This para, presented matter-of-factly in the middle of a New York Times piece about the Repub convention bringing older strategists out of retirement, surprised more than, perhaps, it should

Paul Manafort, 67, all but disappeared from American politics in recent decades to advise international leaders, including strongmen like Ferdinand E. Marcos, the former dictator of the Philippines, and Viktor F. Yanukovych, the deposed former president of Ukraine. Now, though, Mr. Manafort, who worked for the Ford campaign 40 years ago, is the lead convention strategist for Donald J. Trump

Combined with the link back to Joe McCarthy, I feel a bit as if we have moved on to some alternative reality timeline (I remember a great one, where Nixon won in 1960, and an author is trying to pitch the actual history of the 60s as an alternate reality story – can anyone point to this).

We acquired this fridge magnet at some point.

Nice use of Papyrus. Nice combination of Papyrus with whatever that faux-handwriting script font is.

Fits with Henry’s link to an incongruous appropriation of Beckett.

Suppose we wanted to make a collection of cheerful thoughts from depressed writers. You can’t spell ‘unhappiness’ without the happiness! What else might be included?

Apologies in advance for all the formatting foul-ups. My usual formatting guru, John Holbo, is off somewhere arguing about the Commerce Clause…

1.

At Vox, Dylan Matthews offers a sharp analysis of last night’s debate, which I didn’t watch or listen to. His verdict is that the three big losers of the night were Hillary Clinton, the New Democrats, and liberal technocrats. (The two winners were Bernie Sanders and Fight for $15 movement.) As Matthews writes:

But just going through the issues at tonight’s debate, it’s striking to imagine a DLCer from the ’90s watching and wondering what his party had come to. Sanders was asked not if he was sufficiently tough on crime, but if his plans to let millions of convicted criminals out of prison would actually free as many felons as promised. Clinton was criticized not for being insufficiently pro-Israel, but for being insufficiently willing to assail the killing of Palestinian civilians. Twenty years after Clinton named former Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin as his Treasury secretary, so much as consorting with Goldman Sachs had become toxic.

Though I’m obviously pleased if Sanders beat Clinton in the debate, it’s the other two victories that are most important to me. For those of us who are Sanders supporters, the issue has never really been Hillary Clinton but always the politics that she stands for. Even if Sanders ultimately loses the nomination, the fact that this may be the last one or two election cycles in which Clinton-style politics stands a chance: that for us is the real point of this whole thing.

I‘m always uncertain whether Clinton supporters have a comparable view. While there are some, like Jonathan Chait or Paul Starr, for whom that kind of politics is substantively attractive, and who will genuinely mourn its disappearance, most of Clinton’s supporters seem to be more in synch with Sanders’s politics. They say they like Bernie and agree with his politics; it’s just not realistic, they say, to think that the American electorate will support that.

Which makes these liberals’ attraction to Clinton all the more puzzling. If it’s all pure pragmatism for you—despite your personal support for Bernie’s positions, you think only her style of politics can win in the United States—what are you going to do, the next election cycle, when there’s no one, certainly no one of her talent or skills and level of organizational support, who’s able to articulate that kind of politics? [click to continue…]

Envelope please! And the winner is … Troilus and Cressida, by William Shakespeare (probably written in 1603 or 1609 or maybe as early as 1599). Let’s review the victory conditions. [click to continue…]

For where desire, celestial, pure desire,
Hath taken root, and grows, and doth not tire,
There God a commerce states, and sheds
His secret on their heads.

Henry Vaughan, “The Star”

“And how does your commerce go, you strange guardian of the past?”

G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

My partisanship post has blossomed into an extensive discussion of original intent, interpretation and the commerce clause. Maybe we could use a little more scholarship to go with that. (Who knows?)

Randy Barnett and Jack Balkin are big in this area, and their major papers are freely available on the web. (Here’s Balkin’s major statement, outside of his book. Here’s an old one by Barnett that makes his general framework clear. And here’s a recent response by him to Balkin on commerce.) But let me start with “Rethinking the Commerce Clause”, by Nelson and Pushaw. It’s not free online, but I want just to quote the opening: [click to continue…]

We’ve already had Janice Rogers Brown on Samuel Beckett as feel-good self-help guru. Now (from a bit of Molloy I was reading last night), here’s Beckett on the quantified self movement, half a century before it was a movement.

Update: I hadn’t realized that today was the 100th anniversary of Beckett’s birth.

Last week I was in San Francisco for the Pacific APA, so here’s the Golden Gate bridge, with the fog coming in:

We talk a lot on this blog about pedagogy and other issues related to classroom instruction in the academy. I don’t often participate in those discussions, though I read them avidly, with great interest and appreciation. I suppose it’s because the issues raised there sometimes seem a bit removed from what I encounter at CUNY.  But I posted this post last night on my blog, and spurred on by an appreciative tweet from Henry, I thought I’d share it here. Teaching’s not always like this at CUNY, but it often is. I remember my first semester at Brooklyn College, teaching a nighttime seminar on liberalism and constitutional law. I’ll never forget, about an hour after the class had ended, I walked by the classroom on my way home and there were three students—one from Nigeria, one from Eastern Europe, and one who was African American—still arguing over some passage from On Liberty. It sounds like something out of a movie, and the truth is, it often feels that way. More than 15 years later, I still sometimes fantasize that I’m teaching the next generation of the New York Intellectuals. Only instead of them being the children of East European Jews, they’re from the Caribbean, West Africa, Palestine, Yemen, Turkmenistan. They’re black, they’re Latina, they’re Muslim, they’re working class, they’re Orthodox Jewish, and they come from everywhere.

* * * * * 

I’m not one of those professors who says, “I love my students,” but…I love my students. [click to continue…]

When some things have holes in them, it’s a sign of decay, like a beam with termites. But some things are meant to have holes, like Swiss cheese. I agree with John’s view on “holes and gaps”, but as always, I tend to assign agency to the political system more than to the financial sector. Nearly all of those holes were intended to be there, and it was intended that the financial system used them. The process whereby the behaviour involved is redefined from acceptable deviancy to unacceptable is very interesting, like the last chapters of a John le Carre novel by way of Foucault. A few thoughts below, ranging in geopolitical scope from “vast” to “cosmic”, in a comment which grew into an alternative monetary history of the second half of the twentieth century.

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Process hypocrisy isn’t exactly newsworthy, I know, but a few notes. [click to continue…]

Whenever I raise the observation that navies are essentially obsolete, someone is bound to raise the cry “What about the sea lanes”. The claim that navies play a vital role in protecting trade routes is taken so much for granted that it might seem untestable. But it turns out that most of the information needed for a benefit cost analysis is available. Unsurprisingly (to me at least), the claimed benefit of keeping sea lanes open doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I’ve spelt this out in an article in Inside Story, reprinted over the fold.

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Press coverage massive leak of papers from hitherto unheard of (by me, at any rate) Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca has, unsurprisingly, focused on the world leaders, celebrities and fixers whose financial affairs have been revealed in an unflattering light. As regards the financial system as a whole, the New York Times draws a fairly typical conclusion

Above all, the Panama Papers reveal an industry that flourishes in the gaps and holes of international finance.

Really? This description suggests that those involved are obscure minor players in the system, of the sort who might be expected to deal with dodgy law firms in tax havens. The real business of global finance is undertaking by upstanding financial institutions with transparent practices.

But writing this down is enough to see that it is silly. As usual in such cases, we find familiar names: HSBC, UBS, Credit Suisse,and RBS and so on. And of course this is just one firm in one tax haven. The absence of major American banks reflects, in large measure, the fact that they prefer tax havens other than Panama, where there is a high degree of US state countrol.

Again as usual, the line is that this is all in the past, and that the banks have cleaned up their act. But the criminal charges keep on coming. This is scarcely surprising when no major bank has been shut down, even for the most egregious wrongdoing, and where only a handful of bank employees have faced jail time over frauds that total well into the hundreds of billions.

As I’ve argued in the past, activities like tax avoidance/evasion and regulatory arbitrage aren’t peripheral flaws in a financial system primarily concerned with the efficient global allocation of capital. They are the core business, without which the profits of the global financial sector would be a tiny fraction of the $1 trillion or so now reaped annually. The burden of supporting this financial sector is a major factor in the secular stagnation now evident in most developed economies.[^1]

The financial globalization that began in the 1970s has not produced an efficient global financial market with a few gaps and holes. The gaps and holes are the market.

[^1]:Since it’s bound to be raised, the costs of financial globalisation to the developed world can’t be offset by considering rapid growth in China and India. These countries have, until recently, maintained tightly regulated financial systems, and have had plenty of criticism for it. Of course, that has resulted in plenty of corruption and misallocation of capital, but the sector simply hasn’t been enough to produce a large drag on growth. That’s clearly changed, in China at least, so it will be interesting to watch the consequences.

Leiter has an interesting post on why undergraduate women give up on philosophy. A senior female philosopher diagnosed the problem, and started with the following comment:

My assessment of the undergrad women in philosophy thing: undergrad women get sick of being talked over and strawmanned by their peers in and out of the classroom, and get sick of classes where the male students endlessly hold forth about their own thoughts.

Leiter adds:

I will say that over two decades of teaching, it has seemed to me that the students who speak out of proportion to what they have to say are overwhelmingly male.

My experience is exactly the same as Leiter’s. And I’ve heard from countless female students that they just got tired of being ignored, both by prof and male students, and also tired of trying to get a word in among the ramblings of boys who think that they are really smart. Even in classes taught by women. And in classes, I’m embarrassed to say, taught by me. To make things worse I think that such behavior can be a very good strategy for learning – it gets you the professor’s attention, and the professor will correct you or argue with you, even if they are extremely irritated, and you can learn a lot from that.

Leiter goes on that “Maintaining control of the classroom, and creating a welcoming environment for all student contributions, can probably go some distance to rectifying this–but that, of course, supposes levels of pedagogical talent and sensitivity that many philosophy faculty probably lack.”

I almost completely agree with this, but would substitute the word ‘skill’ for ‘talent’. I’d say that if you really feel you lack the talent to manage the classroom in this way, so do not think it is worth investing in learning how to do it, I advise that you avoid teaching in mixed male/female classrooms, or find a job that doesn’t involve teaching. But I think most of us have the talent, we just lack the skill because as a profession, at least at R1s, we are spectacularly complacent about developing our pedagogical talents into skills. We focus considerable effort on developing our talent as researchers, consuming the research of others, discussing their research, our research, and other people’s research in a community of learner/researchers, putting our research out for comments from friends and, ultimately, for review and publication. We ought to become pretty good at it. But as a recent paper by David Conception and colleagues shows, we receive hardly any training in instruction, and once we become teachers we might try very hard, but we invest very little in the kinds of processes that would enable us to learn from experts, as opposed to improving through trial-and-error. It is like trying to become a good violin player without anyone ever listening to you, and without ever listening to anyone who plays it well. Possible, I suppose, but hardly a recipe for success.

So, from my own trial and error (combined with some watching of experts, and employing coaches to observe me) here are some things that I have learned how to do which seem to me to make the classroom one in which women participate at a similar rate to men and seem to reduce the problem of particular male students dominating the room.

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