So they get our freedom of speech, conscience, and association, along with our money and our moral support, and, in return, we get a tweet from their half-ousted Prime Minister. Sounds like the Deal of the Century. Actually, sounds like the deal of the last century, too.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Doxastic Determination by Thesis Advisor?
Another head-scratcher from Jason Brennan’s BHL piece on meta-philosophy (timestamp: 10:16 am, February 12, 2020):
Second, what people believe tends to depend a great deal on who their advisors were. People who go to Harvard tend to come out Kantians of some sort. People who go to Arizona tend to come out Gaussian contractualists or Schmidtzean pluralists. Now, some of this is due to selection–the Kantians are more likely to apply to Harvard than, say, consequentialist ANU. Part of it, though, is that when you attend a program with people who defend X, you encounter much better arguments for X and weaker arguments for other positions. But this seems to a rather unreliable mechanism for changing your beliefs. A Guassian contractualist like Kevin would have ended up believing something else had he gone to a different program. Is it just lucky for him he attended Arizona and not Harvard? Is it just lucky for him that he had Gaus as an advisor instead of Christiano, Schmidtz, Wall, Pincione, or someone else?
Isn’t this the kind of claim that requires bona fide empirical support? I don’t see any here. I just see Brennan recording his quasi-empirical impressions of a handful of institutions, followed by a gigantic epistemic generalization about the whole profession. Forget selection versus treatment effects. A treatment effect presupposes an effect. Not obvious there is one. Continue reading
Doing It with Style: Jason Brennan on the History of Philosophy
From a recent contribution by Jason Brennan to the ongoing polemic between Michael Huemer and Kevin Vallier on the history of philosophy (as posted at BHL at 2:45 pm, February 11, 2020):
Context: Michael Huemer claims that the “great” philosophers are usually bad thinkers. They defend implausible ideas with bad arguments.
Vallier responds that the great philosophers are like architects. Their great achievement is that they build coherent systems of thought.
I’m not much convinced by Vallier’s response in part because, when I studied the history of philosophy or read papers in the field, it seems that the “greats” often have incoherent systems. A large number of published papers on the greats, and good number of the classes, take the form of “Great Thinkers says X here and Y here, but X and Y are seemingly incompatible. Let me try to figure out a way to spin X and Y to render then coherent.”
Don’t really see how the intended conclusion follows.
The Partisan Semantics of Electoral Fraud
Louis Jacobson, Politifact, January 4, 2018:
In a statement on Jan. 3, 2018, announcing his decision to disband the commission, Trump said, “Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry. Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action.”
PolitiFact is separately checking a different assertion by Trump, that “mostly Democrat states refused to hand over data” to the commission. In this fact-check, we’re looking at whether Trump is correct that there is “substantial evidence of voter fraud.”
This is hardly the first time Trump has made an assertion of this sort. He has repeatedly claimed the existence of massive voter fraud and election rigging, which we’ve debunked again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Trump has not yet produced any evidence that supports these claims, and the White House did not respond to another request for this article.
Caught with Your Pants Down: The Strange Case of Mayor John Roth of Mahwah
I’m about to recount an almost entirely inconsequential political incident, the strange case of John F. Roth, mayor of Mahwah, a small, affluent town in northeastern New Jersey. But while the incident is almost entirely inconsequential, I’d say that precisely one feature has broad significance. Let’s see if you and I agree on what it is.
About a month ago, John F. Roth, the mayor of Mahwah, went to a party at the home of a Mahwah Township employee. You’re not going to believe this, but alcohol was served at this party. Yes, alcohol. And–hold on to your hats here–but Roth actually consumed some of this alcohol. I wouldn’t lie about something like this. Having done so, he managed to get drunk. He must have realized that he was drunk, because instead of driving home–like a normal person–he decided to walk into a bedroom or guestroom of the house, take off his pants, and fall asleep on a bed. He was later discovered pants-less in that very bed. A call was placed to his wife, who arrived to retrieve him. Retrieved, I gather that he went home to sleep it off, very possibly pants-less, in his own bed. Continue reading
Cancel Culture Blues: The Strange Case of Steven Wilson
I need to stop reading stories like this, because if I do, I’m in danger of lapsing into Michael Young’s running dog reactionary views on cancel culture.* I’m still a big fan of cancellation as an idea, but if this is what “cancel culture” is going to be, then my thought is: leave me the hell out of it. But this isn’t what cancel culture has to be. We have a choice about what form it will take.
[Steven] Wilson was the chief executive of Ascend, the consortium of central Brooklyn charter schools he built, beginning with plans devised on his dining room table in 2007.
But Mr. Wilson was effectively barred from celebrating with his students.
Several weeks earlier, he had written a blog post embracing the values of a classical education; some younger members of his staff perceived it as racially traumatizing. Others found it simply tone-deaf. He was in a kind of purgatory, still employed by Ascend but taken out of its day-to-day operation.
In Defense of Democratic War Socialism
I love the Democratic Party. I love it with the ardent zeal of an apostate Republican. But some days I wonder.
Many of my friends and comrades are Bernie Sibs dearly in love with the ideals of “democratic socialism.” There used to be a time when you weren’t allowed to use the word “socialism” in American discourse. Now, the neo-liberal corporate sellout media is cashing in on it. And if you’re not a democratic socialist–you don’t want free tuition, free health care, free subway rides, free everything, etc.–well, then from a Bernie standpoint it’s pretty obvious that you stand with the plutocratic 99%. And trashing Hillary Clinton–something I’m only too happy to do–doesn’t give you any points with this crowd. As far as they’re concerned, it’s either dirigisme or oligarchy. Continue reading
On This Solemn Day
When I was eight years old, I wrote to the President of the United States–Jimmy Carter, at the time–asking him to change the national anthem from “The Star Spangled Banner” to “America the Beautiful” (I think it was) on the grounds that the former was unbecomingly and demoralizingly war-loving. The White House wrote back a polite but non-committal response, pointing out that the anthem was what it was through an act of Congress, and suggesting that I take the matter up with my local representative, Dean Gallo, a flag-waving war monger eager to start a war with just about anyone. I never did. Continue reading
Nathan Thrall on Trump’s “Peace Plan”
The best short discussion of Trump’s so-called peace plan for Israel/Palestine that I’ve seen, by Nathan Thrall (ht: Susan Gordon). Hard to improve on, or argue with, any of this:
The Trump plan, much like the decades-long peace process that it crowns, gives Israel cover to perpetuate what is known as the status quo: Israel as the sole sovereign controlling the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, depriving millions of stateless people of basic civil rights, restricting their movement, criminalizing speech that may harm “public order,” jailing them in indefinite “administrative detention” without trial or charge, and dispossessing them of their land — all while congressional leaders, the European Union and much of the rest of the world applaud and encourage this charade, solemnly expressing their commitment to the resumption of “meaningful negotiations.”
social injustice and individual obligation
Suppose that society can wrong individuals and groups within society (as I think it can). If one (or some group) is wronged in any way, one can legitimately complain (object, demand, etc.). If one is wronged by society, one complains to… society. But society is not an agent, so such a complaint cannot function as it would if one were privately wronged. And so, though we can say that society is obligated to right the wrong, it seems we must cash this out in terms of the obligations of individuals. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 