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Foucault on Public Opinion

If you’re like me, you spend too much time – way too much time – these days looking at polling data.  I ran across some interesting remarks by Foucault on opinion yesterday, which I’ll share here as a technique of distraction.  He makes them in the context of a 1976 conversation with J. P. Barou and Michelle Perrot (whose work on resistance to disciplinary power he favorably cites near the end of the conversation) that was published as the preface to an edition of Bentham’s Panopticon writings.  It appears as “L’oeil du pouvoir” (D&E #195, pp. 190-207 in my 2 volume edition) and is translated in Foucault Live (=FL).   For context, then, the conversation appears in the year after Discipline and Punish.  It covers a range of topics, including Foucault’s own path to discovering the panopticon (initially via hospital architecture, which had the dual need to see patients and keep them physically separated to avoid the spread of disease).

Foucault suggests that Bentham’s original work enjoyed considerable uptake in revolutionary France.  Barou sets Foucault up: “isn’t it surprising to realize that the French Revolution, in the persons of people such as Lafayette, favorably received the project of the panopticon?” (D&E 195).  Foucault answers that Bentham “is the complement of Rousseau” because the “Rousseauian dream” that “animated the revolutionaries” was of a “transparent society, both visible and legible in each of its parts, which had no more obscure zones, no zones established by the privileges of royal power or by the prerogatives of such and such body, or indeed by disorder; that each, from the point that he occupies, is able to see the entirety of society; that their hearts communicate with one another, that the gazes encounter no more obstacles, that opinion rules, that of each on each [celle de chacun sur chacun]” (D&E 195/FL 230).  Opinion thus functions similar to what Foucault will later identify as a function of pastoral power (omnes et singulatim), simultaneously totalizing and individuating.  “Opinion” is an object of “police” power in Discipline and Punish (213), that power that is concerned with understanding and managing the minutiae of daily life.

In the interview, Foucault suggests that Bentham is “both this [Rousseauian dream] and its complete opposite” because he understands the problem of visibility “while thinking of a visibility organized entirely around a dominant and surveillant gaze” (D&E 195/FL 230).  Thus you have joined the “lyricism of Rousseau and the obsession of Bentham.”  Foucault then suggests:

“A fear haunted the second half of the 18^th century: there is a dark space, a screen of obscurity which provides an obstacle to the complete visibility of things, of people, of truths. [One needs] to dissolve the fragments of night which were opposed to the light, to make it so that there is no more dark space in society; to demolish the black rooms where arbitrary political power, the caprices of the monarch, religious superstitions, conspiracies of tyrants and priests, illusions of ignorance and epidemics [all] fomented” (D&E 196/FL 231).

In this context, the then proposes that “the rule of ‘opinion’ that we invoke so often in our age is a mode of functioning where power will be able to be exercised on the sole condition that things are known and that people are seen by a type of immediate gaze [par une sorte de regard immédiat] that is collective and anonymous” (D&E 197/FL 232).

Hold on to the word "immediate" – it will be important in a moment.  But for now, notice the extent to which this is a pretty good description of nights spent gazing at opinion polls, both the obsession with knowing, and the fear that there are (say) hidden Trump voters like there were last time.  More light!  This sort of epistemology is driven by a fundamentally paranoid logic, as Wendy Chun emphasized a while ago: once I use some sort of optical device to see beyond what my naked eye tells me, that opens the fundamental possibility that a better device would see more.  See a molecule with the microscope?  Is that really the smallest particle?  After all, there were molecules lurking below the surface that you hadn’t seen before.  Here the paranoia is inevitable given a sampling process.  The poll represents underlying opinions, and the process of sampling invariably “sees” only part of the data, even when it’s done exactly right.  And that’s before you factor in questions about whether people who don’t have landlines are proportionally represented, or whether young people who say they will vote will actually do so, and so on.  That’s also before you get to issue polling, which I complained about before the last election, arguing that it worked to create populations and truths about them that were fully the product of the polling questions, making it (for example) impossible to express views that didn’t fit the categories the polling firm wanted to hear.

In any case, as anybody who works in data will tell you, our access to data is fundamentally mediated by the process of its collection and description, which means that the immediacy we want – to just see clearly whether Trump has enough hidden voters somewhere in Pennsylvania to pull off the upset.  We have to content ourselves with something like the fivethirtyeight statistical runs: crunch all the polling data (including weighting it by quality of poll), simulate the election 40,000 times (there’s a vision of hell: 40,000 occurrences of this election!) and see what happens (as of this minute, Biden wins 88% of the time).  But the human brain just doesn’t like that: a pair of papers, one in Philosophy and Public Affairs,  and one in the Stanford Law Review, by David Enoch, Levi Spectre and Talia Fisher make the case that we prefer juridical reasoning in the sense that we can explain why somebody is wrong, rather than living with the statistical truth (in this case, that Trump could win and there’s nothing wrong with the model at all.  Enoch Spectre and Fisher use the example of liability for a bus accident).

All of which leads to the following remarkable paragraph.  In response to Perrot’s suggestion that Bentham seems to overstate the power of his panopticon, Foucault says:

“This is the illusion of almost all of the reformers of the 18^th century who lent to opinion a considerable power.  Opinion is only able to be good when it is the immediate consciousness of the complete social body; they believed that people would become virtuous by the fact that they were observed [regardés].  For them, opinion was a spontaneous reactualization of the social contract.  They misunderstood the real conditions of opinion, of the media, a materiality which is caught in the mechanisms of the economy and power” (D&E 204/FL 238).

And:

“They also failed to understand that the media would necessarily be controlled by economic and political interests. They did not perceive the material and economic components of public opinion. They thought that public opinion would be just by its very nature, that it would spread on its own accord, and provide a kind of democratic surveillance. It was essentially journalism—a crucial innovation of the 19th century—that manifested the utopian characteristics of this entire politics of the gaze” (D&E 204/FL 238)

Of course as Foucault notes, journalism comes with its own politics, and different forms of it come with different politics.  I’ll close with two tidbits.  First, one large study found that false news traveled further, faster and deeper on Twitter than true news, almost no matter how one measured diffusion.  It’s the materiality of the news infrastructure and the business models of the platforms through which opinion is constituted.  Second, there appears to be a horrible nexus of Instagram, Facebook, QAnon and multi-level marketing schemes that’s contributing to the diffusion of that conspiracy: it turns out that QAnon and multi-level marketing share a lot in common, and social media tends to facilitate that.  I can’t describe it better, but the article is worth a read.  The paranoid logic is baked in!

NC GOP Forgets 9/11

That's right, the party of flag and God and country found something more important to do today than remembering 9/11: making sure that poor North Carolinians don't get health insurance.  The current state budget does not include Medicaid expansion because the GOP so hates Obama that insuring 600,000+ people and creating 30,000+ jobs in the process, almost entirely on the dime of the Feds, just seems like a bad idea.  But the Republicans lost their veto-proof majorities in 2018, so this time when Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed it, they couldn't just steamroll him.  There's been a two-month stalemate since, largely featuring GOP scheduling override votes, dangling various bits of pork spending in front of democrats, not getting enough defectors, and then abruptly canceling the vote.

Then today in the NC House, the GOP assured everyone that there would be no votes because of 9/11.  When they realized that a number of democrats were out commemorating 9/11 or otherwise absent, they - SURPRISE! - voted to override Cooper's veto.

This legislature is beyond shameless, but it's not even the voting that is perhaps the most shameless thing they did today.  No, that award goes to the sanctimonious bit of hypocritcal drivel from one Rep. Jason Saine, who is "appalled that anyone in our country would stop going about their normal business on this day. When we stop being a beacon of freedom, hope and democracy, then the terrorists win."  Yep, 'cuz nothing shines that light of freedom, hope and democracy brighter than a minority party that holds power only because of unconstitutionally gerrymandered districts depriving poor people of the ability to see the doctor!

Imagine if Nancy Pelosi conducted a vote for something important on 9/11, after telling the GOP that she wouldn't.

The budget is now in the hands of the Senate, where the GOP only needs one democratic defector to continue on its gerrymandered way.

Big Win on Gerrymandering!

The awful NC legislature, largely the product of breathtakingly effective partisan gerrymandering, may finally be about to get more competitive.  A lower Court in NC just unanimously ruled that the GOP maps violated the state constitution (which keeps it out of federal courts), and the state GOP apparently does not plan to appeal (virtually all observers think that they would have lost in the NC Supreme Court, after the GOP outsmarted itself and lost a Supreme Court seat to an anti-gerrymandering progressive).  The Court gave the legislature two weeks to produce new maps, and set some very stringent conditions on how they could do it.

Vox has the story here.

This is very, very good news!

One Small Step for Trans Rights. And a Moment for Dan Bishop Awareness.

North Carolina took a small step today towards undoing its disgraceful HB2 legislation passed by the state’s Republican legislature back in 2016 as an effort to stop Charlotte’s attempt to allow trans people to use the bathroom matching their gender identity.  Per a consent decree today, the state has agreed that no provision in HB2’s successor, HB142, can be read to prohibit trans people from using the bathroom matching their gender identity.

Two cheers for small victories!  It would of course mean a lot more if HB142 weren’t such a crappy law.  Although it was advertised by the legislature as a repeal to HB2, thank you, all done  discriminating, it did nothing of the sort.  The replacement – and these things are still part of state law - locks into place an explicit refusal to offer employment and other civil rights protections to LGBTQ individuals in state law, and it forbids other governmental entities in the state (cities, schools, universities) from going further on other employment laws. So this is very much a partial victory.

In the meantime, one of the original architects of HB2, the egregious state senator Dan Bishop, is running for the state’s currently vacant House of Representatives seat.  Why is this seat vacant?  Well, the state elections board refused to certify the results of last election because of serious issues with ballot tampering emanating from Republican Mark Harris’ campaign (see here, and here to get started).  So we get a do-over.  Harris decided not to run for health reasons and now we have Bishop, who won the Republican primary between himself and a guy who honestly liked to dress up as Boss Hogg.  And who is Dan Bishop?

Our Corrupt Carneades, or the Citizenship Question

The Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census is a farce attempting to be a tragedy.  The initial claim – that the question was needed to enforce the Voting rights Act – was so obviously pretextual that Justice Roberts had to join the Court’s liberals to strike it down (even though, as Adam Serwer points out, four justices don’t seem to care that they were being lied to).  Printing of the forms commenced, and everybody thought the case was dead, until Trump tweeted new policy and forced the Justice Department attorneys to humiliate themselves in court.  The DOJ then attempted to replace all the attorneys on the case without specifying why – though most informed commentators assumed that this was because the original attorneys felt ethically uncomfortable with whatever they were about to be asked to do, such as reverse themselves on positions that they had insisted upon before.  A federal judge rejected that request today.  There is supposedly a new rationale coming for the question, maybe by way of an unconstitutional executive order, because William Barr says so.  Any minute now.  The difference is that this new rationale will be delivered for self-evidently pretextual reasons, rather than just evidently pretextual ones (Joseph Fishkin outlines what he thinks is wrong with the best argument the DOJ can likely produce here).

Another development that has gotten less attention is perhaps particularly intriguing.  The government has insisted over and over and over that the census had to be at the printer’s by June 30.  The ACLU has now asked the court system to enforce those words, effectively closing the case.  As Marty Lederman usefully summarizes:

Charlotte/Mecklenburg votes against 287(g)

Yesterday was a big news day.  The biggest story was probably our Tinpot Dictator’s decision to unilaterally violate the Iranian nuclear deal.  In addition to alienating almost everyone not named Bibi Netanyahu or John Bolton, and making the world less safe, the main thing this proves is that Trump can’t see more than ten minutes into the future: very soon, he will supposedly be sitting down with North Korea’s Kim Kong Un to… negotiate a nuclear deal.  What a wonderful time to petulantly scream that the U.S. does not abide by its nuclear deals!  Back home, if you pay attention to local elections, you’ll have heard that in the Republican primary that includes a sizable part of Charlotte, U.S. House incumbent Robert Pittinger narrowly lost to Rev. Mark Harris, a far right preacher who led the state’s 2012 anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment.  Conventional wisdom is that Harris will be easier for Democratic nominee McReady to challenge in the fall.

The news that I suspect didn’t make it out of the local area is that Mecklenburg County’s Sheriff Irwin Carmichael just lost – badly – his re-election bid.  There were three candidates in the Democratic primary, and nobody on the Republican ticket, so the winner last night won the office.  Carmichael had defended the County’s use of 287(g) rules that allowed the ICE agents access to those detained in Mecklenburg County (which includes Charlotte; Charlotte police do not participate in  287(g)) jails.  His support for that program is, by all accounts, why he lost. Both of his opponents came out against it, and there was a strong grass-roots mobilization campaign.  The winner also plans to roll back two of Carmichael’s ending in-person visits with inmates and condoning the use of solitary confinement. 

That’s a good day for those of us who care about criminal justice reform and a reminder that local politics can matter.

The NRA went down to Georgia

I live in North Carolina, the state legislature for which has been basically bought by Art Pope, a smaller-scale Koch brother (the Koch brothers themselves, meanwhile, have been successfully buying the federal government).  The NC legislature has done some truly staggering things, so I’m pretty jaded on the topic of what state legislatures can do.  But the sheer cynicism of the Georgia GOP is worth noting.  When Delta Airlines decided to end its discount program for NRA members, Georgia’s lieutenant governor Casey Cagle immediately took to Twitter to announce that he would scuttle a tax break the airline was about to receive. Cagle, of course, has an A+ rating with the NRA and has received the organization’s endorsement.

In any sane universe, this would inspire a talk about whether Cagle’s behavior broke laws against corruption.  Therefore, it’s legal in this universe and no doubt the NRA is just exercising it’s Free Speech money-words in manner that just happened to be persuasive.  Just like the Charles Koch and his wife weren’t in any way involved in corruption when they sent a $500,000 check to Paul Ryan’s campaign almost immediately after the GOP passed its handout to billionaire donors tax reform package.

Good riddance to yet another corporate giveaway. The problem here is the process, not the unexpectedly happy result (some Georgia conservatives even learned the term "crony capitalism" once their brothers in the NRA had been made to suffer so greatly), but in the meantime, Mr. Cagle, I don’t know what bet you lost, but the NRA got your soul.

Gaslighting in the FCCorporate Attack on Net Neutrality

By Gordon Hull

As part of its war on all things done during the Obama administration, the Trump administration is planning to do away with Net Neutrality rules.  Those rules, announced in early 2015, established that Internet Service Providers must treat all traffic across their networks equally.  Absent such rules, they could favor their own content over that of their competitors, favor content providers who are willing and able to pay extra for faster service, disfavor content that they don’t like (in the only bit of possible karmic justice here, many of them could make it much harder for radical white terrorists to organize online), and so forth.  The “FCCorporate” in my title is deliberate, and it’s of course designed to indicate regulatory capture.  But it also indicates something particularly insidious: regulatory capture by way of gaslighting.  First, a review of net neutrality.

Facebook and Russian Meddling: Why is anyone Surprised?

By Gordon Hull

Facebook’s opaque advertising practices are in the news (again) because it was apparently the vehicle through which some of the Russian attempts to meddle in the 2016 election were routed.  This piece by Sam Biddle on The Intercept is well worth the read, as it makes the case that the public needs to know more about Facebook’s advertising practices. On the one hand, the company has admitted to a little of what happened.  But it studiously has failed to answer most of the relevant questions, hiding behind vague, well-lawyered blog posts. Biddle concludes:

“It’s reassuring that Facebook is cooperating with the ongoing Russia-related probes. But this is bigger than Russia, bigger than Hillary Clinton, and bigger than 2016. Should Facebook continue to simply allude to its ominous potential rather than sharing it in full, there’s only one good option left: Bring in Mark Zuckerberg and have him sworn in live on C-SPAN. No spokespeople required.”

This is not a new issue; what Facebook does to your news feed is a paradigmatic example of the black box society at work. Worried? Facebook routinely publishes research designed to exonerate itself from whatever concerns its black box might engender; for example, it published papers in both 2015 and 2012 purporting to prove that it did not contribute to the development of online echo chambers.  As I argued at the time, these results are not just misleading for reasons internal to the research, but because they spread the myth that anything involving big data, machine learning, or a humongous N= figure somehow produces unvarnished, self-interpreting truth.  This serves to insulate companies like Facebook from the scrutiny that accompanies what Tarleton Gillespie identified as the “politics of platforms” back in 2010 and what Helen Nissenbaum and Lucas Introna identified as an analogous issue with portal sites all the way back in 2000.  When a company is the means through which people experience the Internet or their social interactions with other users, how that company curates its data matters.  But two things are certain: the data is carefully curated, and the companies curating the data aren’t talking.  This isn’t to say that they don’t say things indicating what they might be up to; under the guise of proving that the emotional contagion effect could work across remote networks (and did not require face-to-face interaction), Facebook basically telegraphed that it manipulates users’ news feeds to elicit (presumably positive) emotional states.  danah boyd captured a lot of what is at stake, pointing out (again, a while ago) that Facebook presents itself like a public utility, but demands that it be free from the regulations that guarantee that utilities serve the public interest.

Radical White Terrorism as State Policy: Trump, Sovereign Decision and homo sacer

By Gordon Hull

As our tin-pot “President” continues his inexorable slide into narcissistic authoritarianism, it is worth noting recent events that establish beyond any residual doubt that radical white terrorism is now official policy.  When historians look at the Trump presidency, assuming we all survive long enough for there to be historians, I suspect last week is going to be a significant one.  It began with Trumps’s remarks after Charlottesville, in which he managed to say that counterprotestors shared in the blame for neo-Nazi violence and that there were many “fine people” hiding in the mob of white supremacists.  These made his own views clear (as though they weren’t already).  But they did not establish state policy.  Events Friday did: the pardoning of former Maricopa Country Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the border patrol’s decision to keep inland border patrol checkpoints open during the evacuation from Hurricane Harvey, and Trump’s apparent decision to end the DACA program.  Together these say: radical white terrorism is above the law, and the undocumented are homines sacri. Foucault remarked at one point that in a biopolitical state “it’s impossible to reconcile law and order because when you try to do so it is only in the form of an integration of law into the state’s [administrative] order” (Power, 117).  In Trump’s America, you get neither law nor order: Trump despises both the rule of law, as evidenced Friday, and the administrative state, as evidenced by his repeated appointment of incompetent, unqualified partisan hacks to head regulatory agencies the very existence of which they oppose.  The theoretical framework through which all of this behavior is intelligible finds its expression in the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

Radical White Terrorism

By Gordon Hull

Although they murdered one person, injured 19 others, and celebrated two governments, one of which systematically exterminated over 6 million people in the name of white supremacy, and another that systematically murdered and enslaved millions more, also in the name of white supremacy, members of the far right somehow managed to proudly act like newly liberated victims of something or another (“cultural Marxism?”).    It’s not like Charlottesville should have been a surprise; the FBI and DHS warned about the threat from white supremacists months ago.  White supremacists had been nursing fantasies of running over liberals with cars for quite some time, and racist hate crimes – including, as in Portland, the murder of those who try to stop racist hate crimes – have (unsurprisingly) been on the rise since Trump came to power.  Moreover, what happened last weekend was not about free speech and marches.  It was much more about political violence and intimidation: they showed up in Charlottesville looking for a fight, toting semi-automatic weapons and militia groups so that they might not just exercise their First Amendment rights, but deprive others of their First Amendment rights.

Travel Ban 2.5, the Camp, and the Airport

by Gordon Hull

On Wednesday night, the Trump administration implemented as much of its long promised Muslim Ban as it thought the Supreme Court would allow.  Travelers from a list of six countries who did not have a “bona fide” connection or “close familial relationship” to someone in the U.S. would be banned.  The administration interpreted the Supreme Court’s ruling as restrictively as possible – the Court said that a mother-in-law would be an example of a close familial relationship, but didn’t mention grandparents – so having a grandparent here (or being a grandparent there) isn’t a close familial relationship.  The ruling smacks of arbitrariness and was rolled out as secretly as possible, and it’s not even clear that it actually does much at all. Then again, the original ban also was a poorly-worded, arbitrary mockery of the rule of law.  For example, the “policy” began with zero warning, leaving travelers stranded in airports with no legal options.  So too, the six countries were allegedly named because of their propensity to breed terrorists, but no one from any of them has committed a terrorist act in the U.S. since 2001.  Countries from which terrorists have come – Saudi Arabia – are not on the list.  Some of the countries have no functioning governments, but Iran does.  And so it goes.  That’s what happens when you promise to get rid of Muslims and then realize that you can’t get away with just making that so by campaign promise.

In Homo Sacer, Agamben declares that the camp (the paradigmatic case of which is the Nazi concentration camp) is the archetype of modern power, suggesting that “the camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living” (175).  He proposes that the model of the camp can be seen in all sorts of institutions: the stadium at Bari where the Italians herded Albanian immigrants, the track where the Vichy herded the Jews before deporting them, and the halls at airports where foreigners asking for refugee status are detained, “all equally [are] camps” (174).  As someone who has read a lot of Adorno, I found this assimilation of airport waiting halls and the Holocaust somewhere between uncomfortable and offensive.  I am still uncomfortable with the comparison, but I do think some of the logic that Agamben is identifying is at work here.  That logic is one in which “the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign” (174).

Republican Thanatopolitics

Foucault reminds us that biopolitics is describes a kind of power structure according to which some will be compelled to live (or have their lives as members of a favored population optimized), while others will be allowed to die.  As he puts it, “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (HS1, 138).  Although much work has focused on techniques by which biopower works to optimize a population, it is worth attending to the disallowance of life, the thanatopolitics that is the other half of biopower, because the Republican party is engaged in producing a very effective case study.

As Foucault says a few pages later, “a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms.  It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility” (HS1, 144).  Those who are deemed to be without sufficient value or utility are allowed to die.  Much attention here has focused on Foucault’s brief remarks on “race” war in Society must be Defended, where he proposes that biopower creates a “race” of those who must die, so that “we” can live.  He is thinking of Nazi Germany and the logic of cold war deterrence, but  current Republican policies show that thanatopolitics can operate at a much more granular and subtle level.

I am of course talking about the AHCA, the mean-spirited tax cut for the wealthy, sponsored by gutting the (limited) ability of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to provide for the needy.  Various theorists after Foucault – François Ewald in particular – have emphasized the role of insurance in biopolitics as it comes to regulate and define acceptable behaviors according to actuarial risk.  Here we see its role in thanatopolitics.  There’s a good analysis of the AHCA’s evolution and structure here; suffice it to say that the law, if enacted, would end up in at least 24 million people losing access to insurance (largely by gutting Medicaid and ending the mandate that people have insurance. Republicans are flatly lying about this).  It also allows states to scale back guarantees for coverage of those with pre-existing conditions, and allow states to scale back what services have to be included in health insurance; the primary target appears to be maternity and contraceptive coverage.  Apparently the old, white men who are behind this forgot that they had mothers who required medical care.  There’s a fig leaf $8 billion to fund high-risk pools, which no one qualified thinks comes near to the cost of funding those pools.  It’s not a full regress to pre-ACA levels, but it’s about as far as things can go without requiring enough votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster.

Trump Administration Hypocrisy of the Day: What Should Local Cops be Doing?

I know there’s a lot of material to pick from here, but the following two positions are hard to reconcile with a straight face.  Since Trump’s and his surrogates’ big mouths have been used against him before in Court, perhaps some court will see this one.  On the one hand, the mass deportation program is demanding that local law enforcement help federal immigration officials out.  Although (surprise!) the term has no clear meaning, Trump has targeted “sanctuary cities” for federal punishment.  The cities, like San Francisco, are fighting back, arguing (apparently with good precedent, though I stress that I don’t know much about this area of the law. For a decent discussion, start here) that it’s unconstitutional to force local law enforcement to do the work of the feds.  The entire state of California is joining in.  The substantive argument is that local law enforcement needs immigrant communities to be willing to help deal with crime, and that people will be justifiably terrified to come forth if they fear deportation.  So local complicity in mass deportation will make local crime-fighting much more difficult.  California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on his Facebook page that “on average, 35.5 fewer crimes are committed per 10,000 people in sanctuary counties, the median household annual income is $4,353 higher, the poverty rate is 2.3% lower, and unemployment is 1.1% lower. Before you take away our funds, I suggest you take a look at the facts, Mr. Attorney General.”  The status of all of this is up in the air; San Francisco is reporting that the administration is backing down considerably from its earlier bluster.  But the bluster is quite clear: local law enforcement is to be part of the deportation effort.

On the other hand, the Jeff Sessions Justice Department has decided to throw away everything that’s ever been done by the DOJ to deal with police violence in inner cities, trying especially to nullify existing consent decrees in places like Baltimore.  Local police, says the Sessions DOJ, should be allowed, even encouraged, to resume racist stop-and-frisk policies and the like.  Why? In a memo to DOJ employees, there were several bullet points, including that “the safety and the protection of the public is the paramount duty and concern of law enforcement officers;” and that “local control and local accountability are necessary for effective local policing.  It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies.”  There is a further bullet point that says cooperation with the federal government is important, and that local authorities need to comply with DOJ grant conditions and federal law.  But the direction of the memo is clearly to say that the feds should butt out of local law enforcement.

Maybe he should copy ICE on that one.

North Carolina Repeals and Replaces HB 2

As you probably have heard, in a flurry of activity yesterday, the North Carolina legislature repealed and replaced its omnibus LGBT-hate law, HB 2.  The state was clearly moved to act by an NCAA deadline (repeal by Thursday, or no championships until 22) and an AP report earlier in the week that said the law would cost the state $3.7 billion over ten years.  Almost no one is happy with the new measure, particularly LGBTQ advocates.  The replacement law indeed eliminates the restriction on trans bathroom access, though it allows harassment of trans people under “indecency” laws.  It does not, however, as many of its advocates (who are being parroted by national media like NPR as I type this) claim “reset” the state to its pre-HB 2 status.  The replacement bill also locks into place an explicit refusal to offer employment and other civil rights protections to LGBTQ individuals in state law, and it forbids other governmental entities in the state (cities, schools, universities) from going further either on bathroom access or other employment laws.  Two clauses of the very short bill accomplish this.  Section 2 says:

"State agencies, boards, offices, departments, institutions, branches of government, including The University of North Carolina and the North Carolina Community College System, and political subdivisions of the State, including local boards of education, are preempted from regulation of access to multiple occupancy restrooms, showers, or changing facilities, except in accordance with an act of the General Assembly.”

Section 3, which is staggeringly broad if you read it literally (the literal read was apparently not intended by those who  wrote it) says that “No local government in this State may enact or amend an ordinance regulating private employment practices or regulating public accommodations.”  At the very least, cities like Charlotte are prohibited from enacting LGBTQ protective ordinances like the one HB 2 struck down.  Hence we have not returned to the status quo.  The law does sunset in 2020, but of course the legislature would be free to push that into the indefinite future.

I don’t have a lot to say here on the bill itself, because it clearly does not put the state where it ought to be.  Refusing to protect gender non-conforming individuals from discrimination is a disgrace.  It’s also bad policy to ban municipalities from raising the minimum wage (an aspect of all this that was explicitly in HB 2 and which remains under section 3, despite it getting almost no media attention), though I won’t make that case here.  It might or might not even bring the NCAA back.  I also am still not sure that it would survive a Romer-based challenge, since the clear intent is to freeze-out employment discrimination protection for LGBTQ people. 

I do want to note one thing that’s not getting a lot of press.  In signing the bill, Democratic Governor Cooper said that “In a perfect world, with a good General Assembly, we would have repealed HB2 fully today, and added full statewide protections for L.G.B.T. North Carolinians.”  In this he is absolutely right.  The NC legislature has been on a far right crusade for years and is desperate to hang on to political power as a way to continue that process.  They do that through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and efforts to control local election boards.  As I noted in the linked post above, more people voted Democrat than Republican in North Carolina in both 2012 and 2014.  And yet somehow the Republicans have veto-proof majorities in both houses of the legislature.  That outcome ought to be unacceptable because it says quite clearly that the legislature lacks democratic legitimacy.  A lot of December’s attempt to make election boards Republican has been struck down.  There is litigation pending, including a 4^th Circuit decision that said the most recent legislative maps target minority voters with “surgical precision,” and a pending order to have statewide elections in 2017 under new maps (the state has appealed this to the Supreme Court).  If the Courts get around to striking down all of this, things might get better.  But in many respects, the HB 2 debacle is also a symptom of a deeper failure of governance and democratic legitimacy.

Did Big Data Create President Trump?

One of the more perplexing things about the Trump presidency is why it exists in the first place: he took office having lost the popular vote by a wide margin, and with one of the smaller electoral college margins in memory.  The win also defied virtually all of the pre-election polling and commentary: almost no one (except Michael Moore) predicted the outcome correctly, and on his victory lap, Trump himself admitted that he thought he was going to lose.  So a lot of us have tried to figure out what happened (I continue to think the election was about white supremacy, though that doesn’t explain how Trump got the white supremacists to the ballot box; I’ve also wondered about the libertarian candidates and Clinton’s staggering failure to take the Good News about the auto bailout to the rust belt states).   Others have wondered about the Comey letter, Russian hacking, and so on.  Now there’s another possibility: the Trump campaign’s use of big data, as reported in this chilling article on Motherboard. 

Philosophy in the age of Trump: Threats to science, threats to the environment

by Roberta L Millstein

It's been a long time (too long) since I've blogged here, and now, with the political situation in such turmoil, it's hard to think about anything else.  And one wonders what place philosophy has in all of this.  But it occurs to me to share two blog posts I've written recently-ish elsewhere, both of which I think are relevant.

One is The PSA Women’s Caucus - 10 Years On, posted on the Science Visions blog.  It contains my reflections as I finished my 4-year stint as Senior Co-chair of the PSA Women's Caucus.  Science is under attack from the Trump Administration, as are, I think, women in science especially, given Trump's derogatory remarks towards women (emboldening the likes of Milo Y.).  We need groups like the Caucus to support the work of women in science and of women who think and write about science. 

The second is How the Struggle for Existence Became an Environmental Ethic for Our Lifetime, posted on the Center for Humans and Nature blog (@humansandnature).  The environment is also under attack from the Trump Administration.  Thus, it becomes ever more important for philosophers to reach out to the general public and make our case, to explain why environmental issues should be front and center, to show how even "survival of the fittest" does not undermine (but rather reinforces) our duties to the environment.

#resist

Trump Attacks Privacy of Non-Americans in the U.S.

Amidst the general horror that is Trump’s xenophobic and bigoted executive orders*, and in the executive order attacking sanctuary cities, comes Trump’s attack on the privacy of immigrants (h/t Dennis Crouch at Patently-O).  The order stipulates:

“Privacy Act.  [Federal] Agencies shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law, ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information.”

The Act does not require protection extend to non-permanent residents; Crouch provides the context, noting that “some agencies, however, have been providing aspects of privacy-act protections to non-citizens and permanent residents.  The order appears to force agencies to stop that approach and instead expand governmental data collection and dissemination of information related to non-Americans.”  In other words, expand the surveillance state as much as possible.  I don’t see how this expansion won’t involve the collection of data on citizens, since citizens often interact with those in the U.S. lawfully or otherwise (for example, as students, H1-B workers, or under other programs), and so a threat to the privacy of non-citizens is indirectly a threat to the privacy of everyone in the United States.

Worst. Legislature. Ever.

UPDATE (12/24). Don't take it from me.  The Electoral Integrity Project, which monitors and rates elections internationally, scored North Carolina.  It wasn't pretty.  A sample from the report, as cited in the linked article:

"On the measures of legal framework and voter registration ... on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project."

As Nietzsche said, "that which does not kill me, makes me stronger."  The late  poet and diarist Jim Carroll added that "my version is, that which does not kill me, makes me sleep until 3:30 the next afternoon."  We can add now: "that which does not kill me makes me cheat until well into the evening of a special session."

ORIGINAL POST: I had been going to do a post called “If You Think You’re Going to Lose, Cheat.  If you Lose Anyway, Cheat Some More” in response to last week’s special NC legislative session, which was enough to cement the NC GOP as one of the worst governing bodies in the country.  Today, however, they surpassed themselves.  A quick review is in order, as the NC legislature makes Wisconsin look well and transparently governed.  For that matter, the level of shenanigans and corruption is starting to make Zimbabwe look well-governed.

Trump and Neoliberalism

What does the Trump election mean for neoliberalism as a doctrine?  Adam Kotsko over at An und für sich has some interesting thoughts on the matter; what follows is intended as a constructive engagement.  As I posted last week, I think Trump’s victory is inseparable from what Foucault calls state racism, and the appointment of Steve Bannon and nomination of Jeff Sessions certainly adds evidence to the theory that his will be a government of White Supremacy (I am not going to engage in the parlor game of distinguishing “white nationalism,” “white supremacy,” and so on.  It’s a parlor game that requires white privilege even to play, and all the iterations mean the same basic thing: white people should be in charge).  One of my points there is that the system is structurally rigged against cities and other places where non-Trump voters live.  At current count, Clinton - garden variety neoliberal - is up by nearly 1.7 million votes in the popular vote count, and that number is growing.  This means that more people who voted want neoliberalism than want Trumpism, for what that’s worth.  At the very least, it means that we need to think about neoliberalism as a dispositif of biopolitics, and how that intersects with the 1930s version that Foucault’s remarks on state racism address and that Trump seems to channel.

Kotsko thinks that we should grant that Trump isn’t a neoliberal, and think about the ramifications for neoliberalism.  All of this is thus necessarily a speculative exercise.  Still, I think a couple of points are worth noting, beyond the more general one that if neoliberalism can survive the financial crisis intact, then we should always be skeptical about reports of its death.  Here are two reasons I’m not convinced that Trump and Trumpism aren’t neoliberal in a fundamental way.

The 2016 Election and Racism, Soft and Structural

Foucault famously proposed that biopolitics - the power to foster life, or allow it to die - tended to produce its own outside in the form of state racism: not only might life be allowed to die, but there might be those who must die, literally or metaphorically, so an inside “we” could live. That is, it is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (Society must be Defended, 254).  Note the subtle elision: there is life that is allowed to die, and then there is also life that must die.  Thus, “if you want to live, they must die” (255) becomes the message.  In other words, biopolitics produces two forms, almost simultaneously.  Foucault is thinking of 1930s fascism, where (for example), the German emphasis on the health of the ethnically-German population was coupled with the extermination of European Jews.

But there’s an analogue, however imprecise, in the Presidential election last week.  In it, we saw two versions of biopolitics.  On the one hand, Clinton ran on a campaign of building a better life together, with a particular emphasis on fostering the lives of children and families.  The Affordable Care Act would be improved.  Paid leave for working parents.  And so on.  Even her negative ads against Trump emphasized the positive biopolitics: our children are watching.  What kind of President do you want them to see? On the Trump side, we saw nothing but Herrenvolk biopolitics: Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans and women were taking over, making America not great.  This had to stop.  Law and Order.  Our country is at its nadir, thanks to an ineffective, losing President who was probably born in deepest, darkest Kenya anyway.  He also somehow founded ISIS, which by the way is winning. China is winning.  Everyone but America is winning.  But if we keep the Mexican rapists out, and all the Muslims, maybe something good can happen.  We will be strong.  We will win again.  In Messianic tones that Masha Gessen reminds us (this piece is a must read) we should take very seriously, he proclaimed that “I alone” can save you.  That almost none of that narrative was true became irrelevant, in the same haunted house in which Clinton’s email server somehow became a darker mark against her character than his many business failings, tax evasions, failures to pay subcontractors, etc.

Two version of biopolitics.  In Foucauldian terms, Trump was advocating the return of state racism.  At one level, this is an obvious point, given his endless racist rhetoric about Mexicans and Muslims in particular.  But liberal commentators, including myself, have tried very hard to explain the Trump victory in other ways.  I have decided it can’t be done.  The Trump election is fundamentally about the maintenance of White Supremacy, something that women and people of color said a week ago.

Two Quick Thoughts on the Election

Leiter's post-mortem is worth reading, as is the analysis he links to by Ian Kerr.  If Trump does what he ran on (and what in his speech last night he said he wants to do: build infrastructure.  And really, he's right that our infrastructure is a national embarrassment), it's going to be very interesting to see how he intersects with the Republican party in Congress, since they don't want to spend money on things like that, or any of the other populist parts of the Trump agenda.  And his supporters are going to be very disappointed that he can't constitutionally do a lot of what he promised.

Here are two things that I haven't heard mentioned that need to be talked about.

1. Libertarians.  Gary Johnson got more votes than Trump's margin of victory in a lot of places, if my memory of late last night serves me well.  What percentage of those votes came from Clinton versus from Trump?  We'll never know, but in a very concrete way, libertarians own the Trump presidency.  When Nader was informed that his candidacy cost Gore in 2000, the response was a smug "well, Gore should have been a better candidate."  No doubt he (and Clinton) could have been better (I'm going to say something about that in point #2).  But that argument fundamentally misunderstands what it means to live in a majoritarian system.  In a parliamentary system, vote for the 5% candidate!  You'll get a seat in parliament, and maybe even a part of a ruling coalition.  But in a majoritarian system, if you vote for a candidate who can't win, you are indicating your acceptance of whoever does win.  You don't care, you can't tell a difference, whatever.  Because you take away a vote from the candidate you regard as less evil.  This isn't strategic voting or anything like that.  This is a structural feature of the system.  Don't blame the parties.  Blame the Constitution.  Anybody who voted for Johnson in a state more of a battleground than California or Texas needs to know that they played a non-trivial part in the Trump victory.  And Trump has indicated hostility to rights: during the campaign, he showed complete contempt for the 1st, 4th (and probably 5th), and 14th Amendments.  And women's rights are next, given that he's going to get Court appointments.  The Contrast with Clinton was very stark.  A Johnson vote in a battleground state was at the level of "what's Aleppo?"
2. The Auto Bailout.  I had to go out and get milk this morning, and had a moan with the cashier at the grocery store.  She said that she couldn't believe he won Michigan, given the auto bailout.  And then it struck me.  Obama made a very high-risk, unpopular decision to bail out the auto industry - and in the process saved thousands and thousands of largely-white, working class jobs in places like Michigan and Ohio.  In other words, he took a huge risk to help the sort of people who voted for Trump.  Did he help them all?  Of course not.  Did other things he do hurt them?  Probably.  But the rust belt would have been in much, much worse shape without the bailout.  And I didn't hear Hillary mention the auto bailout even once during the campaign.  When you're looking for something to say in Ohio and Michigan about how democratic party elites stand up for working people without college degrees, you should probably start there.  It's an actual achievement, and it took some courage to get it done.

 

Case Study for the Academic Boycott Question: North Carolina’s HB2

This piece is in response to the discussion over at Daily Nous here.  You should read it first; I’m posting here partly because what I’ve got to say is longer than would reasonably fit into a comment, and partly because I want to think a bit about how difficult the question of whether to launch a boycott is, and Justin wanted to avoid that topic (I may be a little slow in approving comments the next couple of days, be patient).  Since I live in Charlotte, NC, I do however think my subject position gives me some space for speaking on the topic.  And to be honest, I have very mixed feelings – David Wallace’s first comment on the Daily Nous post (that we need to know the details) seems right to me.  Here’s an example of why: One might boycott Charlotte on either of two grounds: the police shooting of Lamont Scott, or the state’s passage of HB2.  I want to leave aside the police shooting for the moment, because the politics behind HB2 lend support to the difficulty of deciding whether to boycott, and if so, what to boycott (plus, police shootings are an aspect of the boycott idea, and it remains to be seen whether the protests in Charlotte manage to get anyone’s sustained attention about the city’s deep racial problems).

On the Police Shooting in Charlotte, and being Ordered to Remove a Post

For those who haven’t been following the news, there was a police shooting in Charlotte the night before last.  The facts of the case are still being investigated: the police claim that the black man who was shot had a gun; his family says he had a book.  I’m not sure the distinction matters, as North Carolina is an open carry state, so “he had a gun” isn’t obviously relevant.  There were violent protests both last night and the night before.  Yesterday afternoon, I put the following statement on the Ethics Center’s webpage (including the italicized portion marking it as my own).  I woke up this morning to an email ordering me to take it down, and to call my dean.  I am not going to die on this hill, so I removed the post.  But we live in a world where University Ethics Center directors are not allowed to attempt to exercise moral leadership in the communities they serve, even as those universities claim to commit and recommit to their communities. And where Ethics Centers are forced to be strangely silent on moral issues like HB2 and police violence.

I reproduce the statement in its exact form below, in case someone may find it useful. Systemic violence against people of color is worse than the loss of our universities - including public ones, as I was sternly informed UNC Charlotte is - as places of intellectual engagement.  But the latter is not trivial or insignificant, as the steady collapse of meaningful public discourse is a disaster for any viable understanding of democracy.

UPDATE (9/22): There is dashcam footage of the shooting, which the CMPD has.  The family has seen the video, and wants it made public.  Earlier in the day, the CMPD chief had declared that the video would not be made public, because "The video does not give me absolute, definitive visual evidence that would confirm that a person is pointing a gun."  Unless this is a misstatement (but this is the exact quote I have seen, in several sources), this means that the CMPD Chief has essentially refused to release the video on the grounds that it does not clearly exonerate his officer.  Someone please show me how I am misreading this statement!   In any event, there are already too many issues to discuss here, but the national conversation has to include discussion about what to do with video footage of shootings.  North Carolina has passed a law that generally suppresses the public availability of that video.  It takes effect Oct. 1.  I do not know what the legal situation with the footage is now, but the conflict between the CMPD Chief and the family on whether the video should be released is important.

Issue Opinion Polls are Bad Biopolitics

I am not the first to say this (I believe Habermas critiqued opinion polls in Theory of Communicative Action, though I bet he didn’t use the Foucauldian language I’m about to), but I live in what is now considered a “purple” state, which means my vote might actually matter, and so I am inundated with opinion polls. So allow me my few minutes of ranting here. Don’t get me wrong: I am very happy to learn that the RCP polling average as of this moment has Trump down 1.7 points in North Carolina, and down 5 points nationally, with almost no path through the electoral college.  It helps me sleep at night, though whatever faith in humanity those polling numbers restore is quickly erased by the sadness that anyone could vote for someone so openly racist.  

I don’t mind being phoned and asked who I’d vote for if the election were held today.  What is more interesting and disturbing happens when the polls try to get at issues. It’s also an excellent example of the creation of a “population,” in the sense Foucault uses the term when he talks about biopolitics.  Today was the second time I’ve been polled by an outfit that clearly only works for Republicans – in both cases, I was presented with a list of things the candidates have done, and I was asked if I was more or less likely to vote for them on that basis.  The Republicans were presented as having done only things that they clearly thought I would say were good, and the Democrats were mainly associated with higher taxes and alleged scandals.  So that’s the first point: the poll often tries to push the voter in one direction or another, to create the reality it is ostensibly researching.

The more interesting point is the one about constructing a population, which it does extracting a series of “issues” and presenting them as a disconnected set of questions, with no attention to their context or how they might interconnect.

Donald Trump is the Perfect Expression of Contemporary Capitalism

There are a couple of emerging narratives about Donald Trump. One is that he is the unreconstructed id of middle-aged, white American men who were left behind by the economy. They aren’t quite sure who they’re mad at, but the list probably includes everybody who doesn’t look like them, women in general, and all those libruls who insist on the “political correctness” of being civil whilst in civil society. It also includes the Republican establishment, which Trump supporters have finally realized not only has virtually nothing in common with them, but also does not care about their actual interests. So the base devolves to all it has left: a generalized rage. The other narrative says that Trump is a European-style nationalist: you can have your social services, but you can’t have people who don’t belong to your tribe running around and using those services. These narratives have in common the idea that Trump is appealing because he is racist.

One should never underestimate the explanatory power of racism in American politics, but there’s a third narrative about Trump that belongs in the picture, because I think it adds some explanatory value that the other two don’t: Trump is also the perfect embodiment of contemporary capitalism, by which I mean brand capitalism. I want to take a little time to explain this via a detour into Saussure, but if you don’t want to go there, here’s the gist of it: Trump doesn’t have policy positions because he’s not selling any product other than himself, and there isn’t anything to him other than his being the embodiment of Trump^TM.

On Throwing Contingent Faculty Under the Bus (again)

Several folks in last night's Republican presidential debate, including Marco Rubio, apparently decided to use philosophy as a foil for some of their typically ridiculous claims about education. In response, lots of people are citing an average salary for people working as professional philosophers — sometimes attributed to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — north of 70k, much more than 'welders.'

I would like to take this opportunity to ask folks to think about what they're doing.  I am, and the rest of you should be, extremely dubious of statistics saying folks working as academic philosophers are making $70k on average. There is, to be blunt, no way such numbers —if they are being correctly reported — are being arrived at without massively undercounting continent faculty working at multiple schools, all technically 'part time,' and almost surely making 'welder' salaries or less. None.

At very least, let's not gleefully paper over the economic reality of many members of the profession just to score points against grandstanding right wing politicians. That would be to continue one of the worst patterns of the current academy, namely that of throwing many of us, and the most vulnerable of us, under the bus in order to reinforce the narrative that there isn't a problem with the economics of our profession — a position which is flatly wrong and only serves the interests of the most privileged subset of professional academics.

Was Charlie Hebdo 'Mocking' The Death Of Alan Kurdi?

By: Samir Chopra

Charlie Hebdo has offended again. A recently published cartoon titled “So Close to His Goal”, shows Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose tragic drowning death sharply focused the world's attention on the desperation of the migrant crisis in Europe, lying face down on the sand near a billboard featuring Ronald McDonald and advertising a 2-for-1 McDonald's Happy Meal with the legend: 'Two children's' meals for the price of one." The caption reads, 'So close to his goal.' And above it all, "Welcome to migrants.' A second cartoon titled “The Proof that Europe is Christian” shows a toddler drowning in the ocean. waters. Next to him a Christ-like figure walks on water. The caption reads, "Christians walk on waters… Muslims kids sink.”

Here is how I 'read' the cartoon, roughly: The West and Europe imagines itself the haven of liberal, secular ideals; it imagines itself the bastion of democracy, republicanism, and the social welfare state. In point of fact, it is as much in thrall to old-fashioned notions of Christian triumphalism and the blurring of the church and state as those regimes that it disdains. The West and Europe still fight holy wars; they still imagine themselves under attack from the 'Huns' and the 'Goths' and the 'barbarians' and the 'Moors.' The migrants might have thought they were escaping to this promised land where they would be welcomed with open arms and invited to make a new life. Little do they know that they were only heading for a vapid, shallow, xenophobic, insular, Islamophobic, consumerist culture, one whose patron saint is Ronald McDonald, and whose guiding slogans are not the call to arms of the great revolutions, but rather, sales pitches for cheap goods.

That's how I read it. I did not take these cartoons to be 'mocking' a dead child.  I do not claim to know the 'intent' of the cartoonist, but given Charlie Hebdo's history, and the current context, my interpretation strikes me as at least halfway plausible.

I am not going to offer a systematic defense here of Charlie Hebdo, but want to make note of a couple of what I think are relevant points:

1. The famous cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama exchanging fist-bumps in the Oval Office, while wearing 'Arab dresses' and carrying guns, appeared on the cover of the New Yorker. Had it appeared on the cover of the National Review Online, complete with a comments section of gibbering right-wingers rubbing their hands in glee, reactions to it would have been considerably sharper.
2. The Onion once ran an article titled 'Redskins Kike Owner Refuses To Change Team's Offensive Name.' I did not think the article or its headline was anti-Semitic. Some Jewish friends of mine were offended.

Charlie Hebdo's cartoons are bound to offend many and their choice of vehicle for making their political points might be questioned. But they have ample material to choose from and ample opportunity to offend; this world and its dominant species' arrogance and continuing self-destructive behavior will ensure that. Satirists exist and find work because we are worthy targets of satire.

Note: This post was originally published--under the same title--at samirchopra.com.

Unhealthy Skepticism: Foregone Conclusions and Bernie Sanders

By Roberta Millstein

Philosophers, and many thoughtful people more generally, pride themselves on having a healthy skepticism toward claims made by the media, by politicians, by scientists – by pretty much anyone. And rightly so. Many issues are complex and have not just two sides, but multiple sides. One ought not accept proffered claims without examining all of the evidence and without thinking about whether the evidence supports the claims being made. But are there times when a healthy skepticism becomes unhealthy?

In my field, philosophy of science, we often have meta-discussions about the extent to which we should accept scientific findings or question them. But even the most naturalistic philosopher of science thinks that we ought to be skeptical of scientific findings at least some of the time and under some circumstances.

In politics, some claim that we are starting to see a surge from U.S. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. But some are skeptical. Some think that Sanders doesn't actually have a chance of winning the Democratic nomination or the U.S. Presidency. Should we be skeptical, too – would that be a healthy skepticism?

I don't think it is. I don't think we should have the same skepticism toward towards claims about future political outcomes as we have towards scientific claims. The reason is simple: in evaluating scientific claims, we are evaluating existing evidence. As new evidence comes in, we might change our evaluation, but our beliefs, whether in favor or against a given claim, are not affecting the evidence or the truth of the claim itself.

But when evaluating claims about future political events, the situation is different. To see this, let's suppose that Jane Voter likes Sanders's platform, agrees with his values and proposals, but, being of skeptical bent, Jane decides that Sanders is too much of a long shot and doesn't really have a chance. This belief leads her not to support Sanders's campaign; it also leads her to suggest to her friends and and family that it would be a waste of time to do so.

The more Janes there are in the world, the more they can convince their friends and family, the more their beliefs become a foregone conclusion. That is, unlike like beliefs about scientific claims, beliefs about political outcomes actually change the outcomes. The skepticism becomes unhealthy.

We should act to bring about the outcomes that we find desirable, not sabotage those outcomes while brandishing the banner of skepticism.

The Offensive Stupidity Of The No-Fly List

By: Samir Chopra

Last Friday (July 31st) my wife, my daughter, and I were to fly back from Vancouver to New York City after our vacation in Canada's Jasper and Banff National Parks. On arrival at Vancouver Airport, we began the usual check-in, got groped in security, and filled out customs forms. The US conducts all customs and passport checks in Canada itself for US-bound passengers; we waited in the line for US citizens. We were directed to a self-help kiosk, which issued a boarding pass for my wife with a black cross across it. I paid no attention to it at the time, but a few minutes later, when a US Customs and Border Protection officer directed us to follow him, I began to. We were directed to a waiting room, where I noticed a Muslim family--most probably from Indonesia or Malaysia--seated on benches. (The women wore wore headscarves; the man sported a beard but no moustache and wore a skull cap.)

I knew what was happening: once again, my wife had been flagged for the 'no-fly' list.