To return to the train of thought abandoned at the end of yesterday's post ... A large number of MLA members now believe that prominent feminist philosopher/theorist Judith Butler should resign her post in that venerable organization because she has used that position to make herself heard in a sexual harassment case on behalf of the harasser. She had not consulted the MLA collectively before intervening in that matter, and the petitioners say this was professionally and ethically inappropriate. A little more than a year ago now, a student at New York University accused professor Avital Ronell of sexual harassment. The graduate student. Nimrod Reitman, says that Ronell assaulted and stalked him. There are emails in which Ronell refers to Reitman as "my most adored one" and "sweet cuddly baby." Pro tip to all professors out there -- get your jollies from anyone in the whole universe who is NOT a student of yours and, in the event you ever feel compelled to...
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Apparently members of the Modern Language Association have initiated a petition to remove Judith Butler as that organization's Vice President and President elect. In order to understand this petition, one has to have some answer to each of the following questions: 1) Who is Judith Butler and how important is she? 2) What is the MLA and how important is it? 3) What are the grounds/merits of this complaint? I will address the first two of those questions today and the final one tomorrow. Judith Butler is a philosophy professor at UCal Berkeley. She is the author of Gender Troubles (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993). Her writing style is notoriously difficult. Here is one sentence often quoted as an example of the impenetrability of it: " The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and reart...
A thought about Senator McCain. No full accounting of his place in our public life in recent decades (yes, it has been decades) could fail to mention his relationship with fraudster Charles H. Keating. In the late 1980s, as the savings & loan system was unraveling, McCain was one of a group of five legislators who intervened to try to halt a regulatory investigation of the Lincoln S&L that Keating controlled. Each of the five had taken substantial political contributions fro m Keating. This made things look and smell like a quid pro quo. It was at the very best a case of extremely bad judgment and ugly 'optics' on McCain's part. That said: perfect human beings are rare, and when one of the more common imperfect beings has just left us it is the custom to focus attention on what was right in his life, not what was wrong. I accept that custom. McCain leaves a rather clean smell behind him all in all. For example and to his credit: McCain testified ...
I encountered the following, perhaps revealing, joke recently. A Mexican is traveling in Spain. He says to a Spaniard, "I ought to be angry at you. After all, your ancestors conquered my homeland." The Spaniard replied, "Nothing to be angry about, my friend. YOUR ancestors conquered your homeland, My ancestors stayed home." Bada bing. Okay, you probably aren't rolling about on the floor now. But there is a point here. It is possible to envy Mexico the thoroughness of the race mixing in their history, so that almost everybody has conquistador/settler blood, and what us to the north think of as "identity politics" has little leverage.
People talk commonly and, as it were, naturally about "social issues" as constituting a nest of issues distinct from the "economic" ones. It is not self evident what this means. After all, economics and sociology don't differ in their subject matter. They differ in their methods. If an economic issue is one an economist might discuss using the tools of his science, then everything human is an economic issue, for nothing is alien to supply and demand. And in that case, the separate nest of "social issues," the other half of the customary dichotomy, dissolves. Yet since it hasn't in fact dissolved, let's try to answer the question in the heading above. What counts as a “social” issue, as distinct from an issue within any other classifications, is largely a subjective matter. Broadly speaking, though, “social issues” are efforts to answer the question “what kind of a person do I think I am?” in the first instance and, collectively...
Alec Klein, a professor at Northwestern University, resigned recently after 22 women accused him of inappropriate behavior, including sexual harassment and bullying. He denied the accusations, and after the first of them were publicized (in February of this year) he took a leave of absence but apparently with the expectation the coast would in time clear, the storm would blow over, and he could return to his post. In August, though, he resigned, full stop. Who was he? Why was he important enough for the case to attract national attention? That's the tack I often take when these matters come to light. There are lots of jerks -- even lots of criminals -- whose jerkiness and/or crimes never become big news stories. Sometimes when an event like this happens, some of us are left wondering: why does THIS one merit especially keen attention? Org-chart stuff gives us a clue. The Medill School of Journalism is part of Northwestern U., and the Medill Justice Project is part of THAT ...
A recent anthology by philosophers of science challenging the "modern synthesis" in evolution draws an intelligent review from NDPR, here: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/challenging-the-modern-synthesis-adaptation-development-and-inheritanc/ What had to be brought together was some sort of Darwinian account of evolution on the one hand and Me ndelian genetics on the other. The late 1930s and early 1940s were key, and the gelling of the synthesis involved a seminal book by Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1937, and another by Ernst Mayr in 1942 The term "modern synthesis" was attached to such work in the subtitle of a book by Julian Huxley, also in 1942. I'll quote the review directly for some institutional history: During this period significant institution building was taking place, coupled with theoretically significant gate-keeping. The Committee on Common Problems of Genetics, Paleontology, and Systematics, supported by a United States National Res...
Here's a link to an article by Dean Zimmerman defending the intuitive (or "A-Theory") view of time. http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/zimmerman/PrivilegedPresent.pdf The intuitive view is that there is such a thing as the present, the "moving now," that at this present is ontologically privileged. Privileged? Sounds like a bad thing to modern sensibilities. "Check your privilege, nowness!" At any rate, we intuitively feel confident the now is real, whereas the past is uncertain and the future is promised to no one. Descartes' "cogito" is in the present tense. The certainty is "I think" not "I thought" or "I will think." From this epistemological privilege we infer an ontological one -- the intuition is that the now is more real, which is one reason self-help authors always urge us to "live here now." Zimmerman believes, roughly, that the inference is a sound one and the self-help auth...
There's an old joke (it actually comes down to us from an ancient Roman joke book) that goes like this: An absentminded professor and a bald man and a barber were making a journey together and camping out in a lonely place. They arranged for each of them to stay awake in turn for four hours and guard the luggage. When it fell to the barber to keep watch first, wanting to pass the time he shaved the head of the prof and, when his shift was done, woke him up. The prof rubbed his head as he came to and found himself hairless. “What a right idiot the barber is,” he said. “He’s gone all wrong and woken up the bald man instead of me.” The phrase "absent-minded professor" is something of a loose translation here. We are primed to accept that as a term for an intellectual who does something amusingly stupid. But the phrase "an academic" would be a more neutral translation of the underlying Latin, I'm told. What is fascinating about this joke is the structure...
It came out, and made its splash, months ago now, but I'm just getting around to reading FIRE AND FURY, a take on the early months of the Trump presidency written largely from the point of view of Steve Bannon. "It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything -- not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up half-way through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he's smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need to stay because I'm the only person there with a clue what he's doing. The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only accept people who pass ridiculous purity tests, even for midlevel policy-making jobs where the people will never ...
His name is Plato and we all know in the ghetto That messin with my boy is gonna getcha laid-low. He'll blow your mind, he be really stylin' He's got the mike and got all of the Big Abstractions flying. He's laying down now how it ain't real in the cave, Joe. He's planning our escape so we can look out at the sun yo. He knows how we can make ourselves a truly perfect city, Just kick out all the poets who are trying to make things pirty. Just kick out the musicians who are making us feel pity, And let the wise ones rule, eating cheezburgers with kitty. ------------------------ And yes, I AM ashamed of myself, Thank you for asking.
The world has too many tempests in too many tea pots, and I don't regret not being able to keep up with all of them. But sometimes when I find that I missed the real-time unfolding of one of the tempests, and the tempest itself seems really bizarre, I do want to revisit, to get a mulligan. So let's look at the Halal soup controversy. This it appears was a big thing in 2010, when I missed it. Halal in its broadest significance simply means "permissible." Its more specific significance is dietary. It has, for Moslems, much the same ring that "kosher" has for observant Jews. Apparently Campbell's soup, the nice people who did so much for Andy Warhol, decided in late 2010 that they would test market "halal" food. Perfectly cool right? I mean: in a capitalist system, businesses seek out markets to serve. The only reason to brand any soup cans "halal" is if that caters to a market demand that makes the costs of the branding wo...
The Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project. Okay, I'm a sucker for guerrilla/gorilla puns, as embodied in this pen-and-ink thing. At any rate, I recent saw an article on the Wikipedia "guerrillas" who seek to add skeptical notes to articles that might otherwise be taken over by true believers, on subjects such as the supposed dangers of childhood inoculations, paranormal phenomenon, fringe science theories. One astrologer has apparently complained that certain of the astrological articles have been gutted by these guerrillas , due to "the Sun opposed by transiting Pluto" and other planetary matters. That pretty well illustrates the threat against which skeptical voices rightly protect us. So: three cheers, and three yummy bananas.