Martha Nussbaum 

It simply is not among the goals that make up the form of life of these creatures to be eaten by predators. Their form of life is their own, and they seek to live it undisturbed, just as we do, even though at times we too are also prey for aggressors. These species would not have survived if they were not pretty good at escape. To say that it is the destiny of antelopes to be torn apart by predators is like saying that it is the destiny of women to be raped. Both are terribly wrong, and demean the suffering of victims.

Yes, it's stupid, but par for the course.

Nussbaum in 1999, attacking Judith Butler. 

Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all.

and 2007

I do not plan to discuss the specific facts concerning boycotts of Israeli academic institutions and individuals. There are three reasons for this silence. First, I believe that philosophers should be pursuing philosophical principles—defensible general principles that can be applied to a wide range of cases. We cannot easily tell whether our principles are good ones by looking at a single case only, without inquiring as to whether the principles we propose could be applied to all similar cases.

Butler defended Ronell. Stock defended Tuvel.

It's amazing what you're able to rationalize sitting alone in a room.

The unfairness of caring for your own children

These relationships appear inegalitarian in deep ways. The parties to partial relationships may exclude others from the mutual benefits their association yields and have special responsibilities to one another that give them the right, and sometimes the duty, to further one another’s interests in ways that may interrupt equality. Scheffler calls this observation (when made in an appropriately hostile manner) the ‘distributive objection’ to special responsibilities: ‘the problem with such responsibilities is ...that they may confer unfair benefit. ...special responsibilities give the participants in rewarding groups and relationships increased claims to one another’s assistance, while weakening the claims that other people have on them’.4 Indeed, participants in these protected relationships benefit twice over. They enjoy the relationship itself, and they enjoy the claims that it enables them legitimately to make on one another, to the exclusion of those outside the relationship.

A new one: In all my ignorance I had no idea Jameson was this stupid. It still amazes me that subtle readers of the past, or present, can be desperate babbling idiots about the future.

Specifically military fears include issues of violence, of hierar­chy and discipline, of regimentation, and ultimately of aggressiv­ity itself, as that is fantasized to be a fundamental feature of human nature or the human "essence" (feminism has thematized this conception of aggressivity as patriarchy or male violence). It is worth reminding the reader that the universal army here proposed is no longer the professional army responsible for any number of bloody and reactionary coups d'etat in recent times, whose ruth­lessness and authoritarian or dictatorial mentality cannot but inspire horror and whose still vivid memory will certainly astonish anyone at the prospect of entrusting a state or an entire society to its control. Removing such justified and visceral fears would certainly be the first task of any utopian therapy, were it not for the situation of dual power from which the new universal army emerges, which begins life as a parallel force alongside the state and its official army and finds its first tasks, and indeed its vocation, in the fulfillment of neglected social services and in a coexistence with the population of a wholly different type. The "nation at arms" which emerges from this situation is above all a general population in which everyone participates and a principled reac­tion against just such enclaves which enjoy Weber's "monopoly of violence" and have come to lead an autonomous life independent of society in general. (Current American reactions against isolated police forces present ready-made analogies.)

An American Utopia, edited by Zizek. Zizek's a clown and I like him as a clown. He's a liberal trying to give liberalism a foundation in faith of something better. I've always ignored his religious shit, but unlike Americans he's a social animal.

Jameson, 

In fact, the possibilities for utopian thinking were always bound up with the fortunes of a more general concern, not to say obsession, with power. The meditation on power was itself an ambiguous project. In the 1960s this project was a utopian one: it was a question of thinking and reimagining societies without power, particularly in the form of societies before power: here Levi-Strauss's revival of Rousseau gave rise to the utopian visions of early Baudrillard, of Marshall Sahlins in his Stone Age Economics, of Pierre Clastres, and of that supreme utopian vision, The Forest People by Colin Turnbull.

Turnbull's book wasn't a vision, let alone a supreme one; it was a description, maybe oversimplified, of a culture where individualism was suppressed, perhaps because it was unnecessary. It's the closest thing I've ever read to a description of actual utopia, but its the opposite in every way of modern individualism. 

From the book that includes his essay on Fukuyama, Perry Anderson's review of Marshall Berman:

Any compressed reconstruction of its general scheme must sacrifice the sheer imaginative sweep, the breadth of cultural sympathy, the force of intelligence, that give much of its splendour to All That Is Solid Melts into Air - qualities that over time will make it a classic in its field. Let us simply say at the outset that a stripped-down analysis of the principal case of the book is no adequate measure of the importance, and attraction, of the work to hand.

Berman's visionary argument starts as follows: There is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others of life's possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience "modernity" To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind.

A friend loaned me Berman's book in the 90s. She loved it and reminded me she wanted it back. We had a falling out a few months later and I've had it ever since. I hated it. And I realized reading through it that she misunderstood my arguments about almost everything we'd ever talked about. But that was because she misunderstood or refused to face her own preoccupations. She was deeply conservative. She loved Kubrick, and Warhol's films. 

Berman celebrated individuality and individualism. It's stupid. This goes back to Graeber's asocial, pseudo-social, anarchism, the loneliness that craves community only if it controls it, and the culture of illustrated fantasy.

Streeck wrote this in 2014, reviewing Mair. I was watching it in the 70s in high school, thinking about the fucking hippies. I was raised by their teachers.

Streeck, years too late. Someone should get the joke.

In the order that seems to be emerging, social bonds are construed as a matter of taste and choice rather than of obligation, making communities appear as voluntary associations from which one can resign if they require excessive self-denial, rather than as ‘communities of fate’ with which one either rises or goes under.

And that link is the one that includes Streeck and Eric Rohmer.

Philosophers write about freedom vs egalitarianism or "freedom and equality." The actual issues are freedom and obligation. Equality, as a noun, is passive, saying nothing about how that relation might come to be. It can be imposed by others. Obligation describes a relation of active participants in a situation imposed not by others like us but by gods or nature: the fact of our limits and the limits of the world. The culture of the Mbuti in the Ituri forest is conservative. The only option given the fact of our own individualism—the modern condition, and irreversible—is a willed conservatism. Most people accept that; they themselves as part of a community. Berman's Americanism is a fantasy and a disaster.

The arts are Burkean. I'm with Eisenstein and Antoine Vitez, the communist from the Comédie-Française. 

The end of politics is the end of argument, the end of conversation. Wishing for the end of politics is like wishing for immortality.

2008

Cultural acts, directed from within culture, engaging their embeddedness, address the other by definition. "Craft" is always addressed from and to the community. Speech as craft engages both reception and the gap between speaker/author/maker and receiver. Can the vanguard as vanguard ever engage the other? Has it ever engaged craft as communication? If it breaks the bonds of language how can it reach back to the community it left behind? When has a vanguard ever made a new community? The best it's been able to do is teach by failure. All political thinkers should read Eisenstein. The last 20 years of my thinking ended up in that paragraph.

Carlo Ginzburg

Let’s start by quoting the magnificent words of the Sinologist Marcel Granet: ‘The method is the path once you have travelled it.’ Microhistory was the result of a convergence and a common discussion among a group of Italian researchers, but each one arrived at it with different experiences. For me, it was the case study. When I was ten years old, my mother [the writer Natalia Ginzburg, 1916-91] regularly brought me the books published by Einaudi. One day I came across The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein. I understood very little of the book’s content, but the impression it made on me was immense, even though I had not yet seen Eisenstein’s films. Then I read his text on the close-up, which became very important for me.

Working on a case in an analytical way is close to this. But, of course, you also have to take into account the off-screen, otherwise the close-up would not make sense. This implies that in any close-up the global perspective is implicit. Every singular case assumes the possibility of a generalisation, and there is a back and forth between the one and the other. 

---

My contempt for utopianism goes back as far as I remember. I associate with with Christianity. I was raised a secularist with the understanding that Judaism focused on the responsibilities in this world, not dreams of another, making it relatively easy to sacrifice the religion itself and keep the burden. 

Art galleries are luxury boutiques. They exist to sell things to the rich.

FÊTE DU BOIS
A Celebration of Yve-Alain Bois
Sunday, December 11, 3 - 5PM
Miguel Abreu Gallery
88 Eldridge Street

On the occasion of Yve-Alain Bois' retirement from the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as the release of his new volume of collected essays, An Oblique Autobiography (no place press), this afternoon features five of his former PhD students reflecting on his indelible contribution to the history of art and art criticism.

With presentations by:

James Meyer, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Maria Gough, Joseph Pulitzer Professor of Modern Art, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University

David Joselit, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor and Chair, Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University

Christine Mehring, Mary L. Block Professor of Art History and the College, University of Chicago

Michelle Kuo, Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York

A group conversation with Bois and the speakers will follow, moderated by Pamela M. Lee. Copies of An Oblique Autobiography (ed. Jordan Kantor) will be available for purchase.
Seating is limited and on a first-come, first-served basis. A livestream of the event will be available on YouTube.

Abreu also represents Straub and Huillet.  It's where I saw Badiou, without Zizek.  Chantal Akerman was represented by Marian Goodman 

updated

---

I put this passage in a post just below, but it reminded me of something I've avoided.

Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 20, defending convention, and tradition. 

We have been visited [1928] by the Kabuki theater-a wonderful manifestation of theatrical culture.

Every critical voice gushes praise for its splendid crafts­manship. But there has been no appraisal of what constitutes its wonder. Its "museum" elements, though indispensable in estimating its value, cannot alone afford a satisfactory esti­mate of this phenomenon, of this wonder. A "wonder" must promote cultural progress, feeding and stimulating the intellec­tual questions of our day. The Kabuki is dismissed in plati­tudes: "How musical!" "What handling of objects!" "What plasticity!" And we come to the conclusion that there is nothing to be learned, that (as one of our most respected critics has announced) there's nothing new here: Meyerhold has already plundered everything of use from the Japanese theater!

Behind the fulsome generalities, there are some real atti­tudes revealed. Kabuki is conventional! How can such con­ ventions move Europeans! Its craftsmanship is merely the cold perfection of form! And the plays they perform are feudal!—What a nightmare!

More than any other obstacle, it is this conventionalism that prevents our thorough use of all that may be borrowed from the Kabuki.

But the conventionalism that we have learned "from books" proves in fact to be a conventionalism of extremely interesting relationships The conventionalism of Kabuki is by no means the stylized and premeditated mannerism that we know in our own theater, artificially grafted on outside the technical requirements of the premise. In Kabuki this conventionalism is profoundly logical-as in any Oriental theater, for example, in the Chinese theater.

Among the characters of the Chinese theater is "the spirit of the oyster"! Look at the make-up of the performer of this role, with its series of concentric touching circles spreading from the right and left of his nose, graphically reproducing the halves of an oyster shell, and it becomes apparent that this is quite "justified." This is neither more nor less a convention than are the epaulettes of a general. From their narrowly utilitarian origin, once warding off blows of the battle-axe from the shoulder, to their being furnished with hierarchic little stars, the epaulettes are indistinguishable in principle from the blue frog inscribed on the forehead of the actor who is playing the frog's "spirit." 

I've linked to this a few times since I read it, because most of it is about Zizek playing the fool, and being one, in Ramallah. But a passage stuck with me that as I said above, I've avoided. Think about the relationship of form to meaning—not "content"

Darwish directed a series of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)-funded films from the early 1970s. He was a pioneer—his shorts that dealt with the armed struggle, first in Jordan, then in Lebanon, were critical documents for any student of the period. More than that, each film text experimented with a particular element of cinematography. They may have all focused on the armed resistance, but the first one was really “about” framing, the second on montage, the third on sound, and so on. These films had long been forgotten save by old comrades and an enthusiastic group of recent devotees. When I found out that he had studied at the Moscow Institute, I asked him about Sonallah and Malas, and he told me how they had all been there together. I asked if he had worked with Godard in Jordan, “Yes! How’d you guess? I was his production assistant. He was there for only a few months, but while he was here, he worked. He never rested. I’ve never seen that sort of ethic. After what happened, he didn’t know what to do for a couple years with all that footage.” 

Godard the Maoist, etc. Politicized aesthetics is aestheticized politics. Sincerity of intention means nothing. Another pithy sentence I wrote once. "The romance of orthodoxy is mannerism." Attaching formal games to political engagement is a kind of decadence. Eisenstein was younger that Panofsky and Kracauer but they all grew up and into he new age of film and their relation to it was organic. 

Film art is the only art the development of which men now living have witnessed from the very beginnings; and this development is all the more interesting as it took place under conditions contrary to precedent. It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art.
—
For me, there is nothing that anyone has written on cinema that is more moving than Kracauer’s recollection of the first motion picture he saw, as a young boy in the early twentieth century: “What thrilled me so deeply was an ordinary suburban street, filled with lights and shadows which transfigured it.”

Several trees stood about, and there was in the foreground a puddle reflecting invisible house façades and a piece of the sky. Then a breeze moved the shadows, and the façades with the sky below began to waver. The trembling upper world in the dirty puddle—this image has never left me.

If Eisenstein turned to politics in a time of revolutionary hope, the hope was more important than doctrine, because possibilities were more important than limits. But defending conventionalism within his understanding of art, he set limits for himself. "The arts are Burkean".  That's another one.

I once spent a long train ride picking apart a copy of October, a special issue, maybe dedicated to Buchloh but centering on formalism and collage and the superiority of early Soviet experiments over later fascist versions. The writing was pretentious, defensive, overintellectualized and overdetermined, and every writer ignored the simplest and least intellectual observation: that the early Soviet stuff was formally fresh and open, and the designs gave an audience room to breathe. But accepting that means accepting art as something other than "a plastic art which sets itself up in place of books."

repeats from 2010 and 2003 on art and original intent. "Show us yer arse!"

---

I found it. Vol. 30, (Autumn, 1984)  Buchloh's in it but it's not s special issue and he's the only one wring about Soviet art. But my description of the language applies to all of it. I picked apart figuratively and literally. I keep it in a binder. Now it's conceptual art.

Leiter

Chomsky on the Harper's letter about free speech and "cancel culture"... 

...which he of course signed, but which has been controversial with the wokerati. From the interview:

The letter is anodyne. It's a simple statement that it's worth being careful to preserve freedom of speech. The main attack on freedom of speech was not discussed there. It's the mainstream establishment, which for years has been engaged in massive cancel culture.

repeats

Philosophers are idiots

A university must tolerate, and even welcome, those who follow evidence and argument to conclusions that are false or unpalatable; but it may reject those who seek a platform for hatred or deception. That is why it counts counts against Middlebury College when its shouts down Charles Murray but it counts in favour of Berkeley when it excludes Milos Yannopoulos [sic].

Universities would deserve criticism for rejecting a presentation by the authors of the Nuremberg Laws, but would be right in rejecting a speech by a rabble-rousing journalist who promotes them.

Similar from Farrell

The way that the Kennedy School used to think about fellowships, as Elmendorf describes it – which I think is the only sustainable way for it to think about them – is as no more and no less than a way to facilitate debate and conversation. This is one of the things that universities are supposed to do – bring a diverse group of people into debate, reflecting a broad set of constituencies. That Chelsea Manning is anathema to other fellows like Morell should be neither here or there – the job of the university is to provide opportunities for both people like Manning and people like Morell to participate in public debate, without necessarily feeling the need to pronounce on the merits of either.

Chomsky has the habit of answering email and I wrote him one. He might recognize the name. Family connections.

The authors of the letter you signed defend their own right to cancel speech they don't approve of. 

None of this is about free speech; it’s about acceptable speech. Limits on acceptable speech are a fact of life. That's why outsiders get on soap boxes. Normative assumption is a powerful thing. And editors are called editors because they have the power to choose what they print. But the NYT Op-Ed didn’t go through standard channels. It wasn’t edited or reviewed. It didn’t follow even their own formal process. And it included falsehoods that staff saw as blatant.

I wouldn’t expect the Times to publish an op-ed that didn’t fit their narrative. That’s why monopolies are bad and free speech is important.

I defend the rights of Nazis, but I wouldn’t expect the Times to publish Hitler without comment. And it didn’t. But the people behind the Harper’s letter think arguments for a one sate solution in Palestine are beyond the pale altogether, with no place in "civil discourse” or blablabla.
You’re allowing yourself to be used as cover for their hypocrisy.

He wrote back and we danced. Four notes back and fourth. The last:

-We’re done.You’ve never understood politics for the same reason you’ve never understood language. It’s not mathematics.
I’d like to reproduce our exchange but I won’t do it without your permission.

-You don’t have my permission. But I agree that we’re done.

I'll break my word, but only brief quotes.

He defends signing the Harper's letter regardless of the fact that the people behind it and many of the cosigners are hypocrites. I told him he could make the effort to defend the principle and separate himself from those who don't follow through, but he can't see the authority behind his name absent the fact of the words he signed. He can't or refuses to see language as a tool beyond its logical function. The false humility of denying he's Noam Chomsky.  Of course within linguistics he's famous for his arrogance. He said no one denies that the editors at the NYT have the right to refuse to publish an op-ed. He seemed unaware of Tom Cotton's piece and James Bennett's resignation, referred to in the Harper's letter without naming the participants. After I described the events at the Times he still denied there's any relation. On acceptable speech he responded as if I were making a moral argument and not describing a sociological fact. He said we might disagree about what's unacceptable, which for him meant calls to bomb Iran "now instead of waiting". He doesn't read; he argues from assumption, but now we know he thinks Iran's a threat. Iran is not a threat, but Chomsky's still a Zionist. Anti-Zionism still isn't acceptable, but it's closer than it used to be. You don't read op-eds defending it in the Times, but you will. Change takes time. Chomsky prefers the timeless; he imagines an ideal transparency in language and then in politics, both held in check only by malign forces.

I've said it dozens of times: post-war rationalism is a disaster. Chicago school economics, Quine, Chomsky, von Neumann and Clem Greenberg. Varieties of the gothic. And Chomsky began his career arguing that linguistics could be modeled on physics.

Cathy Young, recommended by Williams.

The other charge against Weiss — her support last year for a Stanford law student who denounced a campus event with left-wing Jewish cartoonist Eli Valley and assailed Valley as a trafficker in anti-Jewish hate — raises equally thorny issues. Valley’s work frequently uses nasty Jewish stereotypes and Nazi parallels to skewer pro-Israel American Jews as well as Israeli politicians. (In fact, he’s been praised by David Duke.) If people objected to a campus event with a black far-right troll who used blatantly racist tropes to mock black Democrats, I don’t think Weiss or most other signers of The Letter would see that as an outrageous attack on free speech.

Valley's book has a forward by Peter Beinart.

Chomsky now has a tag. It reminded me that Zizek already had one. And we had a more interesting conversation. Z's a bit of a fool, but he plays the role. Chomsky's a pedant and an ass. My mother called him humorless and a dry stick.

Chomsky: "It’s a truism that a statement is evaluated by its contents." It's neither a truism nor is it the case.
Serendipity (the ghost of Panofsky) and (comedians).

One of my favorite linguistics lessons to teach students is on prosody, which is about how intonation, stress, tone, loudness, and other elements do a lot of work to communicate meaning in speech. This Erica Ash video on the versatility of the word “bitch” shows it beautifully. pic.twitter.com/Ws2eexeZTW

— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) August 9, 2020

repeats  "the poverty of the stimulus".  two posts.

More than ten years ago an experimental psychologist described to me her experience and others', dealing with and navigating around Chomskians. At this point it's devolved into a cult.

---

Sept. 2022, Uju Anya and the Queen 

Cooper 

Joe Biden just announced his running mate choice: Sen. Kamala Harris of California. That means Harris, if she can govern well, could be the leader of both the Democratic Party and the country through 2030. If she can't, she might well be the last democratically-elected vice president in American history.

Biden is the heavy favorite against Trump this year. Given his age and his track record of working closely with President Obama when he was vice president, Harris will presumably play a significant role in major governing decisions. It's unpopular for the media to talk about, but there's a decent chance she would need to step in before Biden's term is up. What's more, there is a reasonable chance that Biden would choose not to run for re-election in 2024. If so, Harris would be the overwhelming favorite to run in his place.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Donald Trump is blatantly trying to steal the 2020 election, and the next Republican candidate will very likely try the same trick. A Biden administration would have four years, and perhaps another four or eight under a Harris administration, to address the pandemic, rebuild the shattered economy and federal government, root out Trump's gangrenous corruption, and fortify America's democratic institutions. If Biden and Harris instead muddle through letting everything fester, as happened under the Obama administration, the next would-be authoritarian probably won't be as incompetent as Trump. Let's hope they seize the moment.

Leiter 

Biden has made his pick. Like Biden, she is "pragmatic," i.e, she will tilt whichever way the wind is blowing. Unlike Biden, she is a better and more reliably coherent speaker. A Black woman on the ticket should guarantee a huge Black turnout, which is crucial for Democrats. At the same time, like Obama, she won't scare off those white voters whose latent racial prejudices and anxieties might be activated by a more progressive Black politician. I have no enthusiasm for either on substance, but the main issue is to defeat the monster-child decisively, and hopefully they can do it. I do think they will end up being a highly progressive administration if the Democrats can capture both houses of Congress as well.

ADDENDUM: A few readers (and some Twitterati) didn't quite get the joke in the post title, above. Senator Harris will be the next President because, on the assumption that the monster-child will be defeated (all bets are off for humanity if that's wrong!), (1) Biden doesn't seem equipped to carry out a full 4-year term, and (2) even if he does, Harris will be his heir apparent (given the huge role name recognition--think "Clinton," "Kennedy," "Bush"--plays in democracy). The best thing about Senator Harris (apart from her ability to pull in votes from crucial demographics) is that her father is a Marxist. That means there is hope for America yet. (Readers who have not should look at Achen & Bartels, Democracy for Realists, which makes a strong case, especially in the American context, that democratic elections are all about group identities, not about policies.)

Harris' father was upset his daughter made a joke about Jamaicans and pot. Buttigieg's father was a translator of Gramsci; he didn't disown his son for working for McKinsey. Leiter, Achen and Bartels are realists after Posner and Kissinger; they idealize themselves.

Harris as DA protected the Catholic Church and jailed mothers of children who skipped school. As California Attorney General she ignored court orders to free non-violent prisoners. The Democratic leadership is protecting its right flank with another black conservative. Wall Street is happy.

Change comes from below. The Squad won easily. Omar won out over AIPAC and Bari Weiss.
The Republican base is embracing QAnon.

Leiter defends the rule of his own reason and enlightenment and then links happily, without comment, to arguments he's full of shit. Of course the arguments are polite and "collegial" and this one's full of a hedging, but nothing matters more to Leiter than the "group identity" of academia.

Cooper's an ass but not worse. He moralizes; he's not pro-looter, but he's willfully blind. He's not a full-on geek but when he finds something he can't face he becomes what he would otherwise call "anti-science".

Bouie is taking the fight to Williams, but I don't think he's read Darryl Pinckney.  Williams hasn't responded to the review. He's a coward, but Pinckney is in many ways is his model, a fantasy of what Williams wants to be. And Pinckney is much crueler that Bouie, who only exposes Williams' ignorance rather than saying that passing is what he's trying to do, to escape blackness.

I always read Pinckney as the token black man at the NYRB, who'd passed,  intellectually, into the world of the literary elite, choosing art over explicit politics. I think Harold Bloom was a fan. But I always read his as a smart critic. He's the long-term companion (and vice-versa) of James Fenton. And that brings us back to Hitchens.

Nwanevu left twitter, but like Williams, and Bouie, and Coates, and Jilani,  (and Cooper and the other white suburbanites) he imagines himself an "intellectual". None of it works.

Definitions of an intellectual: someone who's worth reading when their arguments are absurd; someone who enjoys reading absurd arguments; someone who ducks when someone else describes them as an intellectual, and shrugs when someone says that they're a member of "the intellectual class" that includes Williams, Bouie, Cooper et al. Calling yourself an intellectual is like putting PhD after your name every time you write it. But no one in America calls themselves bourgeois. "In the US, where it’s impossible to acknowledge yourself as a member of a group you didn’t choose to join."

Leiter links to Le Monde Diplo, "a useful and interesting corrective", ignoring that the author quotes the "charlatan" Zizek.

Mass democratic mobilisations have, in fact, existed at the heart of these regimes: workers’ riots in June 1953 in Berlin, workers’ councils in Poland and Hungary in 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 (prolonged by the birth of the Czech workers’ councils), the revolutionary trade unionism of Solidarność (Solidarity) in Gdansk, Poland, in 1980. It is this history that the liberal interpretation of 1989 obliterates or falsifies — and tries to appropriate by presenting it as anti-communist. These popular movements fought, not to re-establish capitalism, but on the contrary in the name of socialist ideals. 

If the end of the single party was popular; the philosopher Slavoj Žižek recalled that ‘Behind the Wall the peoples did not dream of capitalism’ (Le Monde, 7 November 2009). Capitalism’s triumph did not arise from a mass desire, but a choice made by the communist nomenklatura: to transform its privileges of function into privileges of ownership. Although the elites’ ‘grand conversion’ has been analysed, there are few studies on the social base of the old single party, which, though it became restive, did not demand privatisations.

What epistocracy has wrought

The United States Postal Service is removing mail sorting machines from facilities around the country without any official explanation or reason given, Motherboard has learned through interviews with postal workers and union officials. In many cases, these are the same machines that would be tasked with sorting ballots, calling into question promises made by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that the USPS has “ample capacity” to handle the predicted surge in mail-in ballots.

“They need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said on Fox Business Thursday morning of the states that are implementing universal mail-in voting ahead of the November election. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”

The rise of American fascism. I blame the 60s, the yuppies, academic theory and John Rawls. Liberals blame everyone else but themselves.

Historian Patrick Iber on historian Rick Perlstein.
"How the GOP Became the Party of Resentment
Have historians of the conservative movement focused too much on its intellectuals?"

One of the values of Perlstein’s heavily narrative and loosely argued approach is that it restores a sense of randomness to outcomes. In retrospect, Reagan looks like the inevitable product of capital’s alliance with social and religious conservatism. But even in the 1980 primary, the “boardroom Jacobins” favored John Connally. They had to accept Reagan, and they certainly made their peace. But none of this was fated. Conservative activists remade the country with intensity, opportunism, and persistence through defeat. Those hoping to push back against their influence today might take some strange comfort in the story of their success. Studying the past does not tell you what will be possible in the future, nor promise that hard work will be rewarded. But it seems fair to conclude that the work is necessary, if not sufficient, and that many will not feel the tremors as the ground shifts under their feet.

And Cooper approves of this shit.

Liberals are responsible for nothing. That hippy anarchism became Silicon Valley authoritarianism means nothing. Neoliberalism does not exist. It's always someone else's fault.

Perlstein's friend Aaaron Swartz has a tag. Now so does Perlstein. Enabler of narcissists, defender of the CIA,  the New Jack mashup of Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Hofstadter.

"I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong." No shit.

Fits with Jilani's reactionary definition of what he calls *progressives*

Definitely seems like *progressives* will be locked out of the White House more than a decade now. But whether populists are depends on what happens to the GOP post-Trump. 2024 is probably a good year for Republicans. https://t.co/JgOVBduPj7

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) August 13, 2020

The university belongs, like the church and the military, to the social institutions that are situated at a considerable distance from democracy and adhere to premodern power structures.

memories.

Academic freedom predates free speech. Although Prussia gave constitutional protection to Lehrfreiheit in 1850 (“science and its teaching shall be free”), academic freedom generally does not enjoy legal protection outside of contractual guarantees; rather, it rests on the authority and ability of a community of competent scholars to police their own discourse and on the willingness of universities to affirm this authority and ability.

[I'd forgotten the first reply to Rauchway was Aaron Swartz. ]

Bernd Hüppauf explains why I have more sympathy for dilettantes than pedants. I'm sure he's a good German, a right-thinking Zionist. But Ronell is pathetic.

repeats: Nussbaum and Butler,

The self-described liberal philosopher and Zionist Martha Nussbaum famously launched an attack on the self-described radical philosopher Judith Butler; Butler now is in the position of defending the liberalism that Nussbaum claims to represent. There's nothing radical to her argument; it's a basic defense of civil and legal rights. 

 Zizek

---
Gessen links to Leiter. She'd referred to "a conservative philosophy blog" but removed the word after he complained. He'd added an introduction to the post replying to her, linking to his posts tagged "The Hermeneutics of Suspicion", but removed it later. As always the one thing beyond suspicion is himself. As I said in comments elsewhere to people who should know or know better: he's opposed to freedom of speech except when he's not; the only reason to have women on the Supreme Court is "fairness" since there's no epistemological advantage; theology is a Wissenschaft, but Derrida's a fraud.  "Calling yourself a leftist because you've read Marx is like calling yourself a feminist because you're read The Second Sex." A good line.

it's just turning into a series of notes

---
and again: The Masha Gessen piece in the New Yorker. wow.
It even has Kris Kraus to remind me again how much the art world high seriousness of the 80's was all really just Woody Allen. I realized that, or saw it for the first time in 1990, watching a film by Yvonne Rainer. I expected something much different, something tough, maybe like what I saw later with Chantal Akerman -when I finally saw the Jeanne Dielman-  and Claire Denis. But in this country now we get I Love Dick on Amazon.

The Euros never succeed in lying to themselves so much. [Or maybe they're just better at it. It never seems like denial.] I really don't mind European indulgence; there's an honesty to it.  American sincerity, the Puritan streak, makes for anger, and a kind of inarticulate, non-verbal, physical power: Trio A and post minimalism. [or rock and roll] But when intellectualism takes over it becomes pedantry. It all fits.

None of this is about US culture as a whole, only about the stuff that proudly wears an air of high seriousness. Puritanism affects everything. American artists read literary theory. American novelists don't.

---
updated, a mishmash

Leiter on Ronell again (see previous)

There are more important things going on, but it's still...

Prof. Ronell has issued a statement denying all of the plaintiff's allegations. I am not sure this statement helps her case. First, the statement acknowledges that at the very same time that the plaintiff was sending affectionate-sounding e-mails to Prof. Ronell he was describing her to others as a "monster." That would seem to support the plaintiff's account that he felt pressured into behaving as Ronell wanted him to behave. 

a "monster"

• “Mon Avital, beloved and special one... [link] I don’t know how I would have survived without you. You are the best, my joy, my miracle. Sending you infinite love, kisses and devotion, your – n.” (6/29/13);
• “Thank you most darlingst. On this rainy day I too hold you and thank you for everything”. (12/6/2014);
• “Sweet Beloved, I was so happy to see you tonight, and spend time together. It was so magical and important, crucial on [sic] so many ways. Our shared intimacy was a glorious cadence to our time in Berlin. Thank you for these moments of togetherness and utter and pure love!...Infinitely, - n” (1/17/2015);
• My beloved Avital, Just sending you infinite kisses and love. Thank you for your being my most precious blessing. Loving, your – n. (3/16/2013);
• “Beloved...Missing you and loving you ! – n” (2/4/2015);
• “Baby. It was so wonderful seeing you today. You looked wonderful...I miss you
• terribly and await seeing you already...”(2/13/2015);
• “Honig most, dearest one...Sending love and misses. Je t’embrasse”.
• (03/19/2015); and
• “Dearest, I have not heard from you all through this oriental trip...Please drop me a line to let me know you are well, I have been worried about you...hugs, n”. (7/29/2015). [Written after Reitman received his doctoral decree].

As a matter of law, if women are easily swayed by dashing hucksters or sleazy sycophants, then so are men. If women are weak and fragile, so are men. Life is more complex. As usual, Leiter is incapable of separating the two.
I have no particular sympathy for Ronell. It's a soap opera. At worst they deserve each other.

---
And now Asia Argento.

But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.

That claim and the subsequent arrangement for payments are laid out in documents between lawyers for Ms. Argento and Mr. Bennett, a former child actor who once played her son in a movie.

The documents, which were sent to The New York Times through encrypted email by an unidentified party, include a selfie dated May 9, 2013, of the two lying in bed. As part of the agreement, Mr. Bennett, who is now 22, gave the photograph and its copyright to Ms. Argento, now 42. Three people familiar with the case said the documents were authentic.

She fucked a 17 year old and he blackmailed her. If Weinstein merely had a thing for teenagers I wouldn't have said much, but he's much more than that.

Law is a blunt instrument.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, of whom I have only had positive feelings up to now, has produced an opinion for the Ethicist column for the New York Times that it is “a good thing” when citizens report violations of immigration law to the US authorities. He produces this opinion in the context of a question about “green-card marriage” entered into merely in order to gain an immigration advantage, so it is unclear how far he relies on the specific features of the case he describes to generate a more general moral conclusion, but I, for one, find his reasons highly problematic.

...Kwame Anthony Appiah has just blocked me on twitter. My only interaction with him ever was writing this post disagreeing with him. (I had a long term plan to get him to unveil some memorial in Bristol to his grandfather Stafford Cripps and to give a talk – I guess I can forget that). What a remarkable reaction.

I can mock Bertram—and again recently on the same subject—and still have more contempt for Appiah, who considers himself a cosmopolitan while having no idea what it means to be one.

Back to Jian Ghomeshi and Marie Henein. The post above fairly or not puts Reitman in the role of Ghomeshi. Women and other groups play at a handicap. The question is the relation of that handicap to law. If you follow the link above and link through to the first post on Ghomeshi and more importantly his lawyer, you'll see Leiter and Wissenschaft, again, as in the first post linked above on Ronell.

Repeating something I wrote elsewhere, responding to Jeremy Waldron:
Loyalty holds society together; we don't want everyone snitching on their neighbors; we need police to be our pedants. But police become loyal to each other: cops hate Serpico; on 9/11/01 I watched thoughtless people acting on reflex drive into Manhattan to dig in the rubble.

The main question remains: how does a programme which is so clearly pro-rich and anti-social succeed in appealing to a majority of Americans as it did in 1980 and again in 2016? The classical answer is that globalisation and cut-throat competition between countries leads to the reign of each man for himself. But that is not sufficient: we have to add the skill of the Republicans in using nationalist rhetoric, in cultivating a degree of anti-intellectualism and, above all, in dividing the working classes by exacerbating ethnic, cultural and religious divisions.

As early as the 1960s, the Republicans began to benefit from the gradual transfer of part of the vote of the white and southern working classes, unhappy with the civil rights movement and the social policies, accused of benefitting primarily the Black population. This long and in-depth movement continued with the crucial victory of Nixon in 1972 (faced with the Democrat, McGovern, who suggested implementing a universal basic income at federal level, financed by a new increase in estate duties: this was the summit of the Roosevelt Programme), Reagan in 1980, and finally Trump in 2016 (who had no hesitation in racially stigmatising Obamacare, as Nixon and Reagan had done previously).

In the meantime, the Democrat electorate focussed increasingly on the most highly educated and the minorities, and in the end, in some ways resembled the Republican electorate at the end of the 19th century (upscale Whites and Blacks emancipated), as if the wheel had turned full circle and the Roosevelt coalition uniting the working classes over and above racial differences had ultimately only been a parenthesis.

Let’s hope that Europe, which in some ways is threatened by a similar development with the working classes having greater faith for their defence in the anti-immigrant forces, than in those who describe themselves as progressive – will be capable of learning the lessons of history. And that the inevitable social failure of Trumpism will not lead our “Donald” into a headlong nationalist and military rush, as it has done others before him.

one [or here]
two [or here]

Slavoj The Bear defends Corbyn and bourgeois decency against petty bourgeois moralism (left and right).

Unfortunately, the leftist-liberal public space is also more and more dominated by the rules of tweet culture: short snaps, retorts, sarcastic or outraged remarks, with no space for multiple steps of a line of argumentation. One passage (a sentence, even part of it) is cut out and reacted to. The stance that sustains these tweet rejoinders is a mixture of self-righteousness, political correctness and brutal sarcasm: the moment anything that sounds problematic is perceived, a reply is automatically triggered, usually a PC commonplace.

Although critics like to emphasise how they reject normativity (“the imposed heterosexual norm”, and so on), their stance is one of ruthless normativity, denouncing every minimal deviation from the PC dogma as “transphobia” or “fascism” or whatsoever. Such a tweet culture which combines official tolerance and openness with extreme intolerance towards actually different views simply renders critical thinking impossible. It is a true mirror image of the blind populist rage à la Donald Trump, and it is simultaneously one of the reasons why the left is so often inefficient in confronting rightist populism, especially in today's Europe. If one just mentions that this populism draws a good part of its energy from the popular discontent of the exploited, one is immediately accused of “class essentialism”.

It is against this background that one should compare the Conservative and the Labour electoral campaigns. The Conservative campaign has reached a new low for the political battled in the UK: scaremongering attacks about Corbyn as a terrorist sympathiser, of the Labour party as a hive of anti-Semitism, and all of this culminating in Theresa May joyously promising to rip off human rights – a politics of fear if there ever was one. No wonder Ukip disappeared from the scene: there is no need for it, since May and Johnson have taken over its job.

Corbyn refused to get caught in these dirty games: with an outspoken naivety, he simply addressed the main issues and concerns of ordinary people, from economic woes to terrorist threat, proposing clear countermeasures. There was no rage and resentment in his statements, no cheap populist rabble-rousing, but also no politically correct self-righteousness. Just addressing ordinary people’s actual concerns with a common decency.

The fact that such an approach amounts to no less than a major shift in our political space is a sad sign of the times we live in. But it is also a new confirmation of old Hegel’s claim that, sometimes, naïve outspokenness is the most devastating and cunning of all strategies.

Sam Kriss replies

no https://t.co/tmoa6kjvFA

— Sam 🐫 Kriss (@sam_kriss) June 12, 2017

Kriss' about page includes blurbs from various people, praise or criticism.

"Swiftian. A joy.”
Peter Hitchens 

“Far too odd to easily classify.”
Nick Land

In the end it all dovetails

New tag for Zizek.

vote trump

"In the south we let niggers live next door as long as they don't get uppity. In the north you let them get uppity as long as they don't move it next door"

added a new tag for Race. It could almost a catch-all, but I'll keep it for the greatest hits.

[They did it again in Jan]
---
Zizek makes a good comic sidekick to Blyth. No, I'm not voting for Trump.

Slavoj The Bear got in some trouble over this, mostly from earnest idiots of one sort or another.
He's not great, and never has been, but he's not bad. And he's willing to state the obvious: that immigrants want to come to Western Europe because they share the dream of Europe that European liberals (the ones the right wing call leftists) mock as shallow hypocrisy. And the same liberals coo over the arrival of dark skinned religious conservatives while expressing contempt for native born white ones.

Anyone wishing to understand why thousands of Western-born Muslims are leaving comfortable homes to fight with Isis would do well to watch Deeyah Khan’s powerful new film Jihad: A British Story.

The award-winning filmmaker spent 18 months interviewing some of the founding fathers of jihad in the UK out of a “personal obsessive curiosity” to find out what was driving young people to sign up to such a violent movement and by doing so, find ways to prevent it.

The film, which will be shown on ITV on June 15 as part of their Exposure series, includes extraordinary interviews with a number of British Muslims who were at the forefront of the movement to recruit, raise funds for and fight in wars ranging from Afghanistan in the 1980s through to Kashmir, Burma, Bosnia and Chechnya.

What many people fail to understand is that “this movement is not new”, says Khan. “It is three decades old in the west. The trend of taking western based people from the UK, Denmark, Belgium, began in the early to mid -80s and since then it’s been one conflict after the other. We are only seeing it now because Isis is so absolutely viscous and so public and they are using cameras to disseminate it. In the west our attention only woke up from 9/11 onwards.”

...Khan grew up in Norway to immigrant parents from Afghanistan and Pakistan and says she “understands very well the culture clash of coming from this in-between place”.

Khan’s father was liberal but rather than “arranging my marriage he forced me into a career that wasn’t (my choice)”. He believed there were only two professions where you were not judged on your gender and race – music or sport - and so he encouraged his daughter to become a singer, throwing away her toys from the age of seven and getting her to undertake intense music lessons.

His plan worked and Khan became a successful pop star at the age of ten, lauded as an example of multicultural Norway, but before long she was receiving death threats from members of the Muslim community who felt that a women should not be performing. Constantly being harassed on the street and fearing for her life, Khan fled to London at the age of 18 but after achieving some success in the UK, the death threats started again and Khan ended up moving to the US and giving up performing music all together.

Deeyah Khan is not a leftist. She's a thoroughly Eurobougie glamour girl, who directed a Peabody winning documentary about honor killing in the UK. And here's the ITV page for the new one.
But she's not attacked by leftists.
Khan in the HuffPo UK.

The UK Government recently announced its Counter Extremism Strategy, a document which refers to 'British values' 54 times. Within this report, extremism is defined as 'the vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.' These are certainly fine values -- which British governments have consistently failed to support.

Britain has been responsible for the undermining of democracy, turning a blind eye to abuses by its allies, using extraordinary rendition to get around the rule of law, passing over the denial of individual liberties to dissidents, and the evasion of the dismal situation for religious minorities. Ironically, David Cameron's first act after the unveiling of this act was setting trade deals with China, hardly notable for its democracy, rule of law, individual liberty or tolerance for different faiths. This was followed by a rock star reception for Indian PM Narendra Modi, whose rule has seen a shocking increase in Hindu supremacist ideology and attacks on minorities.

Zizek is an intelligent bloviator... we're back to Norman Mailer again, and Houellebecq (the links lead back to here) The worst thing about him is his philosophers' taste in art, which also affects his understanding of politics. But in the end he's a liberal, mostly in the good sense of the word. The worst thing about Khan is probably her music, but I haven't heard it so I can't be sure. Zizek the Stalinist and Khan the immigrant both understand liberalism better than most earnest liberals do.

lovely.
commenter "Wallace Stevens"

I find this OP wretched and appalling. But since so few others do, I wonder if it’s just me. Isn ‘t Waring really just saying “It’s great to be rich!”? I know the feeling. I was an expat in Hong Kong in the early nineties: the private schools, the maid-ironed uniforms, people coming and going from one exotic place to another, etc. Most of the OP sounded like back-handed, covert bragging–sprinkled with a heavy dose of cloying, corn pone “y’all’s” to show that she’s a good Ioway farmer’s daughter at heart, or whatever. And the kids! Oy! Smart as whips and learning all these languages! I’ve been trapped by elderly people like this who then want to show you all the pictures in their wallet/purse. But Waring, I take it, is a relatively young woman. Hard to figure. (I did a little research. According to her wedding announcement she is related to the robber baron, Jay Gould. Now, no one is responsible for their ancestors. But why make such a point of it? Especially when John “only a Holbo” Holbo’s ancestory gets no mention at all.)

But so much for form. What about substance? Yes, in places like Singapore, even philosophy profs can live well. But for the most part this is because it is a Republican paradise. No minimum wage, tough on crime, control of the media to ensure that the right people get elected, limited concern for due process and human rights–oh yeah, and lingering “white privilege” makes being a WHITE woman extra safe, in a kind of belt-and-suspenders way. What’s not to like? Singapore is by no means the worst place on earth. Some people on the Left, apologists for Castro for example, believe that there must be some kind of necessary trade-off between human rights and economic
development. I’m not one of them. But for those that do, Singapore should be ashining example. They have achieved far more–in terms of living standards and health for the poorest–while being much more free than Cuba. In fact I have always wondered why Singapore didn’t get more attention and praise from the the authoritarian Left. But for anyone with democratic instincts…? I don’t think so.

Davies defending Waring and quoting her own reply.

Am I supposed to lie about my life? Not discuss the interesting ways it differs from the life I ever thought I’d have? We’d all gain what now?

As far as I can tell, the party line of CT commenters is that one is allowed to exist, but never to say anything good about one’s life and career. In principle, there might be some level of wailing and repenting, sackcloth and ashes and general screaming about what a horrible person you are for being part of such a horrible system, which might excuse you, but nobody’s ever found it yet. The crazy thing is that it’s not just you living in Singapore or me being a stockbroker that they object to; even the academics on the blog seem to get the same treatment for mentioning that they’ve been promoted or got a prestigious scholarship or something.
and again responding to others

Stevens again

Dsquared @ 93: I’d like to distance myself from any of the CT commentators that begrudge Waring, or anyone else for that matter, their good fortune. I’ve enjoyed great good fortune in life myself, so it would be hypocritical for me to resent others. For example, I have enjoyed immensely Daniel’s CT posts on his travels–even though Daniel is clearly in a privileged position to do the kind of the trip he is doing. It is just that Daniel writes well about interesting things, and Waring doesn’t. So all you have is this parading, unselfconscious privilege.

My objection to this OP, in its original form at least, was two-fold: first it had the preening, “look at me” tone that I found distasteful; second it seemed to blithely ignore
the price at which the affordable help and public order in Singapore are purchased.

As Waring points out herself, tenure or no tenure, she’s not really at liberty to say what she thinks anyway. That’s a handicap for a writer. Maybe she should write about something else.

neoliberalism: a bad thing, except when you're living it.

Belle Waring is a bright, shallow, spoiled, emotionally damaged (she's referred to it enough), awful human being. Her's husband's just an ass. All repeats. I like DD, but he's also an ass. After taking a beating for his defense of bankers, he took his own blog private. Both DD and Waring are here. Holbo's silence about Singapore was a running theme with me for a while, with his attacks on Zizek
(The origin of the reference in the previous post).

Rakesh Bhandari makes a Freudian slip. responding to Bertram.

Of course it is not only the poor in the poor nations who suffer relatively; and it is not only the poor in the rich nations who do the excluding. Those opposed to immigration may not be the upper-class in the rich countries; though they may prefer anti-immigrant populist sentiment to other forms of political expression, e.g. higher inheritance taxes. 

...oops meant it is not only the rich in the rich nations who do the excluding.

"populist sentiment" refers to the -perceived and actual-  self-interest of the native born lower middle and working classes. As Dean Baker has pointed out again and again, it's government policy to have working classes compete against each other, while regulating the immigration of the educated. The rich and poor move back and forth; the professional classes are protected. There's no open market in economists and college professors, and they're happy to moralize about fellow citizens, above and below, if it doesn't go against their own self-interest.

Chart from EPI

Bertram's long history

-It is indeed remarkable how all the places inhabited by the super-rich (Kensington, Mayfair, much of Geneva, the XVI arrondissement …) are really crushingly dull. At least little of real value will be lost when we burn them down. 

-First, I’m sympathetic, I really am, to the idea that people should work and consume less and that we should attend more to real life quality. But this doesn’t seem very realistic in my own life for two reasons: first, even if my employer were sympathetic (unlikely) I feel very hard pressed now to produce the level of research output necessary for me to stay competitive with other academics (not just in the UK, but elsewhere)….  Second, it is all very well Juliet Schor telling us to transition to a low hours/lower consumption economy. I’m cool with consuming less. The problem is that I, and just about everyone else, has taken out huge mortgages and bank loans to pay (in part) for the consumption we’ve already had. Hard to reduce the hours unless (or until) the debt goes away. Third, there was distressingly little discussion of the politics of this. 

Again all long term repeats, except for recent refs to the tension between republicanism and liberalism, Aristotle and Montesquieu. Liberalism is amenable to fans of science since it can claim reasonably or not to be without priors. Republicanism is a virtue ethic and priors are explicit: burdens precede freedoms, making hypocrisy more difficult to hide, from yourself at least.

Liberal objectivity: "If her interests have the same value as his, then my interests must have the same value as yours." The opposite of virtue.
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more... 

"Public higher education is under aggressive ideological and political—but not necessarily partisan—attack, and is fostering a fervent political defense."  Siva Vaidhyanathan

A comment, posted on a piece on education and education "reform" by Siva Vaidhyanathan, "a cultural historian and media scholar" (see previous). The formatting was stripped; this a lot easier to read. The last bit repeats paragraphs quoted just below in the post on Joshua Cohen, for the same obvious reasons. Rough, I fixed the spelling and that's all, and all repeats here. It'll do. [comments were stripped years later] 
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This essay is full of the sort of confusions endemic in our age when academics style themselves "public intellectuals" while indulging the biases of the academy: they’re always coming down from the mountain.

What does it mean to defend the research model for the entirety of academia while condemning instrumentalism? (I'll pretend for now that the author is defending the humanities as such, even though it's clear he isn't.) The researchers I know dislike teaching, especially teaching undergrads, because it takes them away from research. And the research model has infected the humanities so that professors now see themselves as akin to scientists or technicians, and also therefore “producing” something, even if it's only cubic yards of pseudo-radical hot air. Economics and Anglo-American philosophy are open in their claims to the status of science, as Marxism and Freudianism once were, but like literary theory and Continental philosophy there’re all forms of high scholasticism, as self-supporting as the Roman Catholic Church, certainly no defender of free thinking and curiosity for curiosity's sake.

And as far as academic radicalism is concerned, Martha Nussbaum was right about Judith Butler's self-indulgence, while Butler is now actively defending liberal principles, in Israel and Palestine, that Nussbaum is too much of a coward to stand for. The same goes for the current popstar Zizek, who's called a Stalinist by liberals who refuse to stand by their own principles, which he and Butler are left to do, as leftists. To see an amusing take on Zizek from something more engaged in what Raymond Geuss would call “real politics” see this.

And as the recent fiasco in Montana should make clear to social "scientists", there is no feedback loop in geology. Money spent studying the average man or woman on the street would be better spent raising the average: in education, not "research". The academy's constant focus on measuring to the mean puts downward pressure on the mean: it makes us all dumber. Seekers of the impossible goal of a “value free” social science are themselves models of moral passivity.

But as I said at the top, the author of this piece isn't really attacking instrumentalism, he's attacking short term instrumentalism

Some time in the 1980s, states forgot that universities benefit the broader society, not just the students who attend. They are part of the cultural and social fabric of each state. They preserve and enhance local art, music, poetry, and drama. They make sense of our past and predict our future. State universities invented Mosaic, the most influential early Web browser, and made those “waves of grain” that feed much of the world possible and profitable. 

Call it serious rather than knee-jerk neoliberalism, the thinking man’s productivism, or Fordism for adults. And the mention of “art, music poetry, and drama” reminds me of Howie Cohen, the ad man who credits Woodstock and acid for giving him the imaginative freedom to come up with the lines "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" and "Try it, you'll like it!"

And now to "disruption" which the author calls "an ahistorical and specious concept". Google "modernism radical disruption" for the history and "disruptive dissensus" for the current vogue. See also of course the current popularity of anarchism. Disruption is ahistorical only because all tag lines and political fantasies are ahistorical: predicated on forgetting the lessons of history. Disruption itself is a modernist trope, just as permanent revolution is a capitalist fantasy, as “creative destruction”. Taylorism and Fordism are not the inventions of a professor at Harvard Business School. [they're the justification: the Harvard program started in 1908] The theme of the relation of modern man as individual to the collective that made him (and of which he’s a member whether he likes it or not) is as old as Hamlet. The ideal of sleepless curiosity is Goethe’s Faust: the definition of Modernity.

And now to the movies. Andrew Rossi:

One of the key themes of Ivory Tower is the idea of disruption, which has been at the core of almost every movie I've made in the last thirteen years. 

Well then, there you go. And Peter Thiel:

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

The author of this piece is defending technocratic capitalist liberalism against anarchist capitalism. I’ll offer a third option, that any professor in the humanities should recognize, though more and more they don’t. And that is the most important change in the academy over the last century, from Weber and Ford to Sputnik, a change Siva Vaidhyanathan and other academics of this age have no knowledge of because they’re the product of that change. Neoliberalism made you. You’re a product of culture without knowing how it would be even possible to be anything but “free to choose” as uncle Miltie would say.

 
Frederick Wiseman is not a “documentary” filmmaker. He calls his films “fictions”. He’s “generated deep respect from critics, film scholars, and other filmmakers.” because he’s a very good filmmaker, as some writers are very good writers. “Through his long career offering almost anthropological observations of American institutions…” He’s made films about the Comédie-Française and The Paris Opera Ballet. Wiseman makes movies about systems and the people within them. He was going to do a film about a Las Vegas casino, but the casino backed out. A wise choice, but not because Wiseman was going to reveal hidden corruption. He was simply going to be an honest observer, sympathetic to people going through their daily routines. Wiseman the filmmaker is not a teacher.

So here’s a small taste of what you’re not. The Learning Knights of Bell Telephone. 

The sociologist E. Digby Baltzell explained the Bell leaders’ concerns in an article published in Harper’s magazine in 1955: “A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, they reasoned; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.” Bell, then one of the largest industrial concerns in the country, needed more employees capable of guiding the company rather than simply following instructions or responding to obvious crises. 

In 1952, Gillen took the problem to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a trustee. Together with representatives of the university, Bell set up a program called the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives. More than simply training its young executives to do a particular job, the institute would give them, in a 10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education. There were lectures and seminars led by scholars from Penn and other colleges in the area — 550 hours of course work in total, and more reading, Baltzell reported, than the average graduate student was asked to do in a similar time frame. 

...Perhaps the most exciting component of the curriculum was the series of guest lecturers the institute brought to campus. “One hundred and sixty of America’s leading intellectuals,” according to Baltzell, spoke to the Bell students that year. They included the poets W. H. Auden and Delmore Schwartz, the Princeton literary critic R. P. Blackmur, the architectural historian Lewis Mumford, the composer Virgil Thomson. It was a thrilling intellectual carnival. 

...What’s more, the graduates were no longer content to let the machinery of business determine the course of their lives. One man told Baltzell that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.” 

...But Bell gradually withdrew its support after yet another positive assessment found that while executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities. By 1960, the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives was finished.

The last link's a third time repeat 

Leiter: Philosophy Metablog retired...

A screenshot from google cache:  "Okay. So, working in a shit department, I have to do my own grading, which is pressing. So here's this week's bad poem:..."

Because I would not stop for SPEP –
It kindly stopped for me –
But ratings have no room for schools –
That think so Frenchily.

One school wants out – though there is doubt
At choosing self-deletion.
That’s self-abuse! – Don’t be obtuse,
That’s withdrawing before completion.

He held his ground – He blogged away
He charlatans disparaged.
Your program’s shit, so please exit
The übermensch’s carriage.

The board’s upset, all broken up
But perhaps he’ll make amends
The co-pilot will dispel all doubts
And serve a healing cleanse.

Read in the context of the full range of events in the world, what is this idiot defending other than the right of a spoiled child to be left alone to his games?

A letter from Leiter, to John McCumber, linked by Jon Cogburn in the original post. Mention of Cogburn here, here and here, (and another I forgot, now reposted just above). McCumber makes an appearance here.

A argument between logical sophists who need to justify their formal rhetoric as science and theologians who need to justify description as prescription and poetry as theology.

The Leiter Events page has been taken down after Leiter threatened a lawsuit. My comment from a month ago appeared finally, tossed in along with everything and now the page is dark. But since I was subscribed to the page, I got the emails.

Leiter responds to commenter naribtrelie:

You write: “It seems worth noting explicitly that, of the seven people targeted by Leiter in recent months (we are including Tom Stern), six of them were women, two of them were junior faculty (one of them very junior), one was a post-doc, and one was a graduate student.” In fact, during the exact same time period, far more men than women have come in for criticism or derision, including Eric Schliesser, Santiago Zabala, Tom Stern, Matt Drabek, Leon Wieseltier, Dirk Johnson, Ben Cohen, Ed Kazarian, Vince Vitale, William Vallicella, and Mark Oppenheimer, among others (I leave out the ‘big names’ like Zizek and Niall Ferguson). This is easily verifiable by a review of my blogs during this time period. 

He writes again:

I have posted corrections several times now over the past three weeks, and those corrections have not been approved and the defamatory factual misstatements not corrected. As a result, I have turned this matter over to my attorney.

The power claimed of philosophy is the power of prescription. As description it’s just another form of literature, and no philosopher will accept what by their own definition would be a drop in status. Philosophers want all the clarity of engineering and the license of poetry. What they end up with is the authoritarianism of the Roman Catholic Church and the metaphysics of hippies.

"Leiter’s authoritarianism is founded in insecurity, and their defense of civility is founded in fluff."