October 2025
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“The Scum Manifesto, or how to get a job in the Trump Administration”
This essay by John Ganz is, sadly, probably on point: I’m sure by this point we’ve all seen some horrific videos of ICE abductions of migrants. Something looks off about those guys: They don’t look like feds or even cops; they look more like Proud Boys or Jan 6ers. That makes sense, since DHS is using white nationalist…
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Trump’s growing, and “shadowy”, federal police force…
…you know the ones that go around in masks snatching people off the streets and throwing them into the back of vans, like in any authoritarian society. That police force is growing, and I would bet its purview expands beyond alleged immigration enforcement.
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Vanderbilt, Wash U/St. Louis among schools “in dialogue” with Trump Admin about the extortionist “compact” that violates academic freedom
So CHE reports. Faculty at those schools need to let their leaders know that any school that signs on to a Trump compact will become the target of a nationwide boycott!
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“Bloodless Pedantry”
Philosopher Tim Crane on “analytic” philosophy: If analytic philosophers were to reflect in a more disinterested, less defensive way about their tradition, it could help them understand why philosophers of other traditions find it so obscure, and why those outside philosophy can find it so pointless. The truth is that the point of philosophical questions…
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Blast from the past: “How Trump Thinks”
I posted this shortly after the 2016 election, but sadly, it remains as relevant as ever.
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Philosopher Jaime Edwards talks about Marx on ideology and class…
…at Brain in a Vat. (I talked about other parts of our Marx book last month.)
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“If God does not exist, then we are locked without hope in a world filled with gratuitous and unredeemed suffering”
I was astonished to learn this had been presented as an objection to atheism in this informative review of Professor Nagasawa’s recent book. How can truth be an objection to a view?
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Lawsky’s Law School Hiring Information
Professor Lawksy has created a website with all the information she has been helpfully collecting over a number of years now. Definitely bookmark it if you’re an aspiring legal academic.
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The U.S. “Insurrection Act” is our “Enabling Act” (the 1933 German law)
This piece explains why: The Insurrection Act is a dangerous law that gives the president broad powers to authorize far-reaching uses of the military in the domestic sphere. It is based on highly permissive standards for action and provides neither a role for Congress nor a basis for serious judicial review…. The president in March…
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Universities continue to reject Trump’s “compact”
Besides MIT, Brown, Penn, and the University of Southern California have all declined. Again, if any school accepts the compact, then academics must boycott that university, and treat it as a pariah. CHE has a useful piece by some leading academic freedom experts (David Rabban, Robert Post, Keith Whittington) and other academic defenders of free…
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Donna Adelson gets life in prison for her role in the murder-for-hire of lawprof Dan Markel
Also convicted was her son, and those who actually killed Professor Markel. His ex-wife, Wendi Adelson, and his ex-father-in-law, Harvey Adelson have not been indicted. Professor Markel was murdered more than 11 years ago.
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Cornell suspends Jewish and pro-Palestinian history professor (UPDATED)
MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–UPDATED Given how much federal money is at stake for Cornell, it’s hard not to interpret this incident as a case of “anticipatory obedience.” If the account of the students in the seminar is correct, then the professor, correctly, asked a disruptive student (who was Israeli) to leave the class, not…
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The imbecile RFK Jr. is destroying the FDA…
….like everything else he touches. An excerpt: The inquiry came in August, and struck scientists at the Food and Drug Administration as highly unusual. The leader of the center that regulates prescription medicines wanted to know what they thought about leucovorin, a generic drug that’s mainly used to alleviate side effects of cancer therapies. He’d seen…
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It turns out some Republicans really are racists and fascists
Who would have guessed?
All about class.