On learning one's native language

It's a fascinating process to watch. Goomba is now almost two and has a lot of single words and a few pat phrases like "out, daddy" and "more, please," but putting words together in new ways poses all kinds of problems. In August, she learned about cars and trucks and buses, and become obsessed with pointing them out whenever we saw one, which is really quite often when you live in a house on a street in America.

We have a bus stop right in front of our house, so buses were a special attraction, and once school started, I pointed out to her the different between city bus ("see-bus") and school bus ("shoo-bus"). This was very exciting! She would chant see-bus and shoo-bus all day to herself, whether in the presence of buses or not. And then we came across a new form of transportation: the firetruck. However, because she was so enthralled by buses, she couldn't wrap her mind around the idea of this big, red bus being called a truck. So it became known as "firebus." And she sat in her carseat happily chanting "firebus firebus firebus" for days in spite of my continual response "no, fireTRUCK." Then, after a week of firebus, she finally switched to firetruck (actually, something more like "firetuck").

We thought she was interested in the category of things that go - logical! - but it turns out that she's more interested in expanding the newly-discovered categories of "bus" and "fire." She wants to know about every kind of bus, and also every kind of fire. From firetruck, we get fireplace, fireflies. We also have to discuss fire itself (which makes me nervous).

Eighteen months really marked a magical mental leap. It was like her mind reached out grasped a big new chunk of the world and ingested it (big proportional to her size; she's still got a lot of world left to ingest), and she suddenly understood and could communicate all kinds of new things. She's been like a qualitatively different creature ever since. I now recommend 18 months as the best turning point to all my friends with younger babies.

Buying influence in the university

One underlying fallacy behind arguments like this is that but for the money they get from donors, academics (or, journalists, writers, artists, etc.) would be writing about and arguing for entirely the reverse of what they now say. They are either natural intellectual blank slates, people with no ideas or opinions of their own arrived at from their own study and reflection, or, in this case, they are natural socialists. But dangle a few Koch dollars in front of them, and they will bust out into a libertarian free-market dance. Since academics and universities have no private interests of their own, if we can eliminate private funding from higher education, we eliminate private interest with it. And what's left behind is unconstrained "free" thought:

The more thinking is directly subsidized, the less it is actually free—which is to say, empowered to range where the relevant thinkers please, without any worries about a funder’s intellectual preferences. Private money for academia comes with a cost—especially when the funders are corporations, even if the beneficiaries are putatively liberal.

Public money, we are asked to conclude, comes with no such "worries" about "a funder's intellectual preferences," because democratic and legislative majorities have no "intellectual preferences" to foist on the beneficiaries of their largess. They fund immense state university systems purely for the satisfaction of empowering "thinkers" to let their thoughts range freely and would be perfectly content if, say, every product of these institutions elected to become a professional philosopher, or better yet, an anti-democratic revolutionary. The only actors in our regime motivated by private interest are rich people.

Let us try to imagine, instead, how it is the academics who are getting the better of the donors. In reality, academics come with a lot of pre-existing convictions, stronger ones than the average person's (though not necessarily wiser) on account of the immense intellectual energy they've devoted to cultivating them. Unlike donors who've made fortunes selling doo-dads or maybe other people's money, academics have only one thing to sell - their ideas. And they can hardly get anything for them on the open market. They make nothing in royalties because no one buys their $150 books, and they publish all their articles that no one reads for free. But along comes some rich guy who's willing to hand them millions of dollars to produce and publicize the very things they've been slaving over in obscurity for so many years. This rich guy has agreed to forego all the potential interest and dividends he could earn by investing the same money in something actually lucrative, and to let them use it instead for completely money-losing ventures like putting on conferences and teaching classes and hiring post-docs. Moreover, the rich guy is not himself a scholar, so he doesn't really know or care how the sausage is made, just so long as the scholars he funds keep on saying the sorts of things they've always said, which he likes but probably does not fully understand (or else he'd use his moneyz to become a scholar himself). His money alone can't force more people to read or agree with the things the scholars write, but it can make their writing of these things much easier and more comfortable for them. Which is to say, so long as the scholars keep on doing the work which they previously did very assiduously for minimal monetary rewards, they will get big monetary rewards from a guy who has devoted himself to amplifying their influence without really understanding their work. Is the donor buying influence, or are the scholars selling donors a bill of goods?

Obviously, it's not that bad for the poor rich guy because he believes that academic influence matters, and maybe it even does, so he may be getting his money's worth. But these sorts of condemnations of private money in higher ed never seem to consider that academics have ideas and interests, very strong ones, that often precede any offers of private money to pursue those ideas and interests. You can't create a libertarian or a liberal or any other kind of ideologue by picking a professor out of a hat and handing him a check. Libertarian donors fund scholars who are themselves libertarian, liberals fund liberals, and so on, and scholars seek out like-minded funders on the same principle. Donors don't want to change scholars' minds by funding them; that would be even more inefficient than funding scholarship in the first place. So if "buying influence" is not really about paying people to advance your ideas, but paying people to keep advancing their own ideas which you agree with, then what is the problem? Is it substantially different from donating money to universities to use for other purposes, like building a new dorm or hiring faculty or even to use for whatever purpose they elect?

Describing a libertarian beneficiary of libertarian funding, Johnson claims that,

The problem is the way he has been able to leapfrog the entire customary governing structure of a university and, via his wealthy friends’ emoluments, enjoy a coronation as the equivalent of university dean. If aspiring political philosophers want some of the post-docs, fellowships, or conference presentations Schmidtz’s center can lavish on them, they obviously need to gain Schmidtz’s favor; Schmidtz’s favor, in turn, relies upon that of his benefactors. If students are not libertarians, they are likely to modulate their views. And as for the true believers, the financial and professional support they find is enviable.

This assumes that "the customary governing structure of a university" is itself a shining example of disinterestedness, and that this fellow Schmidtz is the only game in town for professional advancement. If there were no jobs in philosophy for non-libertarians, then we might say that the "need to gain Schmidtz's favor" to advance is a problem for the discipline. But that's never the case. If you don't like Schmidtz or the work he does, you can apply instead to dozens of other equally narrow positions and funding opportunities which in turn exclude the topics and approaches that Schmidtz favors. However, because academia is the last feudal regime in the West, under "the customary governing structure of a university" that is apparently so great, you always need to gain someone's favor to get goodies like post-docs, fellowships, and conferences. Getting rid of outside funding will only diminish the number and variety of asses available to kiss, but it will do nothing to render ass-kissing unnecessary.

Johnson even admits that there is nothing in principle wrong with advancing the libertarian arguments that the Kochs like, since "such provocations can be quite salutary in philosophy, a field that ruthlessly questions all presuppositions." The problem, he claims arises when provocations are

"incentivized by private money with the explicit aim of passing laws. Zwolinski’s price-gouging piece, for example, includes a handy appendix listing states with anti-price-gouging statutes. I don’t recall John Rawls helping out readers by categorizing state tax policies in terms of how far they run afoul of the Difference Principle."

This seems to be a distinction between (laudable) abstract "provocation" with no political or legislative goals such as Rawls's Theory of Justice, and (corrupt) "provocations" concrete enough to translate directly into laws. But Rawls did aim to influence laws, in a much bigger way than Zwolinski, so much bigger that a list of all those that run afoul of his principles would've required its own book. A rich liberal in the 1960s who wanted to advance redistributive welfare programs through philosophical arguments could not have done better than to promote Rawls, even though nothing he wrote could be turned directly into legislation. Inversely though, sinking money into an academic article for the purpose of securing the passage of a pro-price gouging law is probably imprudent. At least if you hire a lobbyist, he will have direct connections to legislators, which is a lot more than one can say for peer-reviewed philosophy journals. Worse yet, a great deal of academic research, even that which is indirectly or even publicly funded, is about narrow and concrete topics whose conclusions can easily be translated into particular laws. Empirical research almost by definition is concrete like this, and there are entire schools of public policy which pursue research designed to inform legislation. So in the end, a categorical distinction between the kind of research that private money issues in and the kind that "free thought" produces can't be sustained.

So long as academics depend on paychecks, the "free thought" Johnson seeks will never be possible in universities. It takes the greatest naivete or willful ignorance to think that getting a paycheck from the state immunizes scholars against external "influences" on their research, whereas getting one from someone who agrees with their work and wants to subsidize their instincts is a distortion of freedom. State legislatures demand "relevance" and economic growth, not to speak of whatever other local priorities - economic and ideological - their constituents may value. The "customary governing structures" of universities undermine Johnson's "freedom" even further - you must study what your disciplinary superiors deem valuable using the methods they prefer to find employment in the first place, and you must be sufficiently prolific and influential in the study of these things to convince these same superiors to let you keep your job. Private funding mitigates these pressures by opening up the universities to study that legislatures don't want to subsidize (often for good reason), and those to which prevailing fashions and academic and disciplinary hierarchies are indifferent or averse (sometimes with good reason, sometimes not).

It's true that, woefully for Johnson, there aren't currently many socialist or far left philanthropists funding the kind of research he finds congenial. (Which is apparently ok, because "obvious solutions don’t need research.") Indeed, restricting private funding of higher education because, at the moment, such funding disproportionately comes from conservatives, libertarians, and liberals, while reinforcing academic hierarchies in the humanities and social sciences, which at the moment favor the left, seems to be very much in keeping with a certain kind of private and partial interest that is not so different from the motivations of the Kochs, et al. But the political views of "the donor class" and the fashions of academia are contingent things, subject to change and even reversal. If such reversal were to transpire, private funding may turn out to be the last bastion for socialist and leftist thought, as a certain libertarian philosopher once pointed out.

Meanwhile, there is nothing fundamental about private funding that makes its recipient intellectually unfree, just as there is nothing fundamentally liberating about public funding. It's the self-supporting philosopher, the Thales who uses his knowledge to make a killing in olive oil futures and depends on no funds from anyone who is properly free in the Johnsonian sense. But those people don't become professors in the first place.

Identity crisis

Guys, I just got contacts and I don't even know who I am anymore. That's also sort of literally true because I can't really see that well, and everything (including, importantly, my own head) looks concave and HUGE.

Addendum: speech vs. war

I hadn't seen this op-ed before posting on Monday, but it's illustrative of the confusion underlying the broadly unified outrage. The main problem here seems to be that no one is sure whether we're opposed to white supremacists as fellow citizens with abhorrent ideas or as outright enemies in a war, and our conception of them vacillates with our rhetoric, never resulting in any coherent idea of what we're doing. Is this a speech question, or a war question? (You can see this confusion illustrated in the remarks of UVA students here as well.)

Vaidhyanathan starts out by describing them in the terms of the former:

Denying hate groups attention might work if everyone agreed to do so. But as long as television cameras — or even just regular people streaming on Facebook Live and posting to YouTube — were going to witness the events, and as long as others were committed to confronting the white supremacists, there would be oxygen.

On this view, white supremacists are a political affinity group pursuing strategic political aims by exploiting American media, including obviously social media. In that sense, they are just like BLM or the DSA or even the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which also used media strategies for political ends. This does not imply moral equivalency, just a reliance on the same kinds of strategies. The point is that marching around yelling and filming it is a popular way to conduct political activism in the US, regardless of what you're yelling for. Because we understand this as activism by citizens and not war by enemy combatants, we have a whole set of rules and procedures to make it possible to do, and spend a lot of time arguing about how to apply these rules fairly. The white supremacists were playing by these rules too, in applying for and litigating permits, and going through all the civic motions.

(I don't understand Vaidhyanathan's conclusion here that we are simply hostages to social media, which, unlike previous media, makes ignoring a white supremacist march impossible. If you don't show up, they will only be able to film themselves marching around aimlessly. Does that really strengthen their cause?)

But after this, Vaidhyanathan shifts his terms to describing the white supremacists as enemies in war:

Plus, as we had learned from previous such assaults on our community, the hate groups were not just after attention. They wanted conflict. They came to hear the sound of flesh being struck, bones being broken. So the idea of denying them attention seemed less significant as the event drew closer. Still, there were compelling reasons to avoid confrontation...

One could reasonably ask why the conclusion that these people want to break bones requires us to offer up our bones for breaking. Why not just deny them their desire for conflict? But, moving on:

I now believe we made the wrong choice. Does my status as a parent make me special? It shouldn’t. A young man named Dre Harris was ambushed in a parking lot and took dozens of blows by club-wielding thugs. He took them so I wouldn’t have to. Next time I will stand on the street with my neighbors, even at the risk of injury or death. It’s the least I can do to repay those who stood bravely this time....

They hurt us. But they did not defeat us. Local clergy locked arms to stare down the attackers. Volunteers dispensed water to counter-demonstrators. Black Lives Matter members put their bodies on the line for all of us...  

This is not about “free speech.” It never was. There is no “free speech” if anyone brandishes firearms to intimidate those they despise. You can’t argue with the armed.

Now the white supremacists are effectively enemy soldiers set on conquering our city, and in this context, it certainly does make sense to say that it is the responsibility of residents to come out in force and defend themselves. It is indeed unjust, not to mention ineffective, to rely on Dre Harris and BLM members to defend the entire city against an invading army. But if that's the case, then it's crazy to propose that our self-defense should take the form of "taking dozens of blows" and "staring down" our armed opponents. If this is really a war, and the enemy is really big and powerful and armed, we should take up arms ourselves and march on them. We immensely outnumber them; it would be a brief and probably fairly decisive battle (once we learned how to correctly discharge our weapons...). Or we call up the military to do this for us.

But Vaidhyanathan insists instead on nonviolent direct action, which is a strategy for domestic activism - a speech strategy, not a war strategy. This is the crux of the confusion. If we're fighting a war against white supremacists, if we understand them as organized domestic terrorists like White Power ISIS, then nonviolent direct action - "staring them down" - seems like an unbelievably naive response. If Vaidhyanathan were in Iraq, would he fight ISIS by "staring them down"? The obvious response to a domestic insurgency is to use the power of the government, which is on our side regardless of Trump's dithering, to outlaw and execute them for treason. We have certainly done that before.

While I'm sure there are people who would like to do just that to any participants in or sympathizers with white nationalism, I suspect that not even most liberals would be willing to go that far. Even doxxing the men in the photos from the Cville rally in order to get them fired from their jobs has produced unease among them. Why? There is general agreement that the guy who plowed his car into pedestrians ought to be understood as a terrorist. But most people seem to be very hesitant to apply this label to those who profess white supremacist beliefs online, and even those who assemble in their name so long as they do so peacefully. The reason, I suspect, is that, contra Vaidhyanathan, this is still about free speech. We basically do see white supremacists as fellow citizens engaged in speech (hateful speech, dangerous speech, but still speech), not enemy combatants engaged in war. That's precisely why protestors and armchair-commentators alike turn to nonviolent direct action instead of counter-terrorism to fight them. They're concerned to denounce and persuade, not to capture and kill them. So, evidently, you can argue with the armed, because if you really thought you couldn't, you'd arm yourself against them.

Maybe the mood will shift now, and we will begin to treat white supremacism more like treason than repulsive speech. That will of course raise all sorts of difficulties of distinction that no one participating in the present frenzy of righteous outrage seems interested in considering. But the transition will be made somewhat easier by all the domestic counter-terrorism infrastructure we've already established and which we can now extend to surveil a much broader range of speech activities. Or we can hope to split the difference by strengthening the legal scope and consequences of "hate speech," leaving it to judges to surgically separate out white supremacist speech from other kinds of speech. Or maybe we will double down on preventing violence while protecting expression, with all the municipal costs that this will clearly impose. Or maybe we'll just sidestep all this law-and-government stuff and continue indulging in Lincoln's "mobocratic spirit."

Utopia, VA has a dystopian moment

- Thanks for all your messages of concern, peeps. The Self-Importants are all fine, having determined in advance that this event would not end well and concluding that Saturday would be a good time to take in the sights of Lynchburg, VA rather than stay in town. I actually thought there would be all-out rioting, so my paranoia was excessive, but not by much.

- What can be done to diffuse violence while still defending First Amendment rights in these situations, because surely these situations will recur? The reason we left town was because it seemed to me that, after the July rally ended with tear gas, a bigger confrontation in August, for which both white supremacists and anti-white supremacist protestors were streaming in from out of town, was inevitably going to degenerate into violence. And it did, within minutes. What else could possibly happen on a hot day when hundreds of people so devoted to their cause that they flew in just for this march around yelling about their desire to eliminate everyone, and hundreds of other people equally devoted to their cause show up to yell the opposite? The only way to prevent physical confrontation is to prevent any physical contact between the groups, which means either dispersing counter-protesters who try to approach while pushing the marchers through town as quickly as possible, or containing both sides within enforced cordons.

I think both of these approaches are technically possible, though both would require a much larger policing effort than Charlottesville can muster or afford on its own. But even if the next march here or anywhere else is greeted by a veritable army of state troopers in riot gear, this will require a huge diversion of resources to defend the speech rights of terrible people. I wonder if there is a kind of strategy at play here too: if marches like this are insufficiently policed, violence is inevitable and the white supremacists either get to complain that their speech rights have been denied, or they get to kill people and blame the (lack of) police for it, and both outcomes help them. But by being able to call up a huge police presence just by being white supremacists, they suck up public resources and force everyone to indirectly support their activities.

This seems to be the conundrum. We have to defend free speech, but we also have to be able to defend ourselves, and I don't know how we can effectively do both at once. The only response to white supremacist assemblies that would do both is to allow them to proceed without any counter-protest. That is to say, would-be counter-protestors would have to voluntarily ignore them. That way, the white supremacists get their speech and we get to use our lives and public resources for more worthwhile purposes. (Surely there are other solutions too? The problem of defending offensive speech is old enough.)

Of course, I understand that we will never get enough would-be counter-protestors to agree to this because, as I have been informed, the mere suggestion that we should not show up in force to confront a white supremacist mob is a sign of moral cowardice, and probably also secret white supremacist sympathies. All sensible people may agree that mobs are dangerous, that chaos and violence resulting from them is fairly predictable, and that they should be avoided. At least they agree on this until the mob is comprised of Nazis. Once Nazis come into the picture, then apparently we are morally obligated to run toward them with fists in the air, carrying our children on our shoulders (for this is a useful civics lesson). Because Nazis are clearly bad, the baddest of the bad, and expressing that matters more than the laws of group behavior. And I agree. Nazis are the worst! But even when all right-thinking people agree on that, they won't defeat a Nazi mob with a counter-mob, not even a counter-mob comprised entirely of those with pure moral convictions. Instead, they will exacerbate the pathologies of mobs by enlarging them, and increasing the likelihood and reach of their chaos and violence. Is that morally courageous, or foolish?

- Frequent social media refrain: "Silence is complicity." Not unless the inverse, in this context, is also true: "Copy-and-paste is resistance."

- Versions of the claim that Charlottesville must be an especially racist place to be hosting a white supremacist march or that the march exemplifies Charlottesville's essential Southern-ness have the thing precisely backwards. The only reason Charlottesville has been targeted is because it's very liberal and stands out quite starkly against the counties surrounding it on every electoral map. The city resolved to remove its Confederate statues, and that resolution inspired the white supremacists' ire. The problem is that Charlottesville is not, or is no longer and hasn't been for several decades, essentially Southern, if by that is meant something like "full of genteel covert racists." If it were, what would the white supremacists have to march against here?

Sex differences on the internet

 This idea:

Consider it this way: If you asked a right-wing misogynist to craft a sexist parody of his political opponents, you might get something like the highly neurotic, fainting-couch politics of recent campus and online progressivism, whose acolytes oscillate between soft therapeutic language and maenad-like frenzy.

If you then asked a left-wing misandrist to do the same sort of parody in reverse, you’d end up with something like the online far-right — nerds and autodidacts obsessed with cuckoldry, fascist cosplayers eager for evidence of their own racial superiority, would-be lotharios furious at feminism, libertarians with a ten-point case for despotism.

 Explained here:

Boys tend to bully one another physically, while girls are more likely to do so by undermining a victim’s social status or relationships. Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock.

Best emergency notification ever

Received this today:



Update: The backstory. Watch video of tranquilized bear being thrown into truck.