College presidents, student protests, and major political issues

There has been an outpouring of student protests at university campuses in the US as a result of the unfolding atrocities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Many of those protestors have been condemning the horrific situation in which tens of thousands of Palestinians have been bombed, shot, and starved to death. Since it is Israel that has been behind these attacks, there is always a thin line between protesting Israeli government actions and attacking Jews. Antisemitism is reprehensible and should be condemned as much as Islamophobia or indeed any attack on people that is not due to their actions but is based on their identity, whether it be ethnicity or religion or gender or sexuality or nationality. But it has too often been used to try and silence criticisms of Israel.

Some groups, including members of congress, have tried to shut down criticisms of Israeli policies and actions and of Zionism (which is a political stance) by equating those with antisemitism and have strongly pressurized university presidents to crack down on anti-Israeli protests and have refused to take seriously their difficulty in trying to balance the rights of students to protest while at the same time protecting individual students from harm. The presidents of Harvard and University of Pennsylvania tried to make that delicate case but some members of congress were determined to make an example of them and they were forced to resign as a result of this pressure.
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How Trump can make money from his money-losing social media company

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has had his Truth Social company go public by merging with a publicly traded shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp. Under the deal SSAT owns nearly 79 million shares, about 58% of the total. While the share price peaked at $79.38 on March 22, making his shares worth about $6.3 billion, it has since dropped precipitously, and as of yesterday was trading at $33, making its worth about $2.6 billion.

David Cay Johnson writes that the true value of the stock in Trump’s company is zero since it lost $58 million last year and had revenues of just $4 million with no sign that revenues will rise. Johnson says that because the stock is highly over valued, it is the target of so-called ‘short sellers’, who make money by betting correctly that a stock’s price is going to fall.
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Arizona GOP digs an even deeper hole on abortion

The ruling by the Arizona supreme court that an 1864 law that purportedly bans all abortions even in the case of rape and incest has created shock wave in GOP politics. The only exception is to save the life of the woman but, as has been pointed out, this is not as clear cut as it appears to be. It is not always evident at which point the woman’s life is in danger and doctors fearing prosecution may wait until they think death is imminent, which could well result in death or serious complications.

Even serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and the GOP nominee for governor Kari Lake have said that they oppose the law although embarrassingly for Lake, just two years ago she enthusiastically supported the very same law, even referring to it as section 13-3603, its specific legislative number, showing that she knew exactly what she was supporting.
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John Oliver on executions

The program was especially powerful in making the case why the death penalty should be abolished. The practice is so shameful that the manufacturers of the drugs used in lethal injections have refused to allow them to be used for this purpose so states that implement the death penalty have resorted to extreme secrecy to hide the name of the companies that they have mange to persuade to give them the drugs.

The investigative team at Last Week Tonight have identified a company that is not an authorized drug manufacturer but is the secret supplier to states of one such drug.

What will Monday’s Trump trial bring?

On Monday, April 15th, the criminal trial involving 34 felony charges against serial sex offender Donald Trump (SSAT) for the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels is scheduled to begin. Since it is a criminal trial, SSAT is required to be present during it, unlike in the case of the previous civil trials involving the fraud case brought by New York attorney general Letitia James and the two brought by E. Jean Carroll which he chose to sometimes attend, mainly to vent his spleen to the media outside the courthouse.

SSAT has been trying his mightiest to get this next trial, like all his trials, postponed since his entire legal strategy is to avoid any conviction before the election on November 5th in the hope that he wins and can thus shut down all prosecutions. With his federal cases, he can simply order his attorney general to drop them. With the state trials, it is a little more complicated but he could argue that as a sitting president, he has some kind of immunity and that the trials should not go ahead until he leaves office. He is already arguing that, in the federal case over his handling of confidential documents, he has immunity and the US Supreme Court is going to hear that case and will not rule on it until June or July.
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Film review: Scoop (2024)

Back in 2019, Prince Andrew agreed to an interview with the BBC news program Newsnight in an effort to tell his side of the story about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had just killed himself in prison, and the allegations that Andrew had had sex with Virginia Giuffre, one of the many underage girls who were a constant presence in Epstein’s world.

Apparently Andrew was very pleased with how the interview had gone and felt that he had performed brilliantly. But it was widely viewed as a train wreck and a few days later, Andrew had been forced to relinquish his official duties and has not regained them since. It is thought that the interview is what persuaded Giuffre to sue Andrew, a case that was settled out of court in 2022, reportedly for around $16 million.
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Dennett’s somewhat dangerous idea

The philosopher Daniel Dennett has recently published a memoir and in a review Matthew Lau accuses him of pursuing a ‘dead end social Darwinism’. He says that Dennett has defended the idea of ‘adaptationism’, the view “that all features of an organism must be adapted for some good purpose.” This has been rejected by other scholars of evolution like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin who argue that some features did not come into being to serve a specific purpose but were instead accidental byproducts of the evolutionary process. Those two authors gave the image of the spandrels in cathedrals.

In architecture, spandrels are a structural byproduct resulting from the placement a dome on top of four rounded arches. The spandrels fill in the empty space where the arch stops touching the top of the dome, stabilizing the overall structure. In finished cathedrals they are frequently painted and otherwise beautifully ornamented, as in the four famed spandrels of the Cathedral of San Marcos in Venice, Italy, that depict the four biblical rivers (Tigris, Euphrates, Indue, and Nile).

For Gould and Lewontin, if we adopt the adaptationist perspective, we might mistakenly assume the San Marcos spandrels were initially formed to be part of the cathedral’s artwork and miss their origin as necessary structural byproducts.

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Voters seem to be wising up to the stadium con

One of the worst things about professional sports in the US is that the owners of teams extort local communities to foot the bill for fancy new stadiums by threatening to take the teams elsewhere if they do not receive massive taxpayer subsidies. Studies have shown that the economic benefits that the stadiums supposedly provide are often wildly inflated and in reality bring nowhere near the amount that the public puts up. The team owners have pulled off this scam many times but it looks like citizens are getting wise to this extortion racket and refusing to pay.
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A better formulation of the Golden Rule

We are most familiar with the form of the so-called Golden Rule that says that one should treat others as you would like others to treat you. That seems reasonable on the surface but it has the problem that how you would like to be treated may not be how someone else would like to be treated. Some time ago, I argued for a better form of the Golden Rule that says simply “Don’t be a jerk” because the standard form was too vague and too subject to idiosyncratic interpretations to be useful.

My formulation was not very elegant but it turns out that there is a better way of expressing the same sentiment that has been around for millennia. It also takes a negative form of the rule and says that one should not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated. This seems better because avoiding doing things to others that one would not like have done to you avoids many pitfalls, since it is not requiring you to do something to others.
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