AND SO IT BEGINS

And so it begins. In the fullness of time, Trump will be indicted in Georgia, then by Jack Smith for the documents case, and perhaps even for the January 6 case. The Republican Party will rally to his support, he will win the nomination, he will be found guilty in all three or four cases, and either he will run for president from jail or the Republican Party will find some way to block him from being nominated. In either case, he will lose the election and if we are fortunate he will take down the entire party with him.

As Paul Newman tells Robert Redford when explaining to him the big con, it will not be enough but it will be all we will get and we must be satisfied with it.

RESPONSE TO SEVERAL COMMENTS

 John Pillette, another lovely comment. It is nice to feel that I am getting through.

Jerry Fresia, my experience of the ideas with which I spend my life is essentially aesthetic as well as intellectual. My goal is always to grapple with difficult concepts and simplify them in my mind until I can show them to my students or my readers with the power and beauty that they have. That is why I rarely respond to criticisms of my writings. If I have succeeded in showing the beauty of the ideas, that is all I really want to do.

NOCTURNAL REFLECTIONS

I live in three worlds. In the first world, I am an 89-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease, living in a Continuing Care Retirement Community and looking after a 90-year-old wife who is cheerful and an enormous comfort to me despite her struggles with a number of physical problems. In the second world, I am a hapless observer of a nation racing toward fascism, a nation filled with people who can find nothing better to do with their time than to be cruel to the most at risk among us, in a world in which human beings race toward ecological disaster. In the third world, I calmly and quietly prepare for my next lecture on the elements of Game Theory, reflecting as I lie in bed in the middle of the night on the best way to explain to my students von Neumann’s six axioms that taken together allow us to impute a cardinal utility function to a player.

 

I have lived in these three worlds all my life, and though I have devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to both the first and the second, it is in the third that I am most truly myself.

HERE IS THE LINK

lINK TO 2PM LECTURE 

TODAY'S L,ECTURE

As soon as I get the link, I will put it up.  Needless to say, my lecture will follow pretty closely what I have written in my book on the same  subject. This is mathematics, so I cannot, in the interest of novelty, say that this time around the square on the hypotenuse is equal to twice the sum of the squares on the adjacent sides, as it were.  However, I have managed to make certain things clearer or more precise in ways that they were not in the book so I am rather pleased with the lecture.

CALLING ALL NERDS

I have spent the past several days preparing my next lecture on The Use and Abuse of Formal Methods in  Political Philosophy. Monday, from 2 PM to 3:30 PM Eastern Time US, I shall be giving the first of several lectures on Game Theory.The lectures will be on zoom and the zoom program we are using can handle up to 100 participants. Since I expect only about 10 people to participate from the UNC philosophy department, there is room for others should they wish to attend. Only the UNC students will be able to ask questions, but all the others are welcome to attend as listeners. Tomorrow or Monday morning I will post a link. After I have finished expounding the elements of Game Theory, which may take me two 1 1/2 hour lectures, I will follow that by a formal analysis of the central argument in John Rawls's famous book, A Theory of Justice.

THAT WAS FUN

Well, that was fun. I must say you folks have a very rich and varied range of knowledge. Let me say just a word about what led me to raise the question. As you probably know if you have been reading this blog, there was a time in my life when I worked very hard to learn to play the viola.  For eight years, I took a 90 minute lesson every week and practiced an hour a day. As a result of all this work, I became a pretty amateur fair violist. That is to say, I was nowhere near as good as a professional violist sitting in the last chair of the viola section of a small regional professional orchestra. The sheer amount of work day after day, month after month, year after year that is required to achieve the sort of command of the piano or the violin or the viola that professional musicians exhibit is something that non-musicians I suspect do not quite understand. When I watch Yo-Yo Ma leaning back and playing the cello as though he were listening to it rather than actually playing it, I have some sense of what it took for him to reach that point and I am in awe.

 

By comparison, it is my impression that it takes relatively little work to become a good film actor, although obviously some people are much better at it than others. Hence, it does not surprise me that the children of quite successful film actors sometimes themselves become successful film actors. I should imagine it takes a good deal more work than that to become a first-class plumber although I have never done any plumbing so I do not really know.

A GAME TO PASS THE TIME

Jamie Lee Curtis won an Oscar. She is, of course, the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. There are lots of successful actors and actresses who are the sons or daughters of other successful actors and actresses. So I got to thinking, are there first-grade classical musicians who were the sons or daughters of other first-grade classical musicians? Well, immediately I thought of David Oistrakh, the great violinist, and his son Igor, also a first-grade violinist. But I could not think of any other examples. There are no great philosophers who are the sons or daughters of other great philosophers, so far as I could think of. Nor could I come up with great poets or novelists or classical composers who are sons or daughters of other great poets or novelists of classical composers.

 

After a while, it occurred to me that this might be an interesting question to put to the readers of this blog. Can any of you come up with interesting examples of father – son or father – daughter or mother – son or mother – daughter great artists of any sort?

AND SO IT BEGINS

Well, Trump says he will be arrested on Tuesday and for once I hope he is correct. I suspect he will be indicted in Georgia within the next several weeks and perhaps by the end of May for the Mar-a-Lago matter as well.  Meanwhile, France is awash in garbage, England is in bad shape, Italy is in crisis, and Israel is close to what is being described as a civil war.

Perhaps there is something to be said for being very old.

I LOVE IT

John Pillette, Google tells me that there have over the years been 44,569 comments on this blog. I think yours is one of my all-time favorites. Thank you for making my day.

I have heard from several people the comment that "punishing" Prof. Wax by banning her from teaching courses in the department will simply have the effect of encouraging others to take this way of freeloading. I must confess I was stunned and totally blindsided by this observation. The notion that someone would brand himself or herself as a homophobic racist, gain the contempt and detestation of his or her entire cadre of professional associates, make himself or herself a laughingstock in the world, all in order to get out of teaching some courses suggests to me that I am more out of touch with the present generation's attitude toward work than I realized.

Let me say, by the way, that the concern with Prof. Wax at the University of Pennsylvania does not arise out of faculty uneasiness being around someone espousing such views, but rather as a response to the extreme distress experienced by students at the law school, primarily but by no means exclusively students of color.

But I think I shall stop blogging about the subject, because quite clearly I am totally out of touch.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Some of you may have seen the long story yesterday in the New York Times, starting on page 1, about an academic freedom controversy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and if you read the story to the end you will have noticed a reference in it to my son, Tobias, who is a professor there.  The story concerns a rather unpleasant person named Amy Wax, whose racist views have been a thorn in the side of the Law School and a trial to the students for many years. I actually encountered Wax some years ago when I presented my paper “The Future of Socialism,” to the law school faculty. At my son’s suggestion, I circulated the paper in advance and he assured me that everyone would read it. As the discussion started, Wax asked a belligerent and rather condescending question based on the views of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayak.  I pointed out that I had discussed the views of both of these theorists at length in the paper, a fact that she obviously did not know since she had not bothered to read it.

 

After many years of suffering from the complaints of students about Wax’s behavior and statements in class, the Dean of the Law School announced that an inquiry would be started about the effect that her views were having on the students, and this has generated a vigorous debate about academic freedom. Since I am something of an absolutist about academic freedom, both for reasons of principle and out of self-interest (people on my end of the spectrum being more likely to be attacked than people on her end), I felt rather torn about the issue and I spent some time in the middle of last night lying in bed thinking about it. Here is what I came up with.

 

Amy Wax was hired some years ago as a tenured professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. In that position, she has certain rights. She has the right to be protected from professional loss for expressing unpopular opinions. She has the right to receive a salary and raises appropriate to someone of her accomplishments and distinction. She has a right to be assigned office space and to receive her share of such supplementary support as research funds and the like. At the same time, she has certain obligations. She is obliged to teach the normal load of courses, to meet with students an appropriate amount of time, to submit grades for the students in her courses on time and to do her share of such supplementary chores as serving on committees and the like.

 

She has an obligation to teach courses, but especially in a Law School there are limitations on what courses she can offer. Law Schools are unlike arts and sciences academic departments in this respect. A law degree is a professional degree and professors at Law Schools are required to teach such elementary law subjects as Contracts, Torts, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, and the like. In arts and sciences fields, the senior professors frequently teach no introductory courses at all, leaving that to their junior colleagues. But even the most famous professors at a Law School will as a regular thing teach first year introductory courses. Amy Wax earned a medical degree before she went to law school, but if she were to announce that she planned to teach anatomy rather than torts next year, the Dean would summarily tell her that she could not do so. That would not be a violation of her academic freedom; it is just a fact of life in Law Schools.

 

She has an obligation to teach courses, but she does not have a right to teach courses.  She has a right to receive a salary and have her tenure protected but she does not have a right to teach courses. As soon as I realized that, the solution to the problem of Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania seemed obvious to me.  I think she should continue to receive her salary and all of the other perquisites and support appropriate to someone in your position and I think she should be protected in that right despite her despicable views, but I think from now until she retires, she should teach no courses and be assigned no student advisees. She would of course be free to give non-credit lectures on any subject she chose and any student who wanted to study with her would be free to do so, but from now on nothing she does at the University of Pennsylvania Law School should be part of the regular curriculum presented to students.

 

The University of Pennsylvania Law School made a mistake when it appointed her to a tenured professorship and it is their responsibility to swallow that mistake. If they can afford to do it, they should appoint someone else to cover the courses that she has until now been teaching. If they cannot afford to do that, then the faculty as a whole should pitch in and in rotation teach extra courses to cover her load. She can continue to push her ugly racist views in any way she wishes and as loudly as she wishes but she does not have a right to teach courses at the University of Pennsylvania in which he expresses those views and since the University of Pennsylvania does not have a right to stop her from expressing those views in the courses she teaches, they should simply assign her no courses to teach.

I WILL TAKE WHAT I CAN GET

When I read about Trump being indicted for paying off stormy Daniels, all I can think of is Robert De Niro as Al Capone in the 1987 film The Untouchables.  After all his crimes, they got Capone on tax evasion. I am not choosy. I will take what I can get.

AM I MISSING SOMETHING?

There is something that has been puzzling me for some time regarding inflation, and I am hoping that someone can throw light on the matter. One of the causes of the current high inflation in the United States is said to be the tightness in the labor market. As I understand it, this means something like the following: employers are having difficulty filling jobs because there are too few people looking for work. In an attempt to attract employees, employers raise the wages that they offer. This reduces their profits and so they respond by raising prices. The result is inflation, which is to say a rise in prices.

 

My question is this: why don’t they raise their prices before they are compelled to offer higher wages?  If they can sell their goods after raising their prices in response to their rising labor costs, then presumably they can sell their goods after raising their prices even if their labor costs are not going up, in which case they would make more money. If they are unable to sell their goods at the higher prices after their labor costs go up, then they would be forced to bring their prices back down to sell their goods, with the result that they would make lower profits but at least they would make something since the alternative would be that they had unsold goods in their warehouses.

 

This is such a simple question that there must be a simple answer to it but I confess I am unable to figure out what that is.

IT IS A PUZZLEMENT

I thought I would spend a little time today musing about something that has puzzled me for quite some time. I genuinely do not know what to think about this and I would be curious to know whether anyone has some insight into it.

 

The United States is an extraordinarily violent country in which a sizable proportion of the population seems genuinely to want an autocratic or dictatorial ruler. There are more than 400 million guns in private hands in America and mass shootings, defined as shootings in which four or more people are killed or wounded, happen a good deal more often than once a day. Virtually all of the shootings that are not triggered by some personal relationship between the perpetrator and one or more of the victims seem to be rooted in right wing conspiracy fantasies, racist anger, so-called fear of replacement, or old-fashioned anti-Semitism.

 

And yet, despite the presence of so many weapons and the enormous amount of talk about revolution, armed conflict, and the like there seems at least thus far to have been virtually no organized armed military style conflict. The assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was violent, enormous in the size of the participation, and at least on the part of some of the people there well planned in advance. And yet, when the rioters broke into the building they milled around, spread their feces on the walls, and then took selfies which they posted on social media, making it easy for the Feds to track them down. That event is frequently described as practice for the next coup, and yet I rather suspect that it may have been the high point in antigovernment violence, not the prelude to something more violent and more successful.

 

There has been a great deal of reporting about the presence in the ranks of the police and the military of individuals sympathetic to these efforts to overthrow democracy, and yet there been no organized units that have as units broken with their superiors and set themselves systematically against the state.

 

The United States is not only a hatefully violent place, it seems also to be a society obsessed with a kind of performance art.

 

Are we on the brink of a descent into fascist autocracy? I simply cannot figure it out.

 

 

 

  

THE HOT STOVE LEAGUE IS BACK IN SESSION

The UNC basketball team lost to Duke last night, thereby very possibly eliminating it from inclusion in March Madness.  That relieves me of the necessity of pretending to care what happens to them, so I can now turn to the more important business of making political predictions. As always, I alert you to the fact that these predictions are based on no inside information whatsoever and precious little outside information either.

 

I think it is virtually certain that Trump will be indicted by a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia sometime later this spring. It is almost as certain that he will be indicted in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.  It is likely that he will be indicted in the Stormy Daniels payoff case, and it is even possible, although somewhat less likely, that he will be indicted in the big January 6 case. One way or another, he will be under indictment when the Republican presidential primaries begin after the first of the year.

 

Either in spite of these indictments or because of them, he will do quite well in the early primaries, and should lock up the nomination by the summer. He will probably go to trial late in the spring of 2024 and in all likelihood, before the Republican National Convention, he will have been found guilty in at least one of these cases.

 

The Republican Party will then face a difficult decision: whether to confer the nomination on him or construe the rules in such a way as to dump him. There is of course no obstacle to someone running for the presidency when in prison – Eugene Victor Debs ran in 1920 while in prison on the Socialist ticket and got a considerable number of votes.

 

If the Republicans do nominate Trump, he will be defeated by Biden and the Democrats will take the House and even hold the Senate.  If the Republicans dump Trump, he will do everything in his power to get his supporters not to vote and the Democrats will win in a romp.

 

Taking all and all, this is a good reason for me to survive at least until November of next year.

MORE RESPONSES

R. McD in one of his paragraphs refers to Philip Green and Herman Kahn. This brings back memories

Phil Green and I grew up in a neighborhood in Queens, New York called Sunnyside. I have been told, although I was too young to remember this, that he and I on occasion rode together in the same baby carriage.

Herman Kahn was my great nemesis in my early days in the nuclear disarmament movement. At one point I debated him publicly at Jordan Hall in Boston.  I wrote a scathing attack on his book, On Thermonuclear War, for The New Republic.

Back then, it was possible to think that we would win the fight.

A PROPOS THE COMMENTS ON THE ELSBERG LETTER

 I wonder whether the visceral reaction to the possibility of nuclear war is in part generational. Ellsberg and I are only a few years apart in age and both of us became very involved in opposition to nuclear war when we were young. That is what explains my clumsy and rather desperate efforts to ridicule the casual references to "tactical nuclear weapons." Ellsberg understands much better than I did the concrete consequences of a nuclear war but people several generations younger seem to contemplate that possibility without an awareness of how totally terrible it would be.

It was the threat of nuclear war, rather than economic inequality or racial oppression or gender oppression, that first drove me into political activity, and now, 65 years later, we are living with the society-ending threats that so many of us saw then and protested against unsuccessfully.

Ellsberg was an undergradyate, a Junior Fellow and then a graduate student in economics at Harvard when I was there but I do not recall ever having met him.

SAD NEWS

 My son, Patrick, forwarded this to me.

by Daniel Ellsberg Posted on March 02, 2023

Dear friends and supporters,

I have difficult news to impart. On February 17, without much warning, I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer on the basis of a CT scan and an MRI. (As is usual with pancreatic cancer – which has no early symptoms – it was found while looking for something else, relatively minor). I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live. Of course, they emphasize that everyone’s case is individual; it might be more, or less.

I have chosen not to do chemotherapy (which offers no promise) and I have assurance of great hospice care when needed. Please know: right now, I am not in any physical pain, and in fact, after my hip replacement surgery in late 2021, I feel better physically than I have in years! Moreover, my cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my quality of life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my former favorite foods! And my energy level is high. Since my diagnosis, I’ve done several interviews and webinars on Ukraine, nuclear weapons, and first amendment issues, and I have two more scheduled this week.

As I just told my son Robert: he’s long known (as my editor) that I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline!

I feel lucky and grateful that I’ve had a wonderful life far beyond the proverbial three-score years and ten. (I’ll be ninety-two on April 7th.) I feel the very same way about having a few months more to enjoy life with my wife and family, and in which to continue to pursue the urgent goal of working with others to avert nuclear war in Ukraine or Taiwan (or anywhere else). When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was). Yet in the end, that action – in ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon’s illegal responses – did have an impact on shortening the war. In addition, thanks to Nixon’s crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was able to spend the last fifty years with Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends.

What’s more, I was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing and joining with others in acts of protest and nonviolent resistance.

I wish I could report greater success for our efforts. As I write, "modernization" of nuclear weapons is ongoing in all nine states that possess them (the US most of all). Russia is making monstrous threats to initiate nuclear war to maintain its control over Crimea and the Donbas – like the dozens of equally illegitimate first-use threats that the US government has made in the past to maintain its military presence in South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and (with the complicity of every member state then in NATO ) West Berlin. The current risk of nuclear war, over Ukraine, is as great as the world has ever seen.

China and India are alone in declaring no-first-use policies. Leadership in the US, Russia, other nuclear weapons states, NATO and other US allies have yet to recognize that such threats of initiating nuclear war – let alone the plans, deployments and exercises meant to make them credible and more ready to be carried out – are and always have been immoral and insane: under any circumstances, for any reasons, by anyone or anywhere.

It is long past time – but not too late! – for the world’s publics at last to challenge and resist the willed moral blindness of their past and current leaders. I will continue, as long as I’m able, to help these efforts. There’s tons more to say about Ukraine and nuclear policy, of course, and you’ll be hearing from me as long as I’m here.

As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts. For the last forty years we have known that nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean nuclear winter: more than a hundred million tons of smoke and soot from firestorms in cities set ablaze by either side, striking either first or second, would be lofted into the stratosphere where it would not rain out and would envelope the globe within days. That pall would block up to 70% of sunlight for years, destroying all harvests worldwide and causing death by starvation for most of the humans and other vertebrates on earth.

So far as I can find out, this scientific near-consensus has had virtually no effect on the Pentagon’s nuclear war plans or US/NATO (or Russian) nuclear threats. (In a like case of disastrous willful denial by many officials, corporations and other Americans, scientists have known for over three decades that the catastrophic climate change now underway – mainly but not only from burning fossil fuels – is fully comparable to US-Russian nuclear war as another existential risk.) I’m happy to know that millions of people – including all those friends and comrades to whom I address this message! – have the wisdom, the dedication and the moral courage to carry on with these causes, and to work unceasingly for the survival of our planet and its creatures.

I’m enormously grateful to have had the privilege of knowing and working with such people, past and present. That’s among the most treasured aspects of my very privileged and very lucky life. I want to thank you all for the love and support you have given me in so many ways. Your dedication, courage, and determination to act have inspired and sustained my own efforts. My wish for you is that at the end of your days you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now.

Love, Dan

 

WELL, SO MUCH FOR THAT

I could not figure out how to make it work so I have gone back to the old system and I will just ignore the comments when I want to and go on as though they were not there. I had some nice messages from folks which cheered me up and as for those of you who clutter up the comments section, get a life.

AN EXPERIMENT

I have just change the settings on this blog so that only those admitted as members of the blog can post comments. I assume this means that one will have to ask permission to be a member, but I do not know.  My purpose is to try one last time to get people to actually engage with what I have written rather than using this blog as a convenience space for them to have independent conversations with one another. Maybe I am just old, maybe it is a lingering effect of my recent illness, maybe it is just natural grumpiness, but I have more or less had it.

I wrote a short post about an interesting shift in the theoretical analysis of society in the late 19th and early 20th century and no one so much as had the courtesy to take note of it.

If you want to reach me, my email address is at the top of the blog.

MUSINGS

As I wait, impatiently, for someone, anyone, to indict Trump for something, anything, I find myself depressed by the state of the world. A massive earthquake in Turkey kills more than 40,000 people; the poisonous right wing Israeli government destroys what little faith I ever had in the experiment called Israel; all over the world people, mostly but not entirely men, find that more than anything else they want to kill one another. I try to make a difference by giving money to political campaigns –it is really all I can do – but I am well aware that it is no more than a gesture.

 

While I sit at my desk in a funk, let me recall for a moment for myself and for you the origin of the notion “middle-class.” Not much of importance turns on the matter, but it is interesting and diverts me.

 

The modern notion of class, as opposed to status or estate, comes from the work of the early political economists – Smith and Ricardo, most notably. Smith divided the people of England into three groups defined by their relationship to the processes of production of commodities. The first group consisted of those who controled the land on which food was grown. The second group consisted of those who did the labor either in the fields or in the new factories beginning to appear in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. The third group consisted of those who used their private funds to rent the land, hire the labor, and buy the raw materials and machinery needed for production. Land, Labor, Capital, the landed aristocracy, the laboring class, the entrepreneurial class.

 

This functional analysis was an extremely powerful tool and gave rise to the new discipline of Political Economy. One of the important implications of this mode of analysis was that it made transparently clear that the interests of the three classes were in opposition to one another, since in any year what went to one class as rents or wages or profits necessarily came out of what was available to the other classes. So class conflict was built into the structure of the analysis of the classical political economists and whatever their limitations in mathematical sophistication might have been, this fact gave what they wrote enormous analytical and political power.

 

At about the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century, a number of brilliant social theorists, Max Weber most notable among them, looked at the now significantly developed capitalist world and concluded that something more than this functional analysis was required in order to capture the complexity of what they observed, and so in place of the old categories of Land, Labor, and Capital they put forward a more complicated multidimensional analysis of capitalist society in terms of what they called socioeconomic status. It was from this work that there came the classification of the modern capitalist society into Lower Class, Middle Class and Upper Class segments, and then into Lower Middle Class, Upper Middle-Class, and other fragments of the society.

 

(I am reminded of the delightful old book, whose title and author I cannot now recall, which detailed in amusing fashion the differences in England between the lower, the middle, and the upper classes. For example, when two couples went out for the evening in a car, if they were working-class couples, the two husbands sat in the front seats while the two wives sat in the back seats; if they were middle-class couples, one couple sat in front and the other couple sat in the rear; while if they were upper-class couples, the owner of the car sat with the other man’s wife in front and his wife sat in back with the other man.)

 

This new sociological reanalysis had the great virtue of capturing differences in attitudes, life chances, and social and regional groupings that were missed by the older classification of classical political economy into Land, Labor, and Capital.  But it forfeited the powerful insight of the older mode of analysis that there were structural unavoidable conflicts of interest that lay at the foundation of the society.

 

I think of this when I hear Biden claim that a proposal for tax reform designed to increase taxes only on those households with annual income of more than $400,000 a year is a proposal that defends the interests of “the middle class.”