Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

An amusingly clueless review of Dennett's memoirs

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

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

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

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

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

Mindless jurisprudence-bashing on Twitter (updated)

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

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

 

As I observed on Twitter:

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

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

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

Katja Thieme gets her moment of Internet fame

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

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

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

(Thanks to Paul Raymont for the pointer.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so on.

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

America is not a civilized country

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

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

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

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

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

Masks actually work for reasons we have long understood

This essay makes an important point:

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

 

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

 

Dumb and dumber: Twitter on the OUP/Byrne fiasco

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgia secedes from civilization

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

America is doomed.

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

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

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

Enemies of academic freedom watch: Michael Berube edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

QAnon continues to thrive in the heart of the Republican Party

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

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

When the yahoos take over the community college

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

(Thanks to Gregory Mayer for the pointer.)

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

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

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

Montana Taliban trying to wreck science education

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 24--UPDATED    

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

(Thanks to Bradley Wood for the pointer.)

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

A Black professor "trapped in anti-racist hell"

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

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

Charlie Kirk "solves" the Euthyphro dilemma

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

(Thanks to David Livingstone Smith for the pointer.)

Hamline University's disgracefully stupid violation of academic freedom

This is really breathtaking in its stupidity:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republicans and Covid deaths

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

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

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

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

The point of education according to Democrats in America

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

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

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

Who said it: Adolf Hitler or Kanye West?

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

 

Kanye West and Hitler

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

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

Socialism lite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Realism about democracy, part 192

According to a recent study of the American electorate:

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

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

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

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

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

Trump's "Brownshirts" now threatening judge who signed off on the warrant to search his property

First we had the stormtrooper riot at the Capitol, and now we have threats against federal officials, including judges:

Far-right extremists on pro-Donald Trump message boards and social networks are making violent, antisemitic threats against the judge who reportedly signed the warrant that allowed the FBI to search the former president's Mar-a-Lago property in Florida.  Multiple members of these toxic online communities are even posting what appears to be Judge Bruce Reinhart’s home address, phone numbers, and names of his family members alongside threats of extreme violence.

Of course, some of these folks are just keyboard warriors, but not all are.  As long as the lawful authoriteis with the guns--the police, FBI, Federal Marshalls etc.--step up and protect the judges and others who preserve the rule of law in a democratic society, we can weather these outbursts.  The tipping point will come when the keyboard warriors also turn out to be the people charged with preserving the rule of law with force when needed.

ADDENDUM:  A timely example, alas, that the crazies are not all keyboard warriors.

Modern mysteries: "Why" would a tech billionaire (Larry Ellison) become a leading donor to the Republican Party?

Utterly mysterious that someone fabulously rich would align themselves with the imprudent wing of the ruling class party.   What a puzzle.   Maybe Marcuse could help?

When you can't tell what's a parody and what isn't

This exchange has been circulating on social media.  My first reaction was that this had to be a parody of mindless identity politics, but in fact the participants actually believe their nonsense.   God help the universities if too many people like this gain a foothold.

(No doubt there are instances of "indigenous knowledge" that are actual cases of knowledge. But do they really add up to a Wissenschaft?  Maybe some do, but repetitive assertion of the point doesn't inspire confidence.   It's downhill from there in this Twitter exchange....)

Meet Kelley Watt of Tulsa, Oklahoma...

...a damaged human being who now damages others.

UPDATE:  It  turns out Ms.Watt has done work with James Fetzer, a notorious conspiracy theorist who lost a defamation action brought by a parent of the one of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting.  (Thanks to Cora Diamond for the pointer.)

Jennifer Ruth, enemy of academic freedom

And she's now continuing her war on academic freedom (under the guise of protecting it) with Michael Berube in a very bad book reviewed here:

It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom...is a maddening book. It raises many important questions but is so chock-full of unresolved contradictions; gross misrepresentations; and wild, unjustified claims that it ultimately makes you wonder how the manuscript made it into print.

It's a serious embarrassment for the AAUP that Ruth is allowed anywhere near its committee on academic freedom.

Florida man, taking advantage of new "parental rights" law, asks school libraries to remove the Bible

Exactly right:

"My objection to the Bible being in your public schools is based on the following seven points, offered for your learned consideration," Stevens wrote.

Stevens proceeded to question whether the Bible is age-appropriate, pointing to its "casual" references to murder, adultery, sexual immorality, and fornication. "Do we really want to teach our youth about drunken orgies?"

He also took issue with the many Biblical references to rape, bestiality, cannibalism and infanticide. "In the end, if Jimmy and Susie are curious about any of the above, they can do what everyone else does – get a room at the Motel Six and grab the Gideons," he wrote....

"If you want to teach morality and ethics, do you really want to turn to a book that wants you to dash babies against rocks?" he told NPR, pointing to Psalm 137:9.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is still real

Dunning responds to critics.  Every day on Twitter confirms its existence, of course.

"Mob review" rather than "peer review"?

Last week the Twitter mob panned a book they hadn't read, and now we have this:

The blurb for the book “Bad and Boujee: Toward a Trap Feminist Theology” says that it “engages with the overlap of Black experience, hip-hop music, ethics and feminism to focus on a subsection known as ‘trap feminism.’”

But the book, written by Jennifer M. Buck, a white academic at a Christian university, was criticized by some authors and theologians as academically flawed, with deeply problematic passages, including repeated references to the ghetto. The project was also widely condemned on social media as poorly executed and as an example of cultural appropriation.

In response to the criticism, the book’s publisher, Wipf and Stock Publishers, decided on Wednesday that it would pull the title from circulation.

The incident touched on a larger debate in the world of publishing over when, how, and even whether, it is appropriate for authors to write about subjects outside their own culture....

There is actually a whole academic discipline in which authors write "about subjects outside their own culture":  it's called anthropology.

(Thanks to John Doris for the pointer.)

Justice Ginsburg is a philosopher, and other great moments in the Dunning-Kruger Effect

A propos this (and especially this), it was recently brought to my attention that philosopher Sandra LaPointe (McMaster), opined as follows on Twitter:

And now the "open letters" attacking OUP begin

Yesterday's English professor who doesn't speak English is now apparently behind this letter, whose contribution to scholarly debate and free thinking is to ask OUP for,

[A] clear and detailed account of what measures have been taken to ensure the scholarly quality of this forthcoming publication (while being mindful of the need to maintain reviewers’ anonymity), and what further steps the Press is taking to make itself accountable for the consequences of its publication should the book go forward to print. Measures the press could undertake to offset the harm done by the publication of this work might include soliciting and publishing trans-affirming scholarship by transgender authors, updating the house style guidelines to include specific guidance on language around transgender rights, donating a portion of the book’s profits to supporting transgender rights organizations, and/or developing editorial guidelines for the submission of works that challenge the human rights of any marginalized group. We recommend that these steps for accountability be undertaken in consultation with transgender rights activists and transgender scholars. We hope that this process can help guide OUP in editorial directions that affirm trangender peoples’ humanity and rights.

Of course, it is quite normal to demand that an academic press account for the publication of a book that none of the critics have read.   I do hope OUP will ignore this little tantrum by the thought police.

OUP publishing a book="organized violence"

Thus spake this English professor in Canada, who apparently doesn't know what words mean:

If only Hitler had realized that a book could constitute "organized violence," he could have just published his way to the Third Reich.   Naturally, the University of California professor who flagged this for me said,

I hate to have to add that, if you say anything about this on your blog, I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention my name. My husband is still working at [our UC campus], which, as you know, is a hotbed of Diversity etc. I am looking forward to his retiring so I can speak my mind about the [insert expletives here] mess we’re in with regard to gender and biological sex.

The academy, or at least some campuses, are in a "mess" if faculty don't feel they can object in public to stark-raving idiocy like the tweet, above.

UPDATE:  An alert reader points out to me this extraordinary response on Twitter:

U.S. life expectancy continues its decline, thanks to the mishandling of Covid

Here; an excerpt:

The study -- published Thursday on the preprint server medRxiv, which means it has not been peer-reviewed -- found that after falling nearly 1.9 years in 2020, life expectancy in the US decreased another 0.4 years in 2021.  In the decade before the pandemic, life expectancy in the US changed by an average of less than 0.1 years annually, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

Changes to life expectancy amid the Covid-19 pandemic widened an existing gap between the US and other high-income countries, the new report shows. Among a set of 19 peer countries, life expectancy dropped only a third as much as in the US in 2020 (down 0.6 years, on average) and rebounded in 2021, with an average increase of about 0.3 years.

 

For yet another instance of American exceptionalism, we can thank the Republican Party, Tucker Carlson, Alex Berenson, and other pathological liars and ignoramuses.

Right-wing "cancel culture" watch: study room at University of Florida named for Karl Marx has the name removed

Zieg Heil, baby, we're ideologically pure in Florida!   The case study in the Dunning-Kruger Effect that initiated this bit of petty tyranny in the service of ideological delusion is one Jennifer Carbrera who objects--obviously on the basis of no study or knowledge--to Marx being described as a "philosopher, radical economist and revolutionary critic" (all true, of course), adding that the description "neglects to mention the millions of people who have died as a direct result of his ideas."   Direct result?   Some people have funny views about causation, but I guess she's opposed to the Bible too for similar reasons.

Arthur Caplan, bioethicist...and aspiring war criminal?

Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at NYU's medical school, is certainly very good at talking to journalists.  My impression has long been that he is not well-regarded by philosophers, and not even by many fellow bioethicists.   But this is really a new low:

Arthur L. Caplan, a professor of medical ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, has been campaigning for a program of mass death. He has written, not one, but two op-eds calling for a pharmaceutical boycott of Russia.

"How far does noncooperation with Russia go?" wrote Caplan on March 11 in Medscape. "Very, very far ... Whatever can be done to minimize harm to existing subjects in a short period of time ought to be done, but that is it. Similarly, no sale of medicines or therapies ought to be occurring, be they life-saving or consumer products." (Emphases mine.)

"The Russian people need to be pinched not only by the loss of cheeseburgers and boutique coffee but by products they use to maintain their well-being," Caplan lightheartedly adds.

The targeting of civilians is a relatively new form of barbarity in the history of war.

Caplan is untroubled by the implications of his proposal. "War is cruel that way," he shrugs, "but if you tolerate a government that is bombing and shelling a peaceful neighbor to oblivion, then pharma must ensure that efforts to make Putin and his kleptocratic goons feel the wrath of their fellow citizens."

In America the Vengeful, even the philosophers of health can preach death....

The backlash to U Mass/Boston's proposal to cease being a university in favor of becoming an "anti-racist" institution

We noted this embarrassment previously (here and here), and now CHE has an article:

An early draft of the statement, which would commit the university to becoming “an anti-racist and health-promoting institution that honors and uplifts the cultural wealth of our students,” has drawn sharp criticism both on and off campus, even as some applaud the effort.

As of March 11, some 75 faculty members at the university had signed an open letter of opposition written by some colleagues from the College of Science and Mathematics, which called the draft statement “deeply flawed in content, direction, and representation.” The letter argues that “the fundamental role of the public university can neither be political nor ideological activism.” A growing number of supporters from other colleges have also signed the letter of opposition online. A Boston Globe column characterizing the draft as reeking of “woke indoctrination,” has added fuel to the conflict.

Banning Dostoevsky to punish Putin?

A university in Milan had that stupid idea, but it looks like the decision will be reversed.  This is, indeed, a very good time to be reading Dostoesvky, who understood human beings, not to mention Russia, better than most.

(Thanks to Blake Myers for the pointer.)

Here we go again: St. Olaf students protest Peter Singer's virtual talk at their college

At least they only want the talk "boycotted" rather than cancelled, although they also want a commitment that the college will not invite speakers with incorrect views again.  (The misuse of the category "hate speech" is particularly remarkable:  nothing they quote from Singer would qualify as "hate speech" in any democracy with actual "hate speech" laws.)

(Thanks to Justin Garson for the pointer.)

America is doomed, an ongoing saga

During 2021, American voter party identification shifted from the Democrats to Republicans.