Donald Trump is Gaslighting America

"The good news about this boiling frog scenario is that we're not boiling yet. Trump is not going to stop playing with the burner until America realizes that the temperature is too high. It's on every single one of us to stop pretending it's always been so hot in here."

Read the rest at Teen Vogue. (Yes, Teen Vogue, and see this article in Slate Outward for more on the rise of Teen Vogue.)

Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Hate Crimes and our Trumpist Future

"Muslim Americans are our friends and family members, our doctors and nurses, our police officers and firefighters. They own businesses and teach in classrooms. Thousands of them have fought for the American flag. Many have died defending it. And yet, too often—especially in the last year, following a number of tragic terrorist incidents, and amidst an increase in divisive and fearful rhetoric—we have seen Muslim Americans targeted and demonized simply because of their faith. And to impose a blanket stereotype on all members of any faith because of the actions of those who pervert that faith is to go backwards in our thinking and our discourse, and to repudiate the founding ideals of this country."

Read more at Slate.

Really Great Piece About Male Sexual Entitlement

At Role Reboot.

Abortion: An Allegory

Angelina Rosario went into Our Lady of Mercy Hospital in Santa Cristina, California, last week for a minor procedure to help with her dysmennorhea and walked out pregnant. The hospital is still trying to figure out exactly what happened. There was also another woman, Rosaria Angelino, there that day. Ms Angelino had been undergoing fertility treatment and was scheduled to have several embryos implanted in her uterus. Somehow, their charts got mixed up as they were taken into adjoining operating rooms. (There was a small earthquake about that time, and there is some evidence that the charts were knocked off the women’s gurneys.) The error was not discovered until the two women woke up in recovery. Ms Angelino was surprised to find that she had gotten an ablasion, but not nearly as shocked as Ms Rosario was to discover that she was pregnant.

Ms Rosario immediately demanded that the hospital undo its mistake. The doctors, however, refused to do so. The only way to undo what they had done would be to perform an abortion, and Our Lady of Mercy does not perform abortions, on ethical and religious grounds. Ms Angelino and her husband, though they had some sympathy for Ms Rosario’s plight, pleaded with her not to abort the pregnancy. They had been through a very long process, they explained, and the embryos that were to have been implanted in Ms Angelino were the only viable ones that had resulted. It must, they understood, be difficult for Ms Rosario unwittingly to have become a surrogate mother, and Ms Rosario ought no doubt to be compensated by the hospital. But none of that, they said, changes the fact that Ms Rosario was now carrying their unborn children, who have as much of a right to life as any other human being.

It is clear that Ms Rosario has a legal right to abortion if she should choose one. But her personal, moral situation is quite complicated. Ms Rosario has always believed herself that life begins at conception and so agrees with the Angelinos that she is now carrying ‘unborn children’ who have a right to life. But, in statement released by her attorney today, Ms Rosario insisted that this does not settle the question what she should do.

“It is true”, she wrote, “that the embryos I am now carrying have a right to life. But I have rights, too, and their right to life does not give them the right to use my body to sustain themselves. It does not give them the right to put my life and health at risk so that they might grow and develop. It does not give them the right to make me give birth to them so that they might live independent lives. It is tragic that, through no fault of their own, these unborn children have come to be in my uterus. But they have no right to be there, and it is not my fault that they are.”

She concluded, “I do not want these embryos to die. If they could be removed from my body and put in someone else’s, that would be fine with me. But that is not possible. I do not want the Angelinos, who seem like nice people, to lose the children for which they have struggled so long, either. I wish I could help them. Maybe that would be the most honorable thing for me to do: to carry their children for them. But I cannot do it. I have my own life to live.”

---

I made that story up. None of it is true. But it might have been true, and maybe one day something like it will be true. But the lesson of the story is the same, whether it is true or not. Far too often, it is assumed in our public discussions that, if only we could decide whether “the fetus is a person”, we would know what to think about abortion, so we fight and fight over that unanswerable question. But, as my philosopher friends will already know, Judith Jarvis Thomson (one of my teachers at MIT) pointed out forty-five years ago in her now classic paper, “A Defense of Abortion”, that is wrong. And not just wrong but sexist, because it completely ignores the fact that, where there is a fetus, there is also a pregnant person, usually a woman, with rights of her own.

Events relevantly like the ones in my story happen with terrifying frequency, even if people like Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin would have you believe otherwise. When a pregnancy results from rape, an embryo has, in the same way, though no fault of its own, come to be where it is not wanted and not welcome. It is, no doubt, a tragedy compounded. But such embryos, whatever right they may have to life, have no right to the use of their hosts’ bodies.

"Why Are There Lesbians?" Asks Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner

Absolutely fantastic, and really quite funny, article over at Outward about arguments yesterday at the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals concerning what may turn out to be a landmark LGBTQ discrimination case.

Working Class Voters and the 2016 Election

The day after....

Today in my introductory logic class, we were supposed to start talking about formal deduction: one of the most important, and confusing, topics in the course. When 10am rolled around, there were a lot of missing people. And those who were there mostly looked half-asleep, and many of them looked as if they were about to cry, or scream, or something else. I canceled the class, and several students thanked me.

What happened yesterday? There will no doubt be a lot of punditry, but in reading the exit polls last night (I kept the TV off), it seemed to me pretty obvious what had happened. Here's my theory. (And it's apparently not just mine.)

The story of this election is really told in four states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That is where Clinton's famed "firewall" gave way. And why does she lose those four states? Because of Trump's absolutely huge advantage with, as the pollsters tend to put it, "whites without a college education", i.e., working class whites. Republicans have done well with that group for some time now, but exit poll data from the New York Times reveals the depth of the problem Clinton had. Obama lost this group by just 18 points in 2008 and 25 points in 2012; Clinton lost by a staggering 40 points. Along similar lines: Among people with household incomes under $30,000, Obama by 32 and 28 points in 2008 and 2012, but Clinton won by only about 12 points. (Obviously, there is some overlap between those groups.)

Might the fact that Clinton did less well with African-American and Latinx voters than Obama did in 2012 be partly for this same sort of reason?

Who are these relatively poor and less educated people who voted for Obama but have now voted from Trump? I'll hazard a guess that they are the same people who formed a group of which many of us had heard, but of which few of us could believe might exist: the people who wanted to vote for Bernie Sanders, but would vote for Trump over Clinton. Which is to say: Yes, obviously, there are plenty of racists and misogynists and xenophobes among Trump's supporters. But I doubt that they are who won him the election.

The truth is that, long before working-class voters turned out in historic numbers, seemingly fleeing from the Democratic candidate, the Democratic party had abandoned them. The recovery from the 2008 crash has been painfully slow, even non-existent from the point of view of that demographic. What exactly has the Obama administration done to help them? Or, allowing for Republican obstructionism, even tried to do?

But if you really want a poster child for the way the Democrats have taken working-class people for granted, you could do no better than to choose that other Clinton, Bill. It was Bill, together with the so-called "Democratic Leadership Council",  who pushed the party in a 'pro-business' direction. That was a needed corrective, after the disasters of 1984 and 1988. But it did not have to go as far as embracing and even championing the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Bill did largely over the objections of labor, who predicted, rightly as it turned out, that it would lead to a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States. And many of those lost jobs were in the very states in which Clinton stunningly lost last night.

The good news, for Democrats, is that these voters may well not be lost to the party. As I said, I suspect that many of them would have been happy to vote for Sanders, who tirelessly called attention to their plight during the primary. Indeed, in so far as Clinton paid any attention to this group, it was because of pressure from Sanders. I'm not saying that Sanders would have won. Maybe, maybe not. But a Democratic party that took a turn back towards its roots and became once again a champion of labor, would, I think, stand a very good chance of luring at least many of those voters back into the fold.

The reason is that Donald Trump, although he has to be given credit for recognizing the depth of frustration among these voters, has absolutely no concrete plans to help them. Building his ridiculous wall (which Mexico still isn't going to pay for), or anything else that restricts immigration, has nothing to do with it. Probably the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead, but that, at most, will serve to prevent further erosion, not to restore the coastline.

Probably some other moves towards protectionism are likely, too. For example, Trump has talked about re-negotiating NAFTA and other trade deals. But it's far from clear that we can turn the clock back now, or that doing so would lead to a restoration of US manufacturing. What seems far more likely is that it would lead to a trade war that would cost the US economy dearly, since Mexico and Canada are two of our biggest export markets. Besides which, it's far from clear how many Republicans in Congress, who tend be a pretty pro-trade bunch, would be willing to go along with protectionist legislation.

And, speaking of the Republicans in Congress, what we're likely to get from them is a series of policies that will benefit the traditional Republican constituencies, which, to put it mildly, do not include the working class: Massive tax cuts for the wealthy, just to start; a partial repeal of Obamacare, which will deprive many working class people of health insurance; a privatization of Medicare, which will affect millions of older Americans, especially those less well-off.

Maybe, just maybe, there will be enough support for the sorts of investments in infrastructure that seemed, at one time, to be attracting bipartisan support. But that was really a core proposal of Clinton's. And it costs money, which means you need either revenue or debt. For which of those do the Republicans in Congress have an appetite?

Nothing else has even been mentioned at this point, certainly not by Trump.

So here's a prediction: Two years from now (at the mid-terms), and four years from now (at the next presidential election), the plight of working class people will not be any better than it is now and may well be even worse. And the `cross-over' voters who swept Trump into power are not going to be happy about it. They voted for Trump because they wanted concrete change, not just symbolic change, and they certainly did not want the usual offerings from the Republican establishment. But they are not going to get concrete change.

That gives the Democrats an opportunity. But only if they're willing to have their own reckoning and stop just pretending to care about the working class.

How To Be a Man in the Age of Trump

A man behaving as Trump does would be a pariah in any culture that did not actively and persistently enable men like him.

It sounds like an interesting article, but it turns out to be much more interesting than you might expect. It's written by a transman, who has a special perspective on what it is to be a man.

New Paper: Comments on Imogen Dickie's "Fixing Reference"

The main focus of my comments is the role played in Dickie's view by the idea that "the mind has a need to represent things outside itself". But there are also some remarks about her (very interesting) suggestion that descriptive names can sometimes fail to refer to the object that satisfies the associated description.

You can find the paper here.

Make New Files in Some Directory Be Accessible to a Group

My wife Nancy has finally let me move her over to Linux, so now we can easily share access a lot of files on our server, such as photos. But I want her not just to be able to read those files, but also to be able to write them. But, on the other hand, I don't want to make them world-writable. I just want them to be Nancy-writable.

Obviously, the solution is to create a group rghnlw of which we are both members, make that group own the files, and make them group-writable. That's easy enough for existing files. But what about new files? I'd like those also to be owned by the group and to be group-writable.

Making the new files be owned by the group is easy: All we need to do here is make the directory in which these files live setgid, and to make the group in question own that directory (and also any subdirectories). So let's say I've put our common files into /home/common/. Then the first step is:

# chgrp -R rghnlw
# chmod -R g+s /home/common

Now any new files created in /home/common/ will have group rghnlw.

Unfortunately, however, those files will not be group-writable---not if my umask, and Nancy's, are the typical 022. Changing that would be an option, but it would make all files that either of us create group-writable, which is not what I want.

The solution is to use access control lists. There are good discussions of how to use these for this purpose here and here, but I'll summarize as well.

First, we need to enable access control lists for whatever filesystem we are using. In this case, /home/ is mounted on its own partition, the line in /etc/fstab looking like:

/dev/hda3      /home      ext3    defaults        1 2

We need to change this to:

/dev/hda3       /home      ext3    defaults,acl        1 2

And then to activate the new setting, we need to remount:

# mount -o remount /home
# tune2fs -l /dev/hda3

The latter should now show acl as active.

Second, we need to establish the access controls.

# setfacl -d -m group:rghnlw:rw /home/common/
# setfacl -m group:rghnlw:rw /home/common/

The former makes rghnlw the default group, with read and write permissions; the latter applies this to existing files.

Converting "Stitched" Pages from PDFs

More and more great books (including philosophy) are going out of copyright and so are appearing on public archives, like Project Gutenberg and archive.org. Unfortunately, though, many of these PDFs are constructed in a somewhat odd way, with each page consisting of several separate images that get "stitched" together. So if you try to extract the pages to run them through OCR, say, it ends up looking like you ran the pages through a shredder.

Fortunately, as I noted in an earlier post, we can use ImageMagick to fix this up. I'm having to do this often enough now that I've written a small script to automate the process. Here it is:

#!/usr/bin/perl
my @splits = @ARGV;
my $start = shift @splits;
my $stop = shift @splits;
sub normalize {
        my $in = shift;
        if ($in < 100) { $in = "0$in"; }
        if ($in < 10) { $in = "0$in"; }
        return $in;
}
my $newpage = 1;
while (1) {
        my @files;
        for (my $i = $start; $i < $stop; $i++) {
                push @files, "*" . normalize($i) . ".pbm";
        }
        my $cmd = "convert " . join(" ", @files) . " -append outpage" . normalize($newpage) . ".tiff";
        print "$cmd\n\n";
        system($cmd);
        my $lasttime = scalar @splits;
        last if $lasttime == 0;
        $start = $stop;
        $stop = shift @splits;
        $newpage++;
}

The script can also be downloaded here.

There are two ways to invoke the program.

stitch_pages -n INIT STEP PAGES

In this case, INIT gives the number of the first image (this will usually be 0 or 1); STEP tells how many images are used to construct each page; and PAGES tells how many pages we are constructing.

Obviously, this assumes that there are the same number of partial images for each page. If that is not true, you can use the other form and specify the "splits" manually.

stitch_pages -s SPLIT1 SPLIT2 ... SPLITn

In this case, we will stitch together the partial images SPLIT1 - (SPLIT2 - 1), etc. The last split given should thus be one greater than the last image available.

New Paper: Logicism, Ontology, and the Epistemology of Second-Order Logic

Forthcoming in Ivette Fred and Jessica Leech, eds, Being Necessary: Themes of Ontology and Modality from the Work of Bob Hale (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
 
In two recent papers, Bob Hale has attempted to free second-order logic of the 'staggering existential assumptions' with which Quine famously attempted to saddle it. I argue, first, that the ontological issue is at best secondary: the crucial issue about second-order logic, at least for a neo-logicist, is epistemological. I then argue that neither Crispin Wright's attempt to characterize a `neutralist' conception of quantification that is wholly independent of existential commitment, nor Hale's attempt to characterize the second-order domain in terms of definability, can serve a neo-logicist's purposes. The problem, in both cases, is similar: neither Wright nor Hale is sufficiently sensitive to the demands that impredicativity imposes. Finally, I defend my own earlier attempt to finesse this issue, in "A Logic for Frege's Theorem", from Hale's criticisms.

For the most part, the paper is not terribly technical, but there are some (what I think are) interesting applications of technical work on models of second-order arithmetic toward the end of section 3.

Great (and Funny) Video on Consent

Amazing Reflection on Sexuality and Sexual Violence

On Feministing:

When I started having sex, disposability was the first thing on the menu. Fuck you, ignore you, make fun of you on Facebook. Even now, it is the public penance exacted from women who dare.
A friend of mine said as much at the end of our first semester of college. ...“Boys aren’t going to want to date you if you keep having sex with them,” my friend said. The words smashed against my face like ice or glass.

And that's just the part about sexuality.

Every Woman Has Been a Little Bit Raped

Terrific piece on Role Reboot about why we (as a culture) need to broaden our understanding of rape and sexual assault. See also this piece on Bustle and this follow-up piece.

One of the most striking things to me was the idea, apparently expressed as often by women as by men, that stopping in the middle of sex "robs a man of his orgasm". This is particularly odd given that what's being discussed here, for the most part, is stopping intercourse. There's no indication, for example, in the Bustle piece that the author wouldn't have been happy to continue having some other sort of sex. Of course, it's her right not to stop altogether, if that's what she wants to do, but, as I said, that's actually not what seems to be at issue in most of these stories. There are other ways a guy can have an orgasm, you know?

Springsteen Cancels Show in North Carolina

I'm not a huge Springsteen fan, but I'm a bit fan of what he's doing to stand up for LGBTQ people in my home state.

Amicus Brief By 113 Female Attorneys About the Role of Abortion in Their Lives

This happened a while ago, but I just saw it today and read through the brief. It paints a fascinating picture of the importance of safe and legal abortion in the lives of American women.

There are interesting stories about this in Slate, in the Atlantic, and in Forward. There's an op-ed by one of the women in the Washington Post, too.

But maybe the most powerful thing I've read on this topic is this series of stories, collected by the Atlantic. Some of them are just heartbreaking. All of them speak to just how intensely personal the decision to abort is. Perhaps what is most inspiring is what the stories say about ordinary people's ability to navigate the ethical complexities that such decisions involve.

More News on NC's Horrible Anti-Trans and Anti-Gay Law

I grew up in NC, and the rest of my family still live there. It's a diverse state, but one with a lot of jerks, it would seem.

• ACLU Lawsuit (Slate)
• NC Attorney General Refuses to Defend Law (Slate)
• The Business Backlash (Atlantic) 
• Why Bathroom Bills are Unconstitutional (Slate)
• Debunking the Bathroom Myth (Media Matters, two years ago)
• Nothing McCrory Says Is True (ThinkProgress)
• Petition Asking NCAA To Boycott NC

Men's Basketball vs Women's Basketball

OK, so it's not a surprise that colleges (OK, actually, their conferences, get more money for victories by men's teams than for victories by women's teams. But how much more do you think that is? Would you believe that a victory by a men's team is worth $1.56 million and that a victory by a women's team is worth...wait for it...zero dollars? As in, absolutely nothing?

Well, according to the New York Times, that's how it is.

News On North Carolina's Horrific New Anti-Trans Law

As someone who grew up in North Carolina, I'm embarrassed for my home state:

• Indy Week
• Slate (1, 2)
• Charlotte Observer
• HuffPo
• More from HuffPo