Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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!

Fox, the fascist propaganda network, is now an official threat to public health

 

This ad makes clear why Trump is a threat to public health

 

Why having an incompetent President is a problem during a national emergency

Yesterday I noted that Governors, not the President, have authority to take public health measures like shutting down businesses and requiring individuals to stay home, but this interview makes very clear why having an imbecile as President is a real problem; an excerpt:

What is supposed to happen is the federal government has to activate the Defense Production Act immediately. Now, what Defense Production Act does is it allows the federal government to step in and aggressively force the private sector to produce what we need. And what is so critical in this is timing. Because you can't simply build factories from scratch; what you can do is identify a supply chain in order to make it work.

For example, if New York needs rubber gloves, New York cannot simply build rubber glove factories overnight. However, there might be a rubber glove factory in Ohio that could produce it, but they might not have the latex. So therefore, the Defense Production Act allows the federal government to go to the condom factory in Missouri and say, "Listen, you have barrels of latex we need. We are requisitioning those. We are giving them to the rubber glove factory in Ohio. And then we are transporting the finished rubber gloves to New York." That's how it is supposed to work.

The authority to lockdown business and quarantine people rests with the states, not the federal government...

...so the decision-maker who matters in the U.S. is your Governor not the monster-child.   See the comments on Twitter from law professor Bobby Chesney (Texas).

Leiter v. Trump

A funny message, from longtime reader Larry Franz:

Thank you for your COVID-19 posts. The public needs reliable information like you've been providing. We also need TV networks to stop giving the president free access to misinform the public. He's a risk to public health.

Alas, I can only address one of these issues!

Trump's and the right-wing media's disinformation campaign on coronavirus

A philosopher elsewhere kindly invited me to share the following:

I think we're seeing that Trump's initial misinformation about the risk posed by the coronavirus is causing fewer Americans to socially distance than otherwise would. Willingness to socially isolate tracks party affiliation, with way fewer Republicans than Democrats saying they're willing to do so: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/republicans-are-far-more-likely-than-democrats-to-think-the-coronavirus-threat-is-exaggerated-new-survey-finds-2020-03-10 . It's not hard to find people not just defying recommendations to socially isolate, but doing so proudly.

Right-wing media is almost certainly responsible for this.

Until sometime in March, Trump's downplaying of the pandemic was part of Fox News' editorial stance. They would often slip this in as they criticize Democrats for trying to use the crisis to their own advantage.

Fucking Moron Watch: David A. Clarke, Jr. edition

JFC!

Matt and Noah Colvin should be arrested for endangering public health

They're apparently too stupid to realize that being featured in the NYT is going to bring the wrath of people and law enforcement down on them.

Trump and Kudlow should both be moved into the Kirkland, Washington Life Care Center...

...for the duration of this fiasco they helped create.

Bristol newspaper names and shames adult men threatening Greta Thunberg on social media

What a collection of winners!

In case anyone forgot that Rush Limbaugh is the scum of the earth (with apologies to scum)...

...a small sampling, but one that does no justice to the extent to which he has damaged the polity and the democracy over the last thirty years.

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

This is funny; an excerpt:

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

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

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

Everything is bigger in Texas...

...including the morons.

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

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

Vigilante justice comes to NYU...

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