).  

I suggest that Donald Trump should enroll in a PhD program soon, since some segment of the population apparently believes that misconduct is entitled to a free pass if the perpetrator is an adult PhD student.  (Unfortunately for Trump, that segment may consist only of the Twitter Red Guard.)

Poseur du jour: Moira Weigel edition

When I came across Weigel's sneering review of The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, I thought it a bit thin on substance and a bit thick on rhetorical tricks:  here was another standard-issue comp lit PhD invested in identity politics and pissing all over the enemy.  (I confess to having little patience for Haidt, who did some clever psychology experiments early in his career--although he consistently misinterpreted their philosophical import--before becoming a public pontificator who apparently believes the main issue in academia these days is not enough Republican faculty:  go figure?)  Now someone has gone to the trouble to eviscerate the review, rather amusingly so.  But let's not knock ad hominem attacks, at least when not strictly fallacious.  Dr. Weigel's father, it turns out, is a retired tax partner at a "white shoe" New York law firm; I'd bet she even has a trust fund.  Any reader of Adolph Reed would hardly be surprised that an elite female child of ruling class privilege would turn out to be deeply invested in identity politics, to the point that its opponents are unintelligible to her.

Latest Sokal hoaxers make public all the referee reports they got

Here.  (Thanks to Philippe Lemoine for the pointer.)

Meanwhile, elsewhere in cyberspace, Justin Weinberg (South Carolina), the leading cyber-cheerleader for the New Infantilism, assures us that the paper accepted by Hypatia is, in fact, just fine.  Whew, that's a relief.

For those who are interested, here's the article.  It’s the file called HoH2.

And for all those trying to 'explain away' the latest Sokal hoax, here's a regular article from one of the hoaxed journals, GeoHumanities...

...on "The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins."  Give it a try.

(Thanks to Jerry Dworkin for the pointer.)

Sokal Hoax, redux

The authors submitted seven "fake" papers to journals, which passed peer review and were accepted for publication, including Hypatia (more on that, below).  They frame this, unhelpfully, as about "grievance studies," but that several of the papers did get accepted indicates that the journals in question have seriously flawed standards, to the point where one might wonder whether there is a Wissenschaft there at all.

Here is the fake paper that Hypatia accepted after two referee reports!

Title: When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire

By

Richard Baldwin, Ph.D., Gulf Coast State College

Hypatia

Status: Accepted

Thesis: That academic hoaxes or other forms of satirical or ironic critique of social justice scholarship are unethical, characterized by ignorance and rooted in a desire to preserve privilege.

Purpose: To see if journals will accept an argument that shuts down critiques of social justice scholarship as a lack of engagement and understanding, even if one engages fully and knowledgeably with the ideas to the extent of having a paper on them published in a leading academic journal. (This paper is also to anticipate and show understanding of the feminist epistemological arguments against our project and demonstrate their high estimation in the field by having them accepted in the leading academic journal of feminist philosophy. That is, to criticize our work that way, they have to cite us.)

Selected Reviewer Comments:

“This is a very promising essay and so revisions will be very helpful.” -Reviewer 1, Hypatia

“The paper is well written, accessible and clear, and engages in important scholarship in relevant ways. Given the emphasis on positionality, the argument clearly takes power structures into consideration and emphasizes the voice of marginalized groups, and in this sense can make a contribution to feminist philosophy especially around the topic of social justice pedagogy.” -Reviewer 2, Hypatia

“The topic is an excellent one and would make an excellent contribution to feminist philosophy and be of interest to Hypatia readers.” -Reviewer 2, Hypatia

“Excellent and very timely article! Especially nice connection with pedagogy and activism.” -Reviewer 1, Hypatia (second review)

“I have a couple of personal, very minor comments that I’ll put in below the referee’s praise. I hasten to add that I like your paper very much as well!” -Editor of Hypatia, acceptance letter

The Wall Street Journal article on this hoax has more detail:

On the believers in Q-Anon

Philosopher Guy Elgat (School of the Art Institute, Chicago) comments.

Stephen Mulhall did not like Graham Harman's book

For our series of harsh book reviews, though in this case a clearly deserving target; from the conclusion:

Whatever its proximate sources, the picture shaping Harman’s thinking only needs to be plainly articulated for its peculiarity to become apparent. His conviction about the inherent inaccessibility of reality seems ultimately to rest on assuming that genuine knowledge of an object would have to take the form of becoming wholly and fully identical with that object: fusing with it, actually realising the theatrical method-acting aspiration that he claims is internal to the experience of metaphor (but also claims is not truly realisable). This is a strangely idealist assumption for a putatively realist ontology, and one which would abolish the independent reality of both subject and object if it were realised. But of course, knowledge cannot rest on any such assumption, because it is a sheer fantasy. It evacuates the idea of knowledge of any content, since neither we nor Harman have any idea what it would mean for a subject to become the object of her knowledge.

(Thanks to David Gordon for the pointer.)

On the abuse of the concept of "harm"

Philosopher Dan Kaufman (Missouri State) comments; an excerpt:

The way this goes is depressingly familiar to anyone who has been paying attention over the last few years. A professor articulates a view on a controversial social or political subject that is at odds with the prevailing view in the academy or at least, with the view that is most fiercely promoted by academic activists. It is then claimed that the professor in question has “harmed” the relevant population, i.e. racial minorities, trans people, women, etc., and that consequently, his or her writing/speech is outside the frame of acceptable discourse. If the professor decides to stand up for him or herself and reaffirm the position in question, even perhaps marshaling additional arguments or evidence on its behalf, what only can be called a “mob” is then unleashed, first on social media, and then later, depending on the circumstances, against the professor’s home institution, with the aim of exacting some penalty, up to and including the termination of his or her employment.

The issue arose in Professor Stock's reply to Professor Ferrin as well, and Professor Stock's rejoinder was right on the mark:

Ferrin starts by claiming that saying that ‘trans women aren’t women’ (or, in the new, more accurate construction, saying that they aren’t females) ‘hurts’ and ‘harms’ (her italics) trans women, in that it leads to physical violence against them. This is highly tendentious, for a number of reasons. For one, it is very difficult to work out precise causal routes to physical violence against trans people, in the cases we know about — is it violence on the basis of being gender-non-conforming (not all gender non-conforming people are trans)? Is it violence on the assumption the person is gay (i.e. homophobia)? I have looked at many a survey on violence against trans people since I started writing about this, and none of them have done anything to try and sort this out question, in relation to responses given. (Such surveys also tend to be commissioned by trans activist organisations and done on the basis of self-selection and self-report, with no follow-up surveys; but I digress). Crime reports are also mostly impotent to settle it.

 

Trump's actual response to 9/11: bragging that he now owned the tallest buliding in lower Manhattan...

...since the World Trade Center had been destroyed.

PhD student in German at NYU completely beholden to Avital Ronell writes letter in support of Avital Ronell at CHE

And like her other defenders, it's kind of pathetic.  (On the evidence of her most loyal admirers, one might conclude Prof. Ronell is a charlatan, though one shouldn't visit the sins of the students on the teacher obviously.)  Part of the pathos is that it's in large part unintelligible.  Here's the crucial (I think) paragraph:

As it stands now 1) our precarious German department, filled with marginal characters, is being likened to Weinstein corporation by the media; 2) theory is being subsumed under deconstruction and relitigated as some bogeyman art, as if Brian Leiter’s strain of analytic philosophy were anything but self-serving indignation; 3) feminism and prominent feminists are being outright attacked by a legal team steeped in the rhetoric of men’s rights, arguing with reactionary notions of “discrimination”; 4) tropes are being exploited that problematically paint our minoritarian style of humanities research as perverse, sectarian, hypocritical, and even worthless.

Let's take these in order.  

(1)  A handful of articles in the popular media are being written assimilating Ronell's treatment of Reitman to the Harvey Weinstein scandal that sparked what is now called "metoo," but not many:  "metoo" has already claimed lots of male victims (think the ridiculous Leon Wieseltier) who were not rapists like Weinstein.  What brought Ronell into this orbit was the unethical effort by her friends to try to bully NYU out of disciplining her given her alleged fame and international stature.  I was responsible for exposing this disgraceful behavior, hence the anger of the acolytes.

(2) I've referred to "theory" consistently as what they call "bad philosophy" in literature departments, and that's what it is:  ask 99% of the philosophers at the best universities in the country.  Deconstruction is a big part of that, as Marjorie Perloff noted with direct reference to Ronell.  I'm not familiar with my "strain of analytic philosophy," and most analytic philosophers aren't either.  My intellectual lodestars are, in order, Nietzsche, Marx, Quine, Hart.  I'm unrecognizable to most analytic philosophers, though I do try to honor Nietzsche's dictum from The Gay Science:  "Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity.  Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity."

The allegedly pro-Ronell website

A number of folks on social media are again asking whether the pro-Ronell website is really a parody after it published this barely intelligible "devastating reply" (in the words of the site) to the CHE piece on Ronell from the other day.  The proprietor of the site is a Ronell flunkie, Robert Craig Baum, who, as best I can tell, really does believe he is helping Ronell.  Readers can judge for themselves.

More literary theory professors who have trouble with the facts

First there was the fact-free smear merchant Jennifer Doyle (UC Riverside), now comes Jack Halberstam, professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, and another friend of Butler, Ronell et al..  From his public Facebook page on August 20 (!):

The letter, let's remember, was released by a right wing philosophy site long before the signatories were done crafting it.

As the humanities PhD student elsewhere, who sent this to me, remarked:  "I don't know if that's just plain stupid or intentionally malicious (to use the letter's favorite word), but I'm incredulous at how a tenured professor, who should be a beacon of responsibility, is resorting to such deliberate defamation."  I'm less sure it's deliberate:  some of these people are just having trouble coping with what their pals did, and so are unconsciously wishing away the unpleasant facts.  In any case, Marjorie Perloff, the distinguished poetry scholar (emerita at USC and Stanford), soon corrects Halberstam on his FB page:

The fact is that the letter was mailed to the president of NYU on May 11. So it's not true that the signatories had not done crafting it.

The letter's content was crafted and set:  that's why it was being sent to hundreds of academics around the world for signatures.  There were some typos, but that letter expressed the views of Buter et al. for which she has now (finally) felt the need to apologize, sort of.  Halberstam adds to this the nonsense that this is a right-wing blog (I'm about as right-wing as Adolf Reed), but as often happens with these smear merchants, they use words in highly revisionary ways:  "right-wing" in this context means something more like "someone who is critical of my friends."

As the humanities PhD student who tipped me off to this latest display wrote:  "I really hope, however, that this whole affair will lead to some Götter- (or Götzen-)Dämmerung within the literature departments, in the sense of a return to doing real Wissenschaft."  I share that hope.  Both my parents earned graduate degrees in English, before English departments were colonized by "bad philosophy" and political posturing, when English scholars really had to be historians, philologists, and genuine scholars of diction and form.  (I took so many English and Comparative Literature courses, I could have had a minor in the subject.)  Many, of course, still are (and I have been glad to hear from many of them, who are appalled by this whole affair), though I can still recall when A. Walton Litz resigned from the English Department at Princeton in the 1980s to join the Creative Writing Program, because he wanted to be "around people who enjoy reading books."  So three cheers for the disciplined study of literary texts and the many humanities professors who maintain that scholarly tradition today.

With friends like Zizek, who needs enemies?

The deposition of Zizek concerning his latest should make for good reading when the time comes.