Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Justin Fisher's avatar

    To be worth using, a detector needs not only (A) not get very many false positives, but also (B) get…

  2. Mark's avatar

    Everything you say is true, but what is the alternative? I don’t think people are advocating a return to in-class…

  3. Deirdre Anne's avatar
  4. Keith Douglas's avatar

    Cyber security professional here -reliably determining when a computational artifact (file, etc.) was created is *hard*. This is sorta why…

  5. sahpa's avatar

    Agreed with the other commentator. It is extremely unlikely that Pangram’s success is due to its cheating by reading metadata.

  6. Deirdre Anne's avatar
  7. Mark's avatar

“The 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2006” (Leiter)

The reader who sent me this list summed it up accurately:  "very crazy, very funny."  (I have to warn that a quarter of their targets I’ve never even heard of.)  With some justice, they name the far right Arizona Senator John McCain as "the most loathsome," noting:

The most consistently mischaracterized politician in the country, even McCain’s most nakedly self-serving machinations are universally hailed as the bold moves of an independent maverick who really, really, like, cares, man. By virtue of his five-year stay at the Hanoi Hilton and a completely ineffectual campaign finance reform bill (which was itself only PR damage control for his long-forgotten role in the Keating         Five), McCain has so successfully snowed America the he could go around kicking puppies all day and he’d be applauded for his authenticity.
  In reality, McCain is as phony as slimeballs come, having reversed his 
positions on Roe v. Wade, Bush’s tax cuts, the gay marriage amendment and Jerry Falwell in the last year alone, while the mainstream press looked away and whistled nonchalantly.

Bill Gates–who discovered philanthropy as soon as Microsoft became the target of a highly-publicized antitrust legal action–gets a good thrashing too:

As founder and co-chair of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he’s fighting global poverty and disease by investing in corporations that are the source of global poverty and disease. According to the L.A. Times, The BMGF has over $9 billion invested in companies whose activities contradict the foundation’s stated mission.

Nancy Pelosi, poster girl for spineless Democrats, is also pegged:

[She has] betrayed her supposed San Francisco values by sweeping the prospect of a well-deserved impeachment "off the table" and preemptively castrating the investigations she simultaneously promised. Anyone who thinks this brittle fundraising machine with the safest seat this side of North Korea is going to implement any ethics  reform beyond the paltriest possible cosmetic gesture needs to lay off the medicinal marijuana.

They have a good line on the pathological liar David Horowitz–"Like most fascist converts, Horowitz sees disseminating information as an act of treason. His favorite targets are university professors he declares enemies of "academic freedom," because nothing is more dangerous to a neocon than someone who actually knows what they’re talking about"–as well as apt remarks about Rush Limbaugh, Senator Lieberman and Ann Coulter, though these are not quotable for the family audience this blog attracts.  The remarks about Cindy Sheehan are stupid–but, as my correspondent said, this list is both "very crazy" and often "very funny."  Perhaps the funniest is #16 on the list–"You"–which is their Menckenesque characterization of the typical reader of InstaIgnorance or viewer of Fox News or (dare we note?) devotee of the New York Times:

Your whole life has been a pitiful exercise in rote mimicry, a meek subjugation of individuality in exchange for herd approval. Your delusions of "common sense" wisdom stem from an unwillingness to seek information and an inability to critically analyze it. You never hesitate to offer strong opinions on subjects you don’t know a damn thing about. You’re willing to believe anything a guy in a suit says on TV, as long as it        doesn’t hint at your culpability in the negligent homicide of your country and planet or otherwise cloud your streak-free conscience. You’re more  worried about friction on the "Desperate Housewives" set than the lack of health coverage at your tedious, soul-destroying job. You have no idea what is going on in the world, and you’re fine with that. You are why democracy doesn’t work.

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