John Protevi's Blog

Open Letter in support of Jason Stanley and Rebecca Kukla

We stand in solidarity with Jason Stanley and Rebecca Kukla. They have unjustly been subjected to waves of online harassment produced by twisting their meaning and feeding their names to legions of online haters. Their support of colleagues, pointing out that civility should not excuse brutal and dangerous ideas, do not deserve the anonymous third-party abuse they have received. They are valued members of our profession and we sign to make public our defense of their right to live free of such attempts at intimidation.

Should you wish to co-sign this letter, you may do so by commenting below with your name and institutional affiliation. As with these signatories, affiliations are given for identification purposes only.

Eric Brown, Philosophy, Washington University, St Louis

Taylor Carman, Philosophy, Barnard College, Columbia University

Jon Cogburn, Philosophy, Louisiana State University

John Collins, Philosophy, Columbia University

Keith DeRose, Philosophy, Yale University

John Drabinski, Black Studies, Amherst College

Richard Drayton, History, Kings College London

Tom Eyers, Philosophy, Duquesne University

Branden Fitelson, Philosophy, Northeastern University

Leigh M Johnson, Philosophy, Christian Brothers University

Ed Kazarian, Philosophy, Rowan University

Jonathan Kramnick, English, Yale University

Sally Haslanger, Philosophy, MIT

Bonnie Honig, Political Science, Brown University

Bryce Huebner, Philosophy, Georgetown University

Chad Kautzer, Philosophy, Lehigh University

Mark Lance, Philosophy, Georgetown University

Utz McKnight, Political Science, University of Alabama

Joshua Miller, Criminal Justice, University of Baltimore

Donna Murch, History, Rutgers University

Kathryn Norlock, Philosophy, Trent University

Kathryn Pogin, Philosophy, Northwestern University

John Protevi, French Studies and Philosophy, Louisiana State University

Carl B Sachs, Philosophy, Marymount University, Virginia

Eric Schliesser, Political Science, University of Amsterdam

John Schwenkler, Philosophy, Florida State University

David Livingston Smith, Philosophy, University of New England

Mark Steen, Philosophy, Boğaziçi University

Lynne Tirrell, Philosophy, University of Massachusetts at Boston

Adriel Trott, Philosophy, Wabash College

Eric Winsberg, Philosophy, University of South Florida

ON THE ALT-RIGHTING OF PHILOSOPHY BY RC

Let's distinguish doxxing from signal-boosting, as the RC people would like us to do. Doxxing is two-fold: 1) revealing the real identity of someone using an anonymous or pseudonymous screen name, or 2) making public what is private. Signal-boosting is taking what was public in a small sphere and broadcasting it to a wider audience. Critics of RC claim they doxxed our colleagues, while the RC people say it was signal-boosting. 

Let's accept it was signal-boosting, even though there is a strong argument to be made that some instances really are doxxing.

IN ANY EVENT, IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE SIGNAL-BOOSTING WAS ETHICALLY WRONG BECAUSE IT EXPOSED OUR COLLEAGUES TO STOCHASTIC HARASSMENT. 

Stochastic harassment occurs when someone is exposed to mass vitriol by 3rd parties. The exposer initiates and mediates the harassment but does not directly conduct it. Having the RC story picked up by Dreher, Washington Times, and so on exposed our colleagues to vastly larger audiences and thereby predictably exposed them to harassment. (It seems plausible that the first move, from RC to Dreher, occurred via backchannel emails, though the idea that Dreher was simply a reader, while implausible, is not impossible.)

[EDITED] The real problem here is that our colleagues were falsely portrayed as hating traditional Christianity and Christians, when in fact the real target of their anger was 1) those who made a queer colleague's professional life miserable because of beliefs about sexual orientation similar to Swinburne's, and 2) people who were acting like cursing was less civil than Swinburne's disability claim.

WHEN YOU FALSELY PORTRAY JEWS AS HATERS OF CHRISTIANS IN 2016 AMERICA YOU EXPOSE THEM TO HARASSMENT AND INCREASED CHANCES OF PHYSICAL HARM.

Corollaries: 

1) Swinburne suffered no comparable harm by having his "disability" claim cursed out on Facebook to that suffered by our colleagues. So RC can't be said to be evening the score. 

2) Even if one were to say our colleagues acted imprudently by not taking sufficient notice of the danger of RC exposing them to stochastic harassment, that has no bearing on the ethical evaluation of RC's behavior. 

Trust the RSA! Love the RSA!

The ISA instructing us to trust the RSA, to believe its "official accounts," is nothing new (as below). John Drabinski asks us to consider whether there isn't now an additional imperative that the RSA must be loved.

 

You stay classy, Dan Gilbert, billionaire owner of Quicken Loans, and Cleveland's vox populi

Dan Gilbert is trying to moralize a business decision, that is, capitalize on the desperation of the Cleveland community via their emotional commitment to a sports figure. That's bad for Cleveland and it's bad for sports, though I didn't see him complaining when that love for James increased the value of the franchise that Saint Dan Gilbert bought (after James was on board mind you) by hundreds of millions of dollars. He can cry me a river. You stay classy, Dan Gilbert.

What this comes down to is a billionaire financial whiz posing as the vox populi. A break, please give me. What do the people of Cleveland deserve? Relief from decades of de-industrialization in the form of good schools, good health care, good housing, good libraries, good parks, good jobs, etc. They also deserve people to see through Dan Gilbert's trying to speak for "the community" and to examine closely the role that the financialization of the US economy played in the destruction of Cleveland. Owner of Quicken Loans cares about the Cleveland community? He's made billions on refinancing of mortgages which was a major means by which the vast majority of people whose wages stagnated over the last thirty years (see "de-industrializaton" above) have cashed out the equity in their houses. I say Dan Gilbert and his financializing vampire industry can KMRIA, and he can do it twice for trying to speak for "the community" from whose wage stagnation he's benefited to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Dave Zirin: Los Suns Also Rise: Phoenix Suns Win in More Ways Than One

Anyone who believes that sports can't be an effective platform for social justice needed only to watch last night's game between Los Suns of Phoenix and the San Antonio Spurs. The unprecedented decision by the entire Suns organization -- from owner Robert Sarver to star players Amare Stoudamire and Steve Nash -- to wear uniforms blaring Los Suns and come out against Arizona's anti-immigrant Senate Bill 1070, created a sports broadcast like no other in my lifetime. The game on TNT began with sideline reporter Marty Snider outside the arena covering a mushrooming 3,000 person civil rights march, led by Al Sharpton and Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon (both wearing Los Suns Jerseys.) Then the scene switched to the pre-game studio with host Ernie Johnson and former players Kenny "the Jet" Smith, Chris Webber, and Charles Barkley. The viewing audience then got an unexpected and bracing lesson in dissent.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

May I be among the first to wish that Phil Jackson take to heart Dick Cheney's advice to Patrick Leahy? Read the article to see what I mean.

Old Left, New Left, Patriotism

I'm enjoying reading Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, a collection of interviews with Rorty, edited by Eduardo Mendieta of the Philosophy Department at SUNY Stony Brook.

One thing is puzzling me, and I suppose its resolution, if it ever comes, will only be after I read Achieving Our Country. (I'm working my way backward through Rorty, just as an experiment.) It's a simple point, really. When Rorty talks about the "sad, sentimental stories" which have the potential to expand our sympathetic imaginations, aren't they a principal tactic, and aim, of the New Left as well? Our even more so than the Old Left? Maybe I'm operating too much with an Old Left = economism and New Left = culturalism opposition. I've never denied I identify with the New Left, as you might expect someone who turned 13 in 1968, a hell of a year to become politically aware!

I'm of course going to have to wait to read his book, but another issue will be the notion of "America." I'm really not sure there is any such thing, or at least, I think a certain nominalism with regard to class is important (and here this is classic Old Left, I think). In other words, we have many factors making up our history, and if I want to say I'm loyal to America it's only to those parts of American institutions and American history that incarnate the ideals of justice, freedom, and equality to which I have committed myself.

Here's a slightly edited version of something I wrote in private correspondence last year on the topic of patriotism:

New Book from Adrian Parr

My friend Adrian Parr, who is on a visiting Assoc Prof appointment at University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) and who is on the board at the art and culture journal Drain (www.drainmag.com) writes to tell me of her new book from Edinburgh University Press entitled Memorial Culture and Deleuze: desire, singular memory and the politics of trauma.

Read the description after the break.