There are still about 48 days or so before Trump Is inaugurated and for all that time Biden is president. As he demonstrated by his decision to release missiles to the Ukrainians, his actions are not limited by the fact that he is a lame-duck. Apparently Americans owe somewhat more than one trillion dollars on their credit cards. .Does Biden have the authority to transfer any significant amount of that debt to federal agencies with much lower fees? No doubt Trump could cancel that act as soon as he comes to office, but that would be the whole point. Americans would experience a month and a half of debt relief and then perhaps blame Trump for its reestablishment.
For those of you who like myself obsessively watch television news, it is useful to recall that nobody has yet been appointed to anything because Trump is not yet inaugurated.
176 comments:
I don't believe that Biden has any Constitutional power to transfer a private debt to the government. Even though the government is central to the process of student loans, the Supreme Court has pretty well shot down Biden's attempt to ease the burden of those loans.
NYT Guest editorial declares John Rawls the potential savior of democracy.
"In his epoch-defining treatise “A Theory of Justice,” published in 1971, Rawls set out a humane and egalitarian vision of a liberal society, an alternative both to the toxic blend of neoliberal economics and identity politics that has dominated Democratic thinking in recent decades and the pessimistic anti-liberalism that holds sway among some more radical parts of the left. In this time of crisis for liberalism, it offers an unparalleled, and as yet largely untapped, resource for shaping a broad-based and genuinely transformational progressive politics — not just for Democrats but for center-left parties internationally."
The federal government may under the doctrine of “eminent domain” expropriate (with compensation) private property for public use. Disputes in this area usually center on (1) whether the compensation is sufficient and (2) whether the use is sufficiently “public”.
If the debt is actually retired at face value, then there couldn’t be any dispute as to sufficiency of compensation. The “public” use argument is a little more difficult. The large number of people do constitute a “public” and freeing up all this money to be spent on the actual economy would therefore be a public benefit, but we can expect the Fox News right to scream “socialism”! On the other hand, the banks would love it, especially since they would immediately begin the cycle of usury again.
Further, as we learned from the first Trump administration, the use of executive orders are not necessarily limited by liberal timidity (a/k/a “norms”).
But expecting the Biden administration to do this seems like a huge reach. Let’s recall that it was Biden himself who, at the request of the (mostly Delaware-based) consumer lenders, changed the bankruptcy laws to make this kind of debt perpetual. Then again, he seems to have gone completely gaga (what with trying to start WW3 and all) so maybe he won’t remember that.
Just a reminder that Biden was known as the 'Senator from MBNA.' He simply does not care one iota about working people.
As far as I know, eminent domain refers only to the taking of real property, i.e., real estate.
You may be right. Eminent domain nearly always involves realty, but I thought that it covers personalty as well: requisitioning ships in emergencies, that sort of thing.
The real problem with the proposal is that it benefits debtors and creditors both; a proposal that benefits the banks alone would have a better chance of success. A scheme that allows the unlucky or imprudent to escape punishment and humiliation is politically unacceptable. To return to liberal-bashing, I would expect not just reactionaries but especially earnest liberals to take to the NYT to chin-stroke and opine (“regretfully”) on the folly of such a morally hazardous proposal.
First: to mention how 'inflation' is debt relief.
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This, of course, would be part of a 7th Year Relaxation of Debt. Here is the scripture passage:
Deuteronomy 15:1-6
King James Version
15 At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release.
2 And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the Lord's release.
3 Of a foreigner thou mayest exact it again: but that which is thine with thy brother thine hand shall release;
4 Save when there shall be no poor among you; for the Lord shall greatly bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it:
5 Only if thou carefully hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all these commandments which I command thee this day.
6 For the Lord thy God blesseth thee, as he promised thee: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee.
Comparing Trump's proposed economic appointees (somewhat reasonable) with the law enforcement/national security/diplomatic ones is interesting and disturbing. Seems Vlad, Jared, and Bibi have had some input.
Biden has no interest in people with credit card debt. His only interest is pardoning his corrupt tax-evading son. Let's get real. Biden is better than Trump, but the fact that he's better than Trump does not mean that he's a particularly admirable human being or that we can expect anything positive from him.
My idle thought: here's something Biden could do that would strike a blow for justice, is within his power and is irreversible, at the same time that it would brighten what otherwise will be a terribly sad legacy: pardon Leonard Peltier.
The son is a political target, so I'm not having this bad reaction to the pardon. The New Republic is calling it the worst form of corruption, not even Hunter Biden's crimes are remotely the worst form of corruption. Or 'crimes' -- tax evasion, though trumped up, he didn't owe any money, and gun charges, over a gun that he owned for several days -- never loaded. Felony charges over this? Seems ludicrous. I mean, maybe we have some sort of standards about who to pardon but I'm not sure exactly what they are -- this pardon can be construed as 'justice'.
I stumbled on an article in the World Socialist Web Site on the pardon, and which gives a bit of historical context. The article unsurprisingly treats it as part of "the decay and crisis of the US political system". There's a nice phrase characterizing Biden welcoming Trump to the White House as "a mixture of servility and senility". The last paragraphs document the (hitherto unknown to me) great decline in the number of presidential pardons: Biden's doled out 26, whereas in the 20th century through Truman 1000-2000 was typical: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/03/oylu-d03.html
Hear, hear.....
Lucian Truscott in Salon
"Joe Biden has his work cut out for him. He should empower an entire staff in the White House to begin working on blanket pardons for all the people mentioned above, plus members of the House of Representatives and the Senate who were involved in the two Trump impeachments and the House Jan. 6 committee.
"The Biden pardon team should also take a serious look at the many reporters, columnists, and television news hosts who have stood up to Trump over the last eight years. That is another long list of people that Donald Trump has threatened to prosecute for simply doing their jobs as reporters, commentators, and cable news hosts.
That old aphorism “when they go low, we go high” was bullshit when it entered the political lexicon, and it’s a guarantee of a prison sentence at this point. There is no high road in the age of Donald Trump and his MAGA team of toadies and lackeys who are sworn to carry out the campaign of retribution Trump demands.
"The Democratic Party isn’t just a political party anymore. It is an association of Americans who are under attack merely for their political beliefs. Loyalty to the Constitution and swearing to uphold its rights and guarantees of freedom has been turned into a crime by Donald Trump. People like Elon Musk and Leonard Leo are probably adding names to the list of enemies they would like to see behind bars for committing various “crimes” that aren’t crimes at all.
Nobody is safe. Trump has promised to build internment camps for undocumented immigrants he has declared war against. You won’t have to lack an American passport or work permit to be ushered into the walls of those camps once they’re built.
"Trump has gone to war against the America we have known. We don’t need to ask ourselves what this country has done to deserve the war Trump has planned against us. Biden needs to deploy his pardon power as a weapon in that war, and the Democratic Party needs to start recruiting not only followers but fighters. This is going to be an ugly four years, and it is way past time to prepare ourselves."
Far, far less than 50% of those voting for Trump were hard core MAGA. Let him try and arrest and politically prosecute and jail everyone he wants. Appeasing MAGA gains him nothing, and he will lose the House and Senate in '26, '28, and the '28 Presidency.
Trump is either going to be a fascist dictator or not. If he is a fascist dictator, whether or not Biden pardons anti-Trump journalists has no importance because he'll arrest them anyway. Fascist dictators don't give a shit about the law. If he's not a fascist dictator, he's not going to arrest your favorite NYT columnists.
Indeed!
1. Hunter Biden's prosecutions were clearly politically motivated as well as demonstrating Garland's incompetence as AG and Biden's in nominating him as AG.
2. Arrests and prosecutions aren't necessary. "Investigations" will bankrupt most folks.
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Biden shd have bowed out of the '24 pres. race sooner than he did, but his accomplishments in domestic policy are fairly significant. CHIPS Act and infrastructure bill will both have beneficial long-term effects for U.S. manufacturing.
His foreign policy, wrt I/P and Gaza etc. in particular, was considerably less good.
Btw I happened to buy the current (Dec.) issue of The Atlantic in a bkstore, and there is an interesting (and, for a change, somewhat hopeful) piece on I/P: Samer Sinijlawi, "How to Build a Palestinian State: There's Still a Way."
Samer breathes a breath of fresh air for the future of Muslim liberal activists & writers. He makes a good point when he says two female Jewish college students and two female Palestinian college students will put away their differences to work together to get their class assignments completed. Educated Muslim women are the biggest threat to the Conservative movement in the Muslim world. When the U.S. scuttled out of Afghanistan, the first thing the Taliban did was shut down higher education for women in their country. That's how much they fear women and education put together.
As Noble winner Malala Yousafzai said: "Education is the only solution!"
Off topic, but I wanted to let the professor know (hopefully he still reads some of these comments) that to distract myself from all the awful election news, I have been going back through the First Critique alongside his YouTube lecture series. I followed along when they were first released 2016, and now that we are all staring down a second Trump term it seemed like a good time to return to them. Then as now they have provided a stimulating and clear guide through the text, and I wanted to thank him for sharing them. As Hannah Arendt once said, it is always better to spend time with Kant.
In Counterpunch Gerald Sussman places Biden's paternal pardon in the context of his war crimes. Kant would blanch at the crookedness of this timber: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/12/joe-biden-a-resume-of-war-crimes/
My god, still with this silly nonsense about fascism? Trump is Trump and his movement is all its own - has nothing to do with fascism, historical or otherwise.
Counterpunch needs better editors - Sussman makes an obvious error in the first sentence. Objections by elected Dems are likely performative - there is no way Biden would (or should) allow his only remaining son to be vulnerable to a Trump DoJ (Gaetz, Bondi, Patel, and "accidents" do happen in prison). Then there's this:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/12/politics/david-weiss-fbi-informant-alexander-smirnov-plea/index.html
Typical, just typical. An assertion about "an obvious error in the first sentence"--but it must be very obscure, or else I'm going blind. And then nothing. No coming to grips one way or another with what follows in the piece you're supposedly responding to, except to insinuate that the criticising Democrats mentioned in the opening paragraph obviously didn't mean it. And the Smirnov piece referred to doesn't, again, deal with the subject matter of the Counterpunch piece, which has to do with a whole lot of other Biden moral lapses. That's not just typical, it's mendacious.
Off topic: I do not know if the professor is reading the comments but I would like him to know that here, in Brazil, a young philosopher teacher is watching his videos about Marx. My many many regards, professor.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is facing likely defeat in her candidacy to lead the Democratic minority on the House Oversight Committee, after previously building momentum for the role — because Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has been working behind the scenes to thwart it.
This "backroom sabotage" is not a healthy development for Democrats, wrote Alexander Sammon for Slate — and it's a reflection not of legitimate debate over who is best to lead the committee, but a yearslong vendetta Pelosi is unable to let go of, and a reluctance to truly pass the torch to a new generation of leaders.
"After November’s drubbing, House Democrats signaled that they were prepared to accept a changing of the guard atop some of the important House committees," wrote Sammon, including Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) stepping aside for relatively younger leaders.
But when Ocasio-Cortez stepped up for Oversight, and began to attract support, things changed.
"Not one to let a young person ascend quietly, Nancy Pelosi entered the fray," wrote Sammon. "The patron saint of Democratic gerontocracy, 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi is supposedly retired from leadership, but this month, she actively threw her weight behind 74-year-old Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, who was just diagnosed with throat cancer. Now, Pelosi is whipping votes for Connolly, whose potential promotion would cap off this 'changing of the guard' by replacing a 61-year-old with a guy in his mid-70s. And because Pelosi suffered a fall in Germany and had to have her hip replaced, she’s essentially whipping votes from a hospital bed."
ALSO READ: Billionaire newspaper owner slaps major new restrictions on anti-Trump editorials: report
Ocasio-Cortez's outspoken progressive record has made some more centrist lawmakers uneasy, Sammon noted, but she is arguably perfect for this role: "During a second Trump presidency, Oversight will be one of the most important bully pulpits to expose and interrogate the incoming administration’s flagrant corruption," and AOC, who already serves on Oversight, has repeatedly gone viral demolishing Trump allies in that committee. "Her ability as an explainer is top-notch, and her penchant for conveying outrage and injustice is sorely lacking in the party’s upper echelons."
Connolly has extensive experience on the committee, said Sammon, with "a positive reputation for his work beating back Republican witch hunts during the Barack Obama years" — but "it’s pretty obvious which one of these representatives has a bigger megaphone to explain what’s going on. Ocasio-Cortez has 8.1 million followers. Connolly has 4,600."
From The Daily Beast (The Democrats are fucked)
Pelosi, Sammon noted, was instrumental in building the consensus to force President Joe Biden out of running for a second term — but those same tactics are "harder to justify when an eminently qualified rising star — who, whether Pelosi likes it personally or not, is widely known to be a cornerstone of the party’s future — pushes for a simple promotion."
This:
https://apnews.com/article/alexander-smirnov-guilty-plea-biden-informant-fbi-62a3b7acce0345303f812ca6d0206b10?taid=67606582a1361c00013e0d14&utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter
reminded me that R McD had an objection to an earlier post of mine. The author of the Counter Punch article got the charges seriously wrong and his editor failed to catch it. He also repeated the now discredited Burisma charges as well as understanding that a majority of Ukrainians rejected a Russian stooge and didn't consider themselves Little Russians. The author of the article seems not to understand that hobbling Ukraine and facilitating Palestinian genocide stem from the same failed policies.
Also Musk just tweeted his support for this party:
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:of56nmyuqzvjta7qlf7gwht6/bafkreifgmef7oqz76yf4rjcprcomrmyvbc4rkntjmrb3qedc7qxmxumlte@jpeg
My objection, as I recall, was that you, aaall, made an accusation, yet I couldn't see what precisely it was that you were objecting to. I still don't know what it was you took to be seriously wrong. And what are the Burisma charges?
Somewhat confused. Burisma is covered (inadequately) in the CP article which is a bog standard tankie take on past and present US foreign policy which reads worse the second time around. Have you read the article?
P.S. That the son also rises is universal SOP.
LFC: Biden shd have bowed out of the '24 pres. race sooner than he did, but his accomplishments in domestic policy are fairly significant.
And Mussolioni made the trains run on time.
Biden will be remembered for perpetrating a genocide.
"'We're killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists,' [a senior IDF officer who has served three reserve rotations in Gaza] says. 'The IDF spokesperson's announcements about casualty numbers have turned this into a competition between units. If Division 99 kills 150 [people], the next unit aims for 200.'
These accounts of indiscriminate killing and the routine classification of civilian casualties as terrorists emerged repeatedly in Haaretz's conversations with recent Gaza veterans.
'Calling ourselves the world's most moral army absolves soldiers who know exactly what we're doing,' says a senior reserve commander who has recently returned from the Netzarim corridor. 'It means ignoring that for over a year, we've operated in a lawless space where human life holds no value. Yes, we commanders and combatants are participating in the atrocity unfolding in Gaza. Now everyone must face this reality.'
...
An officer in Division 252's command recalls when the IDF spokesperson announced their forces had killed over 200 militants.... 'Of those 200 casualties, only ten were confirmed as known Hamas operatives. Yet no one questioned the public announcement about killing hundreds of militants.'
...
One of the concepts [Gen. Yehuda Vach] introduced was declaring anyone entering the kill zone a terrorist conducting reconnaissance. 'Every woman is a scout, or a man in disguise,' an officer explains. 'Vach even decided anyone on a bicycle could be killed, claiming cyclists were terrorists' collaborators.'"
from Haaretz, Yaniv Kubovich, Dec 18, 2024
"To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they [Biden's closest aides and advisers] told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan....
This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people....
The president’s slide has been hard to overlook. While preparing last year for his interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, the president couldn’t recall lines that his team discussed with him. At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person....
If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. 'He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,' the former aide recalled the official saying."
"How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge"
WSJ Dec 19, 2024
Eric, Biden and whoever is running the show is responsible not only for the genocide in Gaza, but also for Israeli aggression against Lebanon and now Syria. Israel has become Washington's 007, James Bond with a license to kill and to kill and to kill. Biden has been the worst U.S. imperialist and warmonger since Bush 2. I realize that Trump is horrid, but what I don't understand is why folks who saw through Biden back in 2020 and enthusiastically supported Sanders now have idealized this sickening proponent of Amerikan exceptionalism and of "we own the world-ism".
While the U.S. certainly bears some considerable responsibility, the persons primarily responsible for Israel's actions are Netanyahu and his cabinet. Had the U.S. cut off weapons early in the Gaza war, Netanyahu likely still would have had enough to cause a fair amount of destruction.
I don't think anyone here is idealizing Biden; at any rate I'm not.
Btw I've put up a short-ish post on the 400th anniversary of Grotius's On the Law of War and Peace, which occurs in 2025. (In case anyone is interested. I realize it's not a hot current topic.)
P.s. It's an open question to what extent Biden could have stopped arms shipments, esp. given Repub and some Dems in Congress who wd have opposed it. He cd have delayed some for sure, which he only did once.
It's interesting that the comments here about Biden ignore the context of a Congress and a political class very tied to the U.S.-Israel alliance, which as aaall has pointed out before, has even been enshrined to some extent in the U.S. Code. Worth recalling that a President has considerable power but operates in a constraining context.
Ah, yes. Just as with Harris' campaign. She has been a key figure in of all the good that the Biden admin has accomplished, but you can't blame her for any of the bad stuff because she wasn't the one making the final decisions.
Biden's accomplishments on the domestic front are fairly significant (no mention of Congress), but you can't really expect him to change course in Palestine because the president is limited by congressional constraints.
I guess I'm just much too old to understand what now counts as clever verbiage. Have a very pleasant day. r mcd
We're about to see, I suppose, just how much the US executive can be constrained. I suppose it's too late to shut the barn door on executive authority--that horse has been bolting down the road for several generations now. I guess it was in 1966 that I first heard a liberal Democrat politician argue against his anti-war primary opponent that he couldn't go against his "commander -in-chief." Not "President," mind you, but rather the military figure.
Re: Eric's post of the WSJ article on the diminished Biden and s. wallerstein's 'Biden and whoever is running the show': I was just now reading Martha Nussbaum's piece in the NYRB on Matthew Scully's Fear Factories, another book on the horrors of U. S. abattoirs and the Land of the Free's extreme systematic cruelties in its animal 'husbandry'. Nussbaum notes that "By far the most frequent home for Scully's trenchant and no-holds-barred work, however, has been the National Review, a journal I blush to say I had dismissed as biased." I once asked my buddy Julia Friedman why she published her art pieces in the NR, and she replied "Because they don't censor" (unlike the bog standard 'liberal' art publications, who won't tolerate her criticisms of identitarianism). And Alexander Cockburn likewise used to say that the WSJ didn't censor his columns. So I glanced on-line at the current National Review; aside from celebrating in advance the upcoming centenary of William Buckley's birth, much of it seemed to be running with the WSJ article, showing how that revealed the great scandal of 2024 to be not Trump's lunacy about Haitian pet-eaters, but rather Biden's diminishment, together with the media's lack of interest in/cover-up of his condition. Perhaps the upshot is to recall the sense of alternate realities in the various ideological alignments of 'news' sources, and that 'Biden' is for the most part a corporate entity.
could you give a link to your post on Grotius?
The Lord (or whatever spirit guides history) works in mysterious ways. Bad people can do good things. Eliminating Nasrallah and Sinwar were coups. This isn't the best of all possible worlds, but better without them. By far. They are Eblis. The Ayatollah better be ready to meet his maker, just like Haman met his.I bet someone will dress up as Nasrallah on Purim. It will be hilarious
I should have mentioned Congress in connection with the domestic accomplishments, of course.
Anonymous @ 3:33 p.m.
Link to Grotius post:
https://surmisesandsuspicions.wordpress.com/2024/12/21/four-hundred-years-since-on-the-law-of-war-and-peace-grotius/
Tobias Barrington Wolff posted this on Facebook last night: "I will be flying to North Carolina tomorrow. My Dad has been having a difficult time and went into the hospital last Monday. I waited to post about it until we knew more. He had a surgical procedure yesterday morning that went well and his recovery appeared to be on track initially, but things have turned in a less good direction today. It is too soon to say what may happen but it is important for me to be there. My brother is flying out from San Francisco as well. I will share more when the time seems right. Dad has been remarkably strong and resilient through all this and hope remains. Keep him in your thoughts."
sorry to read that medical report--and thanks, JR, for passing on the information
Sorry to hear this.
An update from TBWolff on Facebook: "Dad is in the ICU, where he was moved yesterday. He is battling a bad case of COVID that he almost certainly caught in the Emergency Room a week ago when he first came in for help. He is stable but the situation is serious given his severely weakened state. I will write more later about what has been happening and why the trajectory of his recovery turned the wrong way and required this hospital visit."
Thank you, John Rapko. Please please post each update here for those of us who do not have Facebook! So very concerned!
I also want to thank John Rapko and express my concern about Professor Wolff's medical condition.
All my best wishes to Professor Wolff, Tobias and Patrick.
"...that he almost certainly caught in the Emergency Room..."
I came across this a couple of days ago:
https://jabberwocking.com/americans-have-given-up-on-the-covid-vaccine/
Given the HHS and CDC nominations I assume this will get worse. Vaccines protect others as well as the recipient.
Best to the Prof. and his family.
An update from TBWolff on Facebook: "The news about Dad today is guardedly positive. It is too soon to say what direction things will ultimately go but he remains stable and his fundamentals are slowly getting stronger. We think he was experiencing a fair amount of delirium today, not unusual given all he is going through, and that combined with the challenges communicating with him right now was stressful and frustrating. But there is every reason to hope that will pass if he can get through this illness and today moved the needle a bit in the right direction, which is not how things looked 36 hours ago."
John Rapko, thanks for keeping us informed about Professor Wolff
Tobias, it is a wrenchingly trying time for you! My best to you, and to Patrick!! How I wish you could convey my encouraging regards to your dear Dad! Decessero
Here's hoping your 91st birthday brings some relief (limited though it may be) from the happenings of the last few months. You're in our thoughts. Best wishes!
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The latest (very moving) update from TBWolff: "Robert Paul Wolff turned 91 years old today. For the first several days of this week I did not think I would ever be able to type that sentence. COVID is a brutal killer of a disease that is trying very hard to kill my father. Today was a roller-coaster and it is not yet time to make any pronouncements but there are some positive things to report and that is a mazel. Most important, Dad finally regained a part of his voice.
My father spent Sunday night through Thursday afternoon in the ICU battling for his life. The immediate outcome of that battle was very much in doubt those first two days but by the end of Wednesday it looked like he might be starting to stabilize. On Thursday the medical team was comfortable moving Dad to an intermediate care step-down room and I accompanied him out of the ICU—the third time in the last six months I have had that experience—got him set up in his new situation and went to my hotel to turn in.
A little before 1:00 AM I received an emergency call that Dad had had a respiratory incident. It turned out to be a purely physical blockage of his airways from crud and inflammation but it still sent him in a dangerous direction and required an invasive intervention. I got a live update from the attending physician, offered Dad some reassurance over the speakerphone and then tried unsuccessfully to get some rest. It was a rough night.
Dad remained stable through the night and into today and there were some small signs of physical improvement but he also got almost no sleep last night and seemed weaker in concerning ways. We got updates from a couple physicians and they are still focused on recovery but we also confront some tough realities about the stress Dad's heart has experienced this week and the huge hole he will need to climb out of yet again in order to get back on a stable path.
And yet, Dad continues to show a remarkable will to beat the odds and get better. He spent much of today doing the breathing exercises the respiratory therapist recommended and using a suction wand to keep his airways clear when he coughs. Despite the huge challenge communication has been this week he periodically asked questions focused on what he needs to be doing to improve. We used an iPad and a lot of patient lip reading to get clear on what is most important to him when he returns to rehab. He is determined and forward-looking.
And at around 5:00 PM today, Dad surprised both me and himself when without any apparent wind-up he announced "I can talk!" His voice was labored and croaking but it was a voice, not the fragmented, mostly-inaudible whisper that has been all his body would permit him since Monday. It was clear yesterday that Dad—the essence of the man and mind— was still there, albeit reeling from the devastating impact of severe COVID and his profoundly weakened state. But this evening for the first time since this latest crucible began we were able to have a conservation. And, for reasons only God and Sigmund Freud know, the halting, partial return of Dad's voice came with the Queens accent of his youth in full flight like I have never heard from him before. You can take the philosopher out of Kew Garden Hills, apparently, but . . .
Dad has a ways to go before he can leave the hospital; he may encounter more bumps in the road; and the best-case scenario is a long, arduous rehabilitation with an uncertain outcome. Still and all, if the partial return of his voice and the possibility of a path forward are what the Universe decided to offer Robert Paul Wolff as a 91st birthday present, we will take it."
John Rapko,
If you are able to post a comment on Prof Tobias Wolff's FB page, would you leave a post for me suggesting that (if possible) Tobias or Patrick try to arrange for their dad to be able to listen to some of his favorite music as he is going through this illness and recovery? Several studies have suggested that critically ill patients seem to fare better when music therapy is part of their care.
Eric, I'm not able to comment on TBW's posts (probably because I'm not a 'friend''; the posts are 'public', so I can see them). I've been trying to remember what RPW's favorite music is--Is it something by Mozart with a prominent viola part, like the Sinfonia Concertante or the C Major String Quintet? If anyone is in contact with the sons, perhaps they would pass on the suggestion. I'd like to add this one by Sister Marie Keyrouz, which has helped a couple of people I knew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH8b2_wqh64
Eric, John, I emailed Tobias with your suggestions.
Well, seems like Tobias is useful for something, at least.
So what is that dig about?.... Nasty.
Have you not seen Tobias's political commentary on Facebook? Pathetic throughout.
Whatever Tobias's political opinions are (I don't have Facebook myself), wouldn't a basic sense of empathy restrain one from making nasty comments about him given the health crisis affecting his beloved father?
Nah
Anonymous,
Why are you making the false (and, btw, idiotic) assumption that everyone is on Facebook? I've never had a Facebook account and, as of now at any rate, do not intend to have one. As for your comment about TBW's political opinions, as others have mentioned this is probably not the most suitable time for them.
correction: should read "for it" -- to match w/ the singular "comment"
Latest update from TBWolff on Facebook: "My father is being discharged today or tomorrow morning and will spend some time in the wonderful rehab facility that helped him build back his strength following his first crisis. Their team of superb therapists are particularly motivated to help him regain the capacity they built with him during his last stay. His resilience and will to live are remarkable. And also, candor demands an acknowledgement that the path forward is uncertain.
I have not written in detail about all that my father has endured in the last few months and I will remain somewhat reticent for now, but to give some sense of what he faces: We now know that a medical error resulted in my father not receiving proper nutrition for well over two months, causing him to lose a lot of weight and become severely malnourished. We spent anxious months trying to understand what was happening before the error was finally identified. He went into the hospital two weeks ago today to have that problem addressed. It was in the emergency room when he came to the hospital that he was exposed and infected with Covid from another patient (who also infected his care manager). He had multiple procedures over the course of a week culminating in surgery under general anesthesia and then started crashing before the Covid was finally diagnosed. At the age of almost 91 with advanced Parkinson’s and recovering from surgery under general anesthesia while severely malnourished Dad had to find the reserves to battle a severe respiratory virus. He came within a hair’s breadth of having to be put on a ventilator from which he may never have been removed. It is a miracle he survived and found his way back to a stable state.
As I wrote the other day, my Dad is still there, still determined to get better, still asking for updates about news and world events. But it would be difficult to overstate the extent of his diminishment right now. “Profound” is inadequate.
The question is whether his body is capable of building the strength, weight and energy reserves he will need to move forward. Only his body will be able to answer that question. His will is inspiring. I do not know what will be possible."
Amazing. I am not totally sure what inspires a person to pull through in those circumstances - I perhaps have a ‘second half’ of life to find out - but judging from experience and from what Prof. Wolff has said on this blog, it’s easy to think the inspiration has a lot to do with his family.
Thank you again, John Rapko! So grateful that the rehab facility is so excellent. May it serve to allow our RPW to regain weight and strength. Bless his miraculous life-drive!
Decessero
Here I am at 24 years old learning what it means to truly want to live from a 91 year old... what a beautiful human, thank you Robert Paul Wolff.
I didn’t make any such assumptions, you pretentious cunt.
I am not surprised that the hospital "food" was inadequate for proper nutrition.
If I was caring for Professor Wolf I would definitely make sure he will be getting adequate protein. The standard 0.8 per kilogram of body weight is much too inadequate for seniors. He should be getting protein at least every 4 hours so he can stay in a positive nitrogen balance. Of course, I don't have his status other than he has the will to recover. Animal sources are best since they are more protein-dense than plant protein, but plant protein still is a viable option, one just has to eat more of it. Let's not forget Professor Wolff also needs vitamins, minerals, and good healthy fats like omega threes. One thing is essential he should have a short time trying to walk or just stand since his muscles need to be used. Exercise and getting strong is always an option no matter how old one is, it just has to meet the needs of the individual.
Professor Wolff is a strong determined man and I like others here wish him the best on the road to recovery.
I took your "have you not seen...?" to imply that everyone should have seen, which seems to imply that everyone has an FB account. Perhaps I overread your comment. Anyway, I have no compunction about turning the insult back on you. Though not much point in getting into a transatlantic slanging match (I assume you're probably from the UK given your choice of insult).
p.s. The real pretentiousness might lie in supposing that anyone cares that an anonymous commenter on RPW's blog doesn't like what one of his sons writes about politics on Facebook.
I was briefly in Facebook over 10 years ago. I connected with several family members whom I don't normally keep in contact with. Full of photos of happy families eating in expensive restaurants and on vacation in resorts where I would never venture. Always happy, always smiling, even though one realizes that families aren't always such happy places. I gave up on Facebook immediately.,
Besides that, my partner is active in Facebook and I didn't want to be in her space, so to speak. I'm in X and Bluesky, where she doesn't have accounts.
I deleted my Facebook over 10 years ago as well, so I entirely sympathize with wanting to keep your distance from that and from online trash in general (though 'alternative burial practices' sounds kind of intriguing, heh). But if you're concerned about falling behind on updates from Tobias, I think there may be a way to tweak your feed and notification settings so that new posts are sent to your e-mail...? Might be wrong.
JR, Thanks for the updates.
I thought about going and saying a novena, but doing that for an atheist seemed like asking for trouble. Instead, finding myself in London over the holidays I went to Highgate Cemetery and saluted the grave of Karl Marx: “Bob sends his regards”.
As for our new corporate overlords, life on earth will probably, mutatis mutandis, end up looking pretty much the same for most of us as it always has.
With a number of long plane rides to “enjoy” over the last few weeks I re-read The Good Soldier Svejk. To paraphrase Hasek’s hero, “A republic as stupid as ours ought not to exist”, but it nevertheless does, and I have come around to a genuine enjoyment of its absurdity!
Today on Facebook TBWolff writes: "More updates on Dad soon, but things are gradually moving in a better direction."
what a relief!!!!
On the recuperative front, how is Noam Chomsky doing? He just celebrated his 96th birthday in December. Both men are nonagenarians possessing a strong will to live the life of the mind.
I don't know whether Prof Wolff is well enough yet to be able to read, or have any interest in reading, but if he is and is tired of the hot air on cable news, there is a new translation of Marx's Capital Volume 1 out, translated and edited by Paul North (professor of German at Yale) and edited by Paul Reitter (professor of Germanic languages and literatures at OSU). It is the 1st major translation in decades. They specifically chose to focus on the 2nd (not 1st, 3rd, or 4th) German edition in part because that was the last edition that Marx himself, rather than Engels, oversaw the production of.
Some of the readers here may be interested to know that in an interview on the Guerrilla History podcast discussing their work on the project, Reitter and North mention:
@29:56 "Paul and I...our intellectual background is in some ways quite different from the backgrounds of the previous English translators and editors, and one thing that we have that they don't is a long period of engagement with German Jewish intellectual culture and literature. And Marx's citational techniques for me resonate in some ways with certain tendencies in German Jewish intellectual culture. And so, perhaps for that reason, among others, we hear things in his citational practices that the previous translators didn't hear, and for that reason they didn't pay quite as much attention to them, put as much of themselves into rendering this sort of stuff the way he ventriloquizes capitalists and political economists and workers...."
And they offer a few thoughts on why Marx said some of the controversial things he said about Jews.
I loved this anecdote about Marx and Engels (and Mrs. Marx) that James Miller used to open his review of the translation that was published by the NYT:
"Indifference was the world’s first reaction to Karl Marx’s magnum opus. In 1867, when the first volume of “Capital” was published in German, it was greeted with such silence that the author’s best friend and patron, Friedrich Engels, submitted pseudonymous reviews, most of them combative, to the leading German newspapers, in a futile effort to drum up publicity....
As the biographer Francis Wheen relates, Marx’s long-suffering wife, Jenny, was embittered by the public’s mute response to the book’s publication. 'If the workers had an inkling of the sacrifices that were necessary for this work, which was written only for them and for their sakes,' she complained to a friend, 'they would perhaps show a little more interest.'
Frustrated, Marx asked Engels, in one of the German reviews he wrote, to summarize “Capital” simply, using language that Marx helpfully supplied: It showed how 'present society, economically considered, is pregnant with a new, higher form,' and it revealed in human civilization 'the same gradual process of evolution that Darwin has demonstrated in natural history,' thus confirming the 'doctrine of progress.'"
Marx seems to be misreading Darwin. Speciation is not “progressive” in the ameliorative sense of the term—i.e., from worse to better, from lower to higher—it is merely blindly adaptive to changing material circumstances. It may well be that the post-capitalist order will be more to our liking, but it is equally possible that it will be even less to our liking. Human opinions regarding both (Those of religious fundamentalists toward natural selection and those of lefty fundamentalists toward capital) are both equally irrelevant … that is, if we take the analogy seriously.
As for assimilated German-Jewish intellectualism, in the United States this is pretty much synonymous with culture itself. Picture just how dismal this place would be otherwise.
But now that Eric is here, I’d like to ask him, what does he plan to do now that his hated Biden Admin is out of office? And when may we expect the new Admin to act to end the genocide in Gaza … by the first week in February?
Still awaiting an update from TBWolff, but I dropped in for a different service to humanity: I was very fortunate to be able to see the film Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat yesterday with a 20-minute introduction by the director Johan Grimonprez. It's among the greatest--gripping, intense, entertaining, informative, heart-breaking---documentaries I've ever seen, up there with Harlan County USA. The trailer is a bit misleading, in that the focus is on Patrice Lumumba and the Congo. If nothing else, the footage of Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and others protesting Lumumba's murder at the United Nations really must be seen. Aside from some of the world's greatest music (Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman et alia), there's footage of Andrée Blouin, Conor Cruise O'Brien, dastardly Dag HammarskjöId, Fidel Castro, Khrushchev, Malcolm X, and the CIA station chief in the Congo saying he received orders ultimately from Eisenhower to kill Lumumba. I would love to have the professor's response to the film, and would be very interested in reading others' responses if they touch on issues raised and discussed by RPW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RwLdIiZk_8
With great sadness I post the update from Tobias Barrington Wolff: "Robert Paul Wolff, December 27, 1933 – January 6, 2025.
My father passed away shortly before midnight last night. After a promising beginning to his recovery, he acquired some kind of infection and everything happened suddenly. In his profoundly weakened state after his terrible ordeal he was not able to mount a defense. My brother and I were on the phone and then FaceTime with him during his last two hours and surrounded him with expressions of care and love. He is survived by his wife Susan, the high school sweetheart with whom he reunited and married some thirty years after their young romance, his brilliant sister Barbara, and his two sons."
My condolences for Susan, Tobias and Patrick. We mourn the passing away of a great philosopher.
Condolences to the family. Hope the Blog remains long enough to reread the important contributions. Better that they may be consolidated elsewhere for posterity.
My condolences as well to Prof. Wolff's family. What a gift he was to all of us.
This is very sad. My condolences to the family and to anyone who was close to him. I hope to honor Prof. Wolff by reading his works.
Prof. Wolff said his feelings while studying Kant's Transcendental Deduction reminded him of Jacob wrestling with the angel - maybe *the* event of his philosophical life, or at least one of the main ones. He saw great beauty in the argument, and wished to convey this to other people. It seemed to represent his life's mission; for him the struggle of communicating its beauty and power (along with those of perhaps a few other philosophical works - Marx's was at least comparable) was capable of inspiring tears.
For all that, he said at some point recently on this blog that he had no greater source of pride than his sons. RIP - surely a great example to try to emulate.
My deepest condolences to Prof Wolff's family, friends, and colleagues.
Tonight, I will drink a glass of French red for Professor Wolff. He's been part of my life for more than a decade, and for others here, far longer.
RIP, Bob. Thanks for everything.
RIP, from a longtime reader (and often disagree-er)
This is sad news. My condolences to RPW's family. I did not know Prof. Wolff "in real life" but I did hear him speak in person on one occasion in 2010 (it would take too long to detail the circumstances) and recall a brief email exchange with him not too long after that. He combined his academic career with activism and his special connection to South Africa, about which he occasionally wrote on this blog (including founding and running a scholarship fund to help South African students attend college, often, iirc, in the U.S.). His breadth of interests was notable, and his YouTube lectures on Marx were memorable (at least for me). This blog enriched cyberspace for a long time, and his presence will be missed.
I wrote something to stick on Brian Leiter's blog, and hope it's appropriate here too. Thanks for so much, Professor! And best wishes to all the non-insulting commentators from whom I learned a great deal: I started reading Robert Paul Wolff's blog probably in 2016 (the earliest posts that I can remember related to the Bernie Sanders campaign), and have at least looked at it almost every day since. I can't think of anyone close to Wolff in combining philosophical penetration, wide-ranging interests, humaneness, and communicability. I hope someone will put together a volume of selected posts, perhaps along with the selected comments of s. wallerstein and others. Reading the blog also revivified a sense of how important Wolff's works were to me early on. I started taking philosophy classes at the local university when I was in high school, but the first class that really stuck with me was at age 18 a paragraph-by-paragraph reading and collective analysis of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason taught by the recently deceased Jim Friedman. I read it along with Norman Kemp Smith's commentary and Wolff's Kant's Theory of Mental Activity. It worked, and was a real foundation to philosophical seriousness. And an early reading of Wolff's The Poverty of Liberalism, along with some of Alasdair MacIntyre, permanently inoculated me against the temptations of that malign political philosophy. In honor of Wolff and his love of his second home in Paris, Rimbaud and I say "Salut à lui, chaque fois que chante le coq gaulois."
John Rapko, I believe you're confusing me with someone else, but thank you for the flattering cumpliments.
Very sad to read this. Prof Wolff had overcome so many other health challenges in recent years that a part of me expected he would get through this one as well. But he lived a very good life, and that time eventually comes for us all.
I was a student of Prof Wolff in the summer of 1984, the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, when he was moonlighting at Harvard Summer School, teaching an introductory course in political philosophy. When he introduced himself during the first class and explained that he was on the faculty at UMass Amherst, I felt a rather disappointed--I was expecting a real Harvard philosophy professor, not some guy from a local state school! Little did I know. LOL
But he turned out to be a phenomenal teacher, one whose lectures were not to be missed.
At the time I was debating whether to go into computer science or medicine, and I chose an intensive introductory course in computer programming as my other course for the summer to try to get an idea of whether I would enjoy and be successful in that field. The computer course was very rewarding but also very demanding, and I ended up spending probably 95% of my time that summer working on computer programs, resigned to the conviction that thinking more deeply about the philosophical issues would have to wait until some day when I had more time when I was older.
Years later, decades really, I came across RPW's YouTube lecture series while I was searching for new content from Marxian economist Richard D. Wolff (whom, incidentally, regular readers here know was on the faculty at UMass Amherst when RPW was active there). I downloaded a bunch of RPW's lectures on Marx, Kant, etc and began listening to them while doing chores or out on walks for exercise. Until then I had not really thought much about the professor who'd taught that philosophy class all those years ago, and certainly didn't recall his name, but when he mentioned in a lecture that he had a facial tic (something that in just experiencing the lectures from YouTube audio recordings I had no way of knowing), and he mentioned that he had been friends with Herbert Marcuse, I instantly remembered it was the same man who had taught my class!
And then when I found out he was blogging, I began reading his posts. It was only a matter of time before I would begin commenting. I think it would be fair to say that almost every word I have written here has been for an audience of one. I hope he was able to read and appreciate some of it, even with all the rancor at times among the commenters.
As this will likely be my last time to comment here, I would like to ask those readers who have not already read them to take a look at a few posts I shared a couple of months ago, when the topic of whether how great a philosopher is should be measured by the number of disciples he or she has birthed.
The relevant posts are in the comments to RPW's June 16, 2024 post "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi," beginning at Oct 1, 2024 9:00 PM and continuing through Oct 5, 2024 at 12:35 AM.
(Note that, depending on how you are accessing the blogger platform, you may need to click on the "Load More" link at the bottom of the first page of comments to be able to see these posts.)
(The main disadvantage of not having a Blogger account is that you can't fix typos & grammatical errors after the fact. Grrr)
Condolences to all and especially Prof. Wolff's family. This was one of my 'go to' blogs for many years which always gave me food for thought.
Although I've not posted often in recent months, I've remained a regular reader and will feel somewhat lost when this blog is over. I never met the Prof, but I knew his sister, Barbara, from taking several of her OLLI classes and heard about him from her--her philosopher brother. I stumbled on this blog through a reference from Brian Leiter's blog--and I don't remember how I found that one.
The Prof was a remarkable man. The depth and breadth of his knowledge and his skill in expressing it were incredibly impressive. I've found that growing old is a process of losing people, people whose loss leaves a hole in our lives. The loss of the Prof and this blog leaves a large one in mine.
When I heard the news, I felt an emotional thud. He's not here.
My participation at this blog had diminished over that years but I would still check in. On occasion I would write the professor directly and he would respond. He was here, hidden but present. You may recall that he gave us a way to contact him, by means of a specific question - should a longer than normal absence trigger a fear that something was wrong. I did use the code words twice..."Still here?" And twice he popped back with a commentary. Reassurance: all okay.
This morning I felt compelled to ask once more: still here?
Sigh!
Ave atque vale....
Perhaps at the appropriate time one of his sons might use this space to post and compile some of his unpublished materials posthumously… while also maintaining the community in the comments, for discussion.
Just a wishful thought given RPWs departure. :(
Earlier today Tobias Barrington Wolff posted on Facebook an obituary he wrote (it won't let me post the entire obituary in one comment, so I'll post it in as few as it lets me): 'Robert Paul Wolff, career-long philosopher and academic, died on January 6, 2025 at Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina. He was 91 years old.
Professor Wolff led a wide-ranging public intellectual life as a thinker, author, teacher and advocate. Born on December 27, 1933 to Charlotte “Lotte” Ornstein Wolff and Walter Harold Wolff and raised in the Kew Gardens Hills neighborhood of Queens, New York, Bob Wolff matriculated as a freshman at Harvard University in 1950 at the age of 16 where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1953 at age 19 and completed a PhD in Philosophy in 1957 at age 23 with his dissertation The Theory of Mental Activity in The Treatise of Human Nature and The Critique of Pure Reason. He began his career in academic philosophy as an instructor at Harvard in 1958 and a junior professor at the University of Chicago in 1961 before moving to a tenured position at Columbia University in 1964 where he went on to become the youngest Full Professor of Philosophy in the history of the department. He then left the world of elite private universities in 1971 to join the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and made his home at UMass until his retirement in 2008, first as a Professor of Philosophy and then as Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the PhD program of the Department of Afro-American Studies. In 2017 he was appointed to the Society of Senior Scholars at Columbia University.
As a scholar, Wolff was equally known for his critical analysis of major figures in the European philosophical tradition and for the numerous works of original philosophy he authored. His close analysis of Immanuel Kant’s writings on metaphysics and moral theory during his early career is the work on the European canon for which he has been most lauded, particularly Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity (1963) and The Autonomy of Reason (1974). In the middle part of his career he developed a passion for Karl Marx’s theory of labor economy in Das Kapital and wrote virtuosic treatments of that work in Understanding Marx (1984) and Moneybags Must Be So Lucky (1988).
Wolff’s original works of philosophy largely focused on the Western project of liberal democracy. His best-known book, In Defense of Anarchism (1970), is a critical examination of the possibility of legitimacy in state authority. In Defense of Anarchism has found a wide global audience across many disciplines and has been translated into dozens of languages. It was an apotheosis work, building on Wolff’s exploration of aspects of liberal democratic theory and institutions in The Ideal of the University (1969), The Poverty of Liberalism (1968), and A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965) co-authored with Herbert Marcuse and Barrington Moore, Jr.
Professor Wolff was as brash politically as he was precocious academically, leaping into public policy arguments over nuclear disarmament in the 1950s and 60s, the war in Viet Nam in the 1960s and 70s—at Columbia he took a prominent public stand in support of students who occupied Low Library during the antiwar protests of 1968—and the racist depredations of apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and 90s. It was a source of pride for Professor Wolff that he succeeded in being arrested in front of the Fogg Museum at Harvard during a protest urging the university to divest its holdings in the apartheid government of South Africa and he participated in the successful effort in 1989 to elect the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers on a pro-divestment platform.
The obituary continued:
Professor Wolff’s commitment to radical thought and liberal political values led him to become an institution builder. While in his first teaching position at Harvard he became one of the “founding fathers” and first head tutor of Social Studies, a cross-disciplinary program designed to enable students to investigate politically controversial or unconventional subjects and equip them with more powerful methodological tools. Social Studies continues at Harvard as a popular undergraduate concentration. Shortly after arriving at the University of Massachusetts he founded Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC), an undergraduate program built on the model of Social Studies and dedicated to the use of critical perspectives to analyze political and social relations within communities and institutions. STPEC recently celebrated its 50th anniversary and continues to be a robust part of undergraduate life at UMass Amherst.
Wolff’s involvement in the apartheid divestment movement of the 1980s led him to found a not-for-profit organization in 1990, University Scholarships for South African Students (“USSAS”), dedicated to making higher education available to Black South African students by funding them at scale to attend university within South Africa. USSAS was a one-man operation: Professor Wolff developed his own fundraising list and would use a mail-merge program to send out appeals to finance the bursaries that would enable Black South African students to attend the University of Durban-Westville and University of the Western Cape. The organization funded the education of more than 1,500 students during the two decades it was in operation. Wolff traveled to South Africa on numerous occasions to establish and strengthen the relationships necessary to make this effort successful and in 2011 he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by University of the Western Cape in recognition of the impact of his efforts. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, then Chancellor at UWC, officiated the degree ceremony.
At his home institution, Professor Wolff translated his growing commitment to racial justice into a bold career turn. Working in partnership with the faculty of the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass—a field in which Wolff had no academic training or expertise—he moved his tenured professorship out of Philosophy and into Afro-Am in order to dedicate his energy and organizational skills to helping create a PhD program, the first non-Afrocentric PhD in Afro-American Studies at any university. Professor Wolff served as the first Graduate Program Director for the fledgling PhD program, which has been producing successful graduates with distinguished careers in the Academy ever since. He remained in the Afro-Am Department until his retirement in 2008 and wrote about the importance of African-American Studies as an academic discipline and his experience finding this new professional home in a monograph with the characteristically provocative title Autobiography of an Ex-White Man (2005).
The final section of the obituary: After retiring, Wolff moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his second wife and first love Susan Wolff (née Schaeffer), the high school sweetheart from Queens whom he found again and married in 1988 after the end of his first marriage in 1986 to Cynthia Griffin Wolff, the noted scholar of American literature. (Cynthia Wolff passed away in July 2024.) Bob and Susie Wolff spent much of their retirement splitting their time between Chapel Hill and Paris where they embarked upon a grand adventure with the purchase of a small apartment in the Fifth Arrondissement just off Place Maubert, visiting as often as they could until travel became too difficult.
Retirement also brought a new chapter to Wolff’s life as a public intellectual when he created a popular blog, The Philosopher’s Stone, that he used as a platform for offering commentary on politics and policy, discussing the existential challenges of aging, and finding a new audience for his published works. The blog community he gathered was lively, enthusiastic, sometimes raucous, and the eagerness of that community for substantive engagement inspired Wolff to record and upload videos to YouTube of his lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and other subjects of analytical philosophy. He would often remark with amazement that these videos allowed him to reach an audience for his lectures orders of magnitude greater than the number of students he taught in person during his career.
In his last years, Professor Wolff developed Parkinson’s Disease which advanced quickly and imposed severe physical limitations. He adapted to his disabilities with a combination of frustration and resigned good humor and refused to suffer unnecessary constraints on his intellectual work, continuing to write actively on his blog, teaching courses on ideology and society at Columbia University and the University of North Carolina, and remote-teaching a course on volume one of Marx’s Kapital to a group of faculty, graduate students and undergraduates at Harvard in the spring semester of 2024 when he was 90 years old.
The Harvard course would prove to be Wolff’s valedictory as a professor. His physical disabilities led to a fall in June 2024 that produced a severe subdural hematoma. After several brushes with death he beat the odds, survived that brain injury with a full cognitive recovery, and spent late summer and fall 2024 attempting to recover his physical capacity from the ordeal while also planning to design and teach a course on the misuses of formal methods. A combination of circumstances frustrated his ability to succeed in his recovery, however, and led to additional medical crises that left him profoundly weakened. In his last days he was unable to survive an infection that led to his sudden death from septic shock on January 6, 2025, ten days after his 91st birthday.
In late November 2024, a few weeks before the start of his final decline, Wolff was still posting commentary on his blog about the coming return of a presidential administration he reviled and the incoherence of the term “tactical nuclear weapon” in public discourse on Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. He was no longer able to type and required assistance to translate his dictated blog entries into the written word. But his voice was not stilled.
In addition to his wife Sue, Professor Wolff is survived by his sister Barbara Searle, sons Patrick Gideon Wolff and Tobias Barrington Wolff, Patrick’s wife Diana Schneider and their children Samuel Emerson Wolff and Athena Emily Wolff, stepsons Lawrence Gould and Jonathan Gould and their wives Suzanne Gould and Tamara Dyer.
Thank you ever so much, John Rapko!
Mourning with the entire community over this enormous loss.
My sincere condolences to Professor Wolff‘s family and friends, from a longtime reader of this blog.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/legacyremembers/robert-wolff-obituary?id=57223118
Thank you John Rapko. RPW was a remarkable, remarkable man.
Condolences to his family - I always enjoyed this blog and will miss reading it and checking it. Thank you to RPW for generosity of spirit, encouragement and engagement. He will be greatly missed.
My deepest condolences to Professor Wolff's family and friends. I will miss his unique voice and perspective.
Thank you Professor Wolff! You were my teacher for over 40 years. My condolences to the family.
Dear Professor,
Wherever you are now, perhaps you will read this short message on your journey.
When I saw the first of your Kant lessons about 5 years ago, I had the impression of hearing a travelogue, except that the country the traveler was describing was the text that its author called “Critique of Pure Reason”.
I quickly realized that you really walked the paths you covered in this text with your feet. The places you described to your listeners, you saw with your eyes. So the experiences you conveyed to your listeners had the authenticity of a person who was really there with everything he was and everything that made him who he was, whether it was a text by Kant, Marx or Freud, or the streets and alleys of Paris.
I will miss you very much!
My heartfelt condolences go out to the whole family.
Anonymous, It never crossed your mind that Professor Wolff's family may glance at this comments section from time to time and that what you say might be traumatic for a grieving family?
s. wallerstein: you really don't need to be the santimony police or virtue signaller in chief.
Anybody literate enough to read that comment will detect the intrinsic malice/schadenfreude unaided; nobody who has any psychological maturity should be traumatized by it. We don't have to call attention to the obvious or indulge our instinct to scold what we don't approve.
And we really don't have to be offended by proxy. Aren't you finally tired of assuming the burden of taking umbrage on behalf of all those whose sensitivities you presume to know?
-not the same Anonymous (obviously)
I'm with Anonymous 2; also, how easy it is to trigger some of you! I mean, it was obvious bait from that Anonymous...
Look guys. Your criticizing me for virtue signaling is a form of virtue signaling and of sanctimony policing, I reserve the right to over-react whenever people mock recently departed people whose existence means something to me. I will be offended by whatever the fuck I feel offended by and if that turns you guys off, you know where you can stuff it.
Spoken like a pretentious and sanctimonious cunt - go back to Twitter
Ahhhh - so nice to see the real s. wallerstein. You like to come across as nice, reasonable, objective, and a not unintelligent above the fray kind of guy, but when the appearance is scratched, you prompty reveal yourself as a vicious, mean-spirited, nasty stupid little man.
-Anonymous 2 (I guess)
The last exchange is another illustration of my theory of the troll, which I developed out of parts of Melanie Klein's thoughts on envy and gratitude. The troll, like the infant in the paranoid-schizoid position, splits the object (i.e. the breast) into the good object and the bad object. Unable to introject (basically, to make part of itself) the good object, it unleashes its destructive impulses upon the (fantasied) bad object. Unable further to distinguish the good and bad objects, it aims to degrade the (idealized) good object by stuffing its feces (in fantasy, mind you) into it. So the theory goes like this: the troll knows his lack of goodness, and this gnaws at him. He cannot tolerate the existence of the goodness he lacks. His only, highly temporary relief from his sense of his own meaninglessness is to attack goodness. He anxiously monitors the world for the appearance of goodness, and aims to show that the appearance is mere appearance. So comes the anonymous attack. If the attacked object responds, then the troll jubilantly proclaims that the appearance is indeed mere appearance, and that the troll is himself superior to attacked object, since at least the troll never pretended to goodness. And that, friends, is why we don't feed the trolls and just let them continue their anxious search.
This "theory" (like all psychoanalytically derived stories) has the convenient feature of being unfalsifiable. It applies equally to s. wallerstein. And actually to your own comment.
Confirmation in three.... two....
Don’t feed the trolls? I think the point here is that some people are just too keen to react and virtue signal at any opportunity
This is a statement I've rarely had occasion to write; S. Walerstein is absolutely correct. I too am outraged that some asshole, too cowardly to give us his name, has made disparaging remarks about anyone in this situation, let alone the remarkable man we've all treasured.
Thank you very much, David. We can both agree that Professor Wolff was a remarkable man, as you say.
It is good to read all the sincere outpourings of grief over Professor Wolff's recent passing and genuine love for him as a person who had lived - and, I believe, sought to live - a good life in accordance with principles of social justice. He was a fine and humble philosopher too. Like most of you, I too have been following his blog for sometime and have, on occasions, made some (hopefully) useful comments. Also, perhaps like most of you, I have had some private correspondence with him, which would always end with him signing off as 'Bob Wolff'. Finally, let it be said, even in retirement Professor Wolff still made intellectual contributions for which we can all be extremely grateful, such as his extensive critical review of Thomas Piketty's book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". Vale, Robert Paul Wolff (1933-2025).
Stephen Darling reminds us of the professor's review of Piketty, and on Brian Leiter's blog Rob Hughes recommends a three-part post on 'The Pimple on Adonis's nose'. If anyone else recalls especially interesting and/or favorite posts, I would be very interested in seeing them linked here with some words about why you particularly liked them.
The obsession with names - the deceased was also obsessed with that. Who cares what some random person has to say online, really? You guys are too easy to outrage, methinks.
Pretty simple, how about just trying to be kind when the moment calls for it?
Spoken by a fellow occasional troll. Since I’m Anonymous I receive zero “virtue signaling” points, right?
Unacceptable.... really, unacceptable.
I am the one who just said that "Anonymous's" comment is "Unacceptable.... really, unacceptable." And moreover, cruel, really cruel.
Sorry to disrespect the memory of Prof. Wolff by way of a few unrelated reflections here, prompted mainly by the recent trolling.
I never did totally get the psychology behind abuse/bullying etc., though I'm a bit further along than I was in the past. It seems at first to be sheer gratuitous cruelty, but of course it's gradually discovered that "hurt people hurt people" (not that this necessarily softens the unpleasantness of the abuse).
I don't think there'd be much sense in making out those Anonymous comments as more outrageous than pitiable. For one thing, despite their intelligence (i.e., the sort of intelligence that's helpful for pointed put-downs), I don't see any genuine substance to them. I don't think anyone honestly doubts that Prof. Wolff was a decent person who conducted his life in an honorable, admirable way; I don't think anyone honestly fails to see that Anonymous's "shockingly" shitty comments are "shockingly" shitty. (Side note: The criticism of Ice Cream's statement as "unfalsifiable" seems out of place alongside the accusation that s.w. is "virtue-signaling." I mean, the accusation of "virtue-signaling" seems in the same way unfalsifiable, as it amounts to claiming that the other person is "really" acting on some discreditable but unobservable motive. Are we simply picking-and-choosing as to when "unfalsifiable" means "devoid of interest or plausibility"?)
To say that trolling is more pitiable than outrageous isn't totally speculative on my part. I went through a pretty rough stretch in late adolescence, where experiences of love, friendship, service, solidarity, and the corresponding sense of self-worth didn't come easily at all. And it happened that during this vulnerable developmental time of life, I became attracted to some online "communities" that (while enriching and entertaining in other, healthier ways) tended to reward over-the-top tasteless and offensive behavior - places affording many (mercifully secondhand) glimpses of 4chan-type stuff, etc. - as if the most enjoyable social activity were to hurt and humiliate others, to embellish and celebrate our uglier qualities. This was a difficult, damaging time (and of course I don't totally have it together today, either), but it ended up helping me along to a general view that consciously hurtful behavior doesn't come from a good place.
Maybe this is simply naive (or maybe Prof. Wolff would be amused to see the stubborn Tigger-ness). But beyond denying trolls the gratification of taking offense, maybe a decent "constructive" responsive (even if it can rarely succeed) is trying to imagine what sort of place they're coming from and to hint that there's a way out. Apart from whatever cases of just-plain-sickness, I don't doubt that these people have genuinely positive, valuable qualities about them simply by being intelligent human beings who try to learn about and share with their fellows. I just think those qualities have been under-nourished or suppressed over time, and are purposefully put out of sight in the comments above. Not sure what else can be done here but to offer a slight bit of recognition and encouragement - you do have good things to offer, you're cut out for better things than trolling.
Let’s not over-intellectualise matters now. The ‘Finally! He took his time’ comment was meant as a joke, surely, and as bait, as someone else said. I did find it amusing, in fact; a little levity, guys.
Re: Levity--Early today Tobias Barrington Wolff posted on Facebook a lengthy account of his end-of-life caring for both his parents. After hesitating for a couple of minutes, I excerpt and re-post here the part specifically about the professor's end of life: "My father's decline was almost wholly physical in nature. The final chapter of his life following his brain injury in June 2024 was consumed with the devastation of that trauma but for years leading up to that event he had been experiencing the slow erosion of his physical capacities from Parkinson's Disease. Those years were difficult. My father's courage and perseverance were genuinely impressive but there were also waves of despondency. I spoke with Dad regularly and was a primary audience for his feelings of despair. I worked to shift him into his places of intellectual power and engagement in our phone calls, which to his credit he often found his way back to. But the slow erosion of my father's physical capacities was defining our time together for a long time before his injury.
During the seven months of his acute crisis, my father's physical infirmities went from a subject of regular and heavy attention to the dominating fact of his world. The month I spent with him in July and the weeks in August, September and December all required unrelenting focus on his physical needs and condition. The last two hours of Dad's life in the emergency room one week ago today, which my brother and I spent with him on the phone and then on FaceTime, were gravity waves following the black hole collision inside his body and I rode the warping of my personal space-time while confronting the reality that my father would not find a way through this time."
He was in his 90s, what do you expect? Incidentally, does this Tobias know of privacy at all? I have checked his facebook account on occasion and he acts like he’s a celebrity - sharing far too much about far too many events, and the profile is open to anyone. I don’t understand it.
Lieutenant Wallerstein of the Sanctimonious Police reporting for duty. What is your game? I can understand that Professor Wolff's death does not grieve you in the least. But if someone dies and I see others mourning them, even if I don't share that spirit of mourning, I keep silent. Unless maybe it's Henry Kissinger who died and I might point out that he wasn't really such a great human being, but I believe Professor Wolff gets at least a passing grade on living a decent life, unless you're a rightwing troll who found him to be a commie subversive and I don't believe that's you.
R.P. Wolff himself was fairly open about some personal matters on this blog, so if his son wants to be open on FB, I'm not sure that he's violating anyone's privacy. I would be more inclined to the privacy end of the spectrum for myself (as I've mentioned, I'm not on FB at all) but am disinclined to pass judgment on different choices that others make. What I don't understand is why you feel compelled to comment on your view that Tobias W. shares "far too much about far too many events" -- why even comment about that here? My guess is that he finds it helpful to write about this, and if he wants to share it on FB that's his decision. There's sometimes a fine line between levity and offensiveness, and certain comments by anonymous commenters in this thread have crossed that line, IMHO.
John Rapko, you are a dear to pass along Tobias's post in Facebook. It is meaningful and welcome.
I suspect the game is to rile you up, and as mentioned above, you are just falling for it and getting all upset about it. On Tobias, I also find him exasperating; he thinks he's a celebrity, sharing his opinions with the world on pretty much anything. And it's all so pretentious and self-righteous is unbearable.
A short obituary of RPW from UMass Amherst, mostly relating to his founding of their Social Thought and Political Economy program: https://www.umass.edu/social-thought-political-economy/news/memory-stpec-founder-robert-paul-wolff
John Rapko asked if anyone woud share some of their favorite RPW posts. Well, I have a bunch. But a relatively recent one which springs to mind had the title "Marx Book Day Six," from September 14, 2023. It opens with a discussion of Marx's use of irony:
"In order for us to understand why Marx has chosen to write the opening chapters of Capital in so strange a fashion, we must take a little time to examine certain matters of literary theory which at first seem very far from the economic, political, and historical issues with which Marx is dealing....
Irony is a mode of literary discourse that rests on the oldest and most fundamental distinction in Western philosophy, the distinction between appearance and reality."
He continues:
"The Socratic distinction between appearance and reality has been called into question on the grounds that it presupposes an “essentialist” ontology....
Such ontological claims, it is said, make philosophical sense only on the fundamentally religious premise that being is the product of a purposeful creation, inherent in which is the telos of the Creator. Without such a premise, there is no ground for calling one aspect or element of the world truly real, and another aspect or element merely appearance. Marx, the anti-essentialists observe, frequently speaks in this essentialist way, but he thereby merely manifests the influence of his Hegelian education. They conclude that insofar as we wish to follow Marx in the establishment and development of a scientific theory of society and history, we must put behind us these last philosophical echoes of religious mythology, and develop a theory of capitalism in which the distinction between essence and appearance plays no role.
I embrace this critique of essentialism in the terms in which it is enunciated. I am quite unprepared to readmit into social theory the religious superstitions that were, with such great effort, driven out of philosophy. Nevertheless, I propose to build my entire interpretation of Capital on the objectively grounded distinction between appearance and reality."
And my favorite part--he concludes with this humorous anecdote that he shared at greater length in his memoir:
Perhaps I can conclude today’s episode of this serial book by telling a little personal story that captures something of what I have been trying to communicate. My first wife, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, was raised in a Catholic home and although by the time I met her she was no longer a practicing Catholic, she still retained some of the affect and instincts of her former faith. In the late 1970s, when we were living in Northampton Massachusetts, I was for a period of time the Cubmaster of the local Cub Scout pack, to which both of my sons, Patrick and Tobias, belonged. Most of the little boys in our group were Catholic, as were the women who served as den mothers. We met each month in the basement of a local Catholic Church. One of the boys in the Cub Scout pack, Eddie Scagel, had completed some program for Catholic Cub Scouts and the priest decided to celebrate a mass to mark the occasion. While I was downstairs preparing for the meeting, everyone else was upstairs taking part in the mass. I got done early and went upstairs to see what was going on just as everybody lined up in two rows in front of the altar to receive the host. To my horror, I saw Patrick and Tobias at the end of one of the lines. I was about to rush forward and drag them off the line when I thought to myself, “what the hell, it is not real anyway, let them go.” When we got home that night, Cindy asked me how the meeting had gone. I answered gaily “it was great. Patrick and Toby received holy Communion.” The blood drained out of Cindy’s face and I thought she was going to faint. She might no longer be a good Catholic girl, but the religion still had a hold on her.
I'd intended to post the following a couple of weeks ago, but got caught up with some other things.
If anyone is wondering why the Democrats lost the presidential election:
"Defaults on US credit card loans have hit the highest level since the wake of the 2008 financial crisis....
Credit card lenders wrote off $46bn in seriously delinquent loan balances in the first nine months of 2024, up 50 per cent from the same period in the year prior and the highest level in 14 years, according to industry data collated by BankRegData....
'High-income households are fine, but the bottom third of US consumers are tapped out,' said Mark Zandi, the head of Moody’s Analytics. 'Their savings rate right now is zero.'"
Financial Times, Stephen Gandel, Dec 29, 2024
Among various points along these lines made by RPW, he drew attention to the end of ch. 6 of Capital vol. 1, where Marx invites the reader to follow him in a figurative descent into "the hidden abode of production" and contrasts it with the sphere of commodity exchange where everything occurs "on the surface". These passages (among others in Capital) are very much about the appearance/reality distinction. The language and imagery here are powerful, imo, apart from the merits (or lack thereof) of the underlying argument. (I've written a short post about this but may not post it for quite a while, as I'm busy with other things at the moment and my blog has an extremely tiny readership anyway.)
I for one honor your grief for it is shared. Professor Wolff (I guess we can drop the formality and all call him Bob) is strangely still present. He was an interesting man and for a deep thinker and deep person, we get the sense of really knowing him. He was a very interesting man, complex yet simple (like advanced math or some kinds of jewels). Even more strange, as much as he wished capitalism disappeared, he lived a charmed life under its auspices. This was the best of all posible worlds for Professor Wolff yet the worst of all possible worlds, for the world we inherit uopn his leaving us (I do not need to elaborate)
Those who deliberately 'unworthily' receive the Blessed Sacrament/Holy Communion do so unto their own eternal condemnation. (St. Paul) It functions as 'anti-Grace' (my term) for such wicked individuals- and those who 'put them up to it'. Talk about child abuse! And then to go home and taunt your wife about it. What a foolish, despicable little man RPW was. His sacrilege here is of a diabolical piece with his praise of Black Panther snipers during the 1967 Detroit and Newark riots, during which, BTW, my father, a Detroit police officer, received a shrapnel wound courtesy of one of the just mentioned lawless cowards.
Anonymous writes that "Those who deliberately 'unworthily' receive the Blessed Sacrament/Holy Communion do so unto their own eternal condemnation. (St. Paul)", seemingly in response to the professor's story about allowing his sons to receive Holy Communion. This remark presents interpretive problems: 1. The relevant passage is of course 1 Corinthians 11.27f, where Paul writes "Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily [anaxiōs] will be answerable [enochos--a legal term, so something like 'liable'] for the body and blood of the Lord." The context is Paul chastising the Corinthians for their eating what should be the common meal in cliques of rich and poor, and so forgetting or ignoring the original intention of the meal to participate in the blood of Jesus and in the new covenant instituted by the Last Supper (see e.g. Günther Bornkamm's book Paul, pp. 192-93) Paul then enjoins that a man must first examine himself [dokimazetō] and (only?) then to eat and drink of the body and blood. In an exceptionally intriguing phrase, Paul does say that those who eat and drink without self-examination (and/or unworthily) do so "without discerning [diakrinōn] the body" (11.29), and because of this "many of you are weak and ill, and some have died" (11.30). But here comes the kicker: everybody's going to be judged; the question is only by whom. If we judge ourselves, we won't be judged (11.31). But if the Lord judges us, we are 'disciplined' [paideuometha--perhaps more accurately 'corrected', and surely with at least connotations of 'educated'], "so that we may not be condemned along with the world" (11.32). So there's nothing here in this particular passage about eternal condemnation; on the contrary! And surely Paul does not think generally the Corinthians were so condemned for their lapse with regard to the common meal. 2. Even on Anonymous's implausible interpretation, I don't see why the professor would be condemned eternally. There's nothing whatsoever in the passage about allowing others to receive Holy Communion. The professor was avowedly an unbeliever, but what do we know of his sons' beliefs, then or now? 3. Given the highly implausible interpretation of Paul's remarks in First Corinthians in the previous comment, I wonder what the professor actually said about the Black Panther snipers. Would Anonymous be so charitable as to quote/link the passage and its relevant context?
The Black Panther Party was founded in 1966 and as far as I know, it had not expanded beyond California at the time of the Detroit and Newark riots in 1967.
John Rapko/ s. wallerstein - I wouldn't waste time on this particular anonymous. His screed bears a striking similarity to a former commentator to this blog. Regardless of who wrote it, it is nothing more than cloaca, an underused Latin term.
I fervently and with good humor propose that the world would be a better place if we were eulogizing Trump while hailing the Wolff Presidency, being the first anarchist and the first Marxist to serve but not the first philosopher, for that honor goes to Jefferson.
I think I had the same thought as CJM. Reminds me of the guy we met here a while back:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2020/02/success.html
There's something funny about the way JR critiques the guy's position above. The reasoning behind that position might be boiled down to:
1. If the writings of St. Paul state that all non-believers who participate in Communion go to Hell, then all non-believers who participate in Communion go to Hell.
2. The writings of St. Paul state that all non-believers who participate in Communion go to Hell.
3. Therefore, all non-believers who participate in Communion go to Hell.
Despite the thoroughness of his comment, I don't think JR means to give the impression that 2 is where our friend's case might be particularly unconvincing. :)
I'm determined to stay off the internet today, but before I go I must say that I really enjoyed reading the professor's one sentence post from 2020 about the troll, and then the lively exchanges of comments. I got a nice hit of pleasurable nostalgia.--One of my fellow Nietzscheans once said to me that the worst thing that early-in-life immersion in Nietzsche had done to him was to give him an unreflective and ignorant dislike of Rousseau. For me it was a stupid early-in-life dislike and avoidance of Paul. Nowadays Paul is, along with Origen and Augustine, in my Top 100 favorite writers. Paul's central writings are full of the kind of astonishing leaps that one sees in the gap between 11.30 and 11.31 in First Corinthians. Along with Paul's writings themselves and the basic secondary literature of E. P. Sanders and Bornkamm, I would enthusiastically recommend Alain Badiou's book on Paul as the exemplum of revolutionary militancy.--In the last week I've chatted with quite a few people who are anxiously asking "What should we do? What should I do? What are we to do for the next 4 years?" I've found myself quoting one of the Church Fathers (I think it was Tertullian, but I'm not sure) who responded to the question 'Why did God put so much evil in the world?' with 'So that you don't have to go far to do good'.
Maybe we need to start with verse 17? Anyway, this is interesting:
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lg74qw7q5x2n
BTY, all of the planets save Mercury are currently visible (telescopes needed for Uranus and Neptune, of course) and Mercury joins in at the end of Feb.
The Harvard Crimson has published a brief memorial notice that focuses on RPW's last class, a zoomer on Das Kapital in Spring 2024: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/1/21/robert-paul-wolff-obituary/?fbclid=IwY2xjawH81QJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWeX_o0-iPJWKh8Ga_h-n6S6wbLYSpFrg6ygVr_WJFQh7_tD4-ZRxUNQmQ_aem_6Ak1c6kCJqM_nNtt3FMMZA
J. Rapko,
Thanks for the pointer, but the Crimson obituary is not a brief notice. It's quite extensive and covers a lot more than just that last class on 'Capital.' Here's a more workable (I think) link to it:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/1/21/robert-paul-wolff-obituary/
It is morally insane, Wallerstein, to approve of snipers (whether BP, as AI says, or not) shooting at fire fighters, and the police officers trying to protect them. Civilization fundamentally depends upon Wolff's contrary position being a paradigmatic public opinion outlier. But, boy, that RFGA , Ph.D. was prescient (unlike Mulvaney who trusted the risible 11th hour Des Moines' presidential poll). He realized even back in the dark Plandemic days that the American electorate at large would eventually discover that President DonaldTrump, God bless him, is the only man standing between them and the diabolical globalists seeking to destroy their beloved country. But, what he still probably doesn't get is how leftists' professed compassion for working people, which is what Trumpists primarily are, is compatible with the contempt they are now held in by said would be benefactors, simply for choosing President Trump over them for their political savior?
The one-time President of Planned Parenthood dies of brain cancer. A few days latter, President Trump frees imprisoned pro-Life activists. Definitely not a good week for baby murderers. Where's Moloch when you need him? God bless America. God bless Donald Trump. Amen.
You should try dying of brain cancer next, dipshit
I beat it twice, MFR, God is with me. Like President Trump in Butler. God bless 🇺🇸.
“Abba, selach ’ethon la nakhru mah h’mon pelalin!” The English philosopher-comedian Stewart Lee is evidently a close reader of the the professor's blog, and has just published a response to some of the most recent comments: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/26/the-donald-and-elon-show-is-an-unholy-mess
If only
The American electorate has just had an epiphany: DJT + MAGA = defeat of the leftist menace threatening their way of life. No more PC censorship Woke racism, infanticide, sodomy, treason, DEI incompetence, etc.. I won, you lost.
Of all the things to whine about, ‘sodomy’?
Because the very thought of gay people living in our neighborhoods, minding their business without our judgment and meddling, building relationships and sharing their lives together, sometimes being physically intimate (!!!) - and doing all this without interference from law enforcement? Yeah, man, having to deal with that would be super oppressive and threatening to our way of life. But thankfully Donald J. Christ is on our side. We shall overcome!
studies indicate that homophobia is linked to latent homosexual arousal.
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0021-843X.105.3.440
Sodomy is #2 on the list of the 4 Sins Crying out to Heaven for Vengeance. Right behind Murder and ahead of Denying a Worker his Wage and Oppressing the Poor. Sure if you elide the fact that so-called gays are violating Natural Law, they can appear to be perfectly normal. What you call homophobia, normal people consider disgust and revulsion. But, speaking of labels, I propose that we re-name this blog My Dead Leftist Punching Bag.
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