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#31

Off the Record / Re: Quo Vadis, Democrats?

Last post by The Minsky Moment - Today at 03:38:06 PM

The machinations are afoot to try and clear the way to give Coumo the best shot...

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/03/a-trump-administration-position-to-leave-the-race-for-mayor-eric-adams-faces-a-decision-00542212

But it would hard to see how this wouldn't end up Trump-tainting Coumo irrevocably.

Put aside the motivations.

Eric Adams absolutely should be out of the race, he's a crook and a corrupt piece of shit.  I get that for national GOP primary voters, those are virtues qualifying one to be President, but NY democratic voters should have higher standards.  And they do - Adams is polling badly and has no chance.  There is no legitimate reason for him to stay in.

 

#32

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by Norgy - Today at 03:37:31 PM

Remember the original steel tariffs date back to 2018 we have data on the impact.

Steel employment is slightly down.  Productivity collapsed and overall output is down.
There may be other factors at work but anyone expecting more tariffs would benefit the US steel industry is engaging in magical thinking at this point.

And that's the direct impact on steel.  The impact on US companies that use steel as an input - i.e. a broad array of US manufacturers of which Deere is only one example - is far more negative. 

The tariffs like much of the Trump agenda - e.g. the insanity with vaccines and the CDC, the assault on higher education, the replacement of an expert professional civil services with incompetent flunkies and partisan hacks - is best understood as a fascinating experiment in national self-vandalism, though probably more interesting to observe from the outside then to experience from the inside.

Steel tariffs hurt Norway quite a bit.
The direct export to the US went down.
So we traded through the EU.

This love of tariffs baffles even a left-winger like me.

#33

Off the Record / Re: Facebook Follies of Friend...

Last post by The Minsky Moment - Today at 03:27:35 PM

I don't get the gun one.  A drunk guy with a microphone is going to stop gun control?

#34

Off the Record / Re: The Closing of the America...

Last post by The Minsky Moment - Today at 03:23:40 PM

Leo Strauss was also UChi.  Once a real center of conservative intellectual thought.

#35

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Savonarola - Today at 02:36:53 PM

There's definitely been some similar issues in the US. I remember reading a story in the NYT about a town in Michigan which elected a majority Muslim council and Muslim mayor with the support of progressive activists, who then felt very betrayed when the council voted to ban flying the Pride flag on council buildings.

Hamtramck, which is one of two cities to be entirely surrounded by Detroit (the other is Highland Park.) The city is almost 50% first generation immigrants today mostly from Yemen and Bangladesh. Previously it had been Detroit's Polish enclave leading to such oddities as The Center for Islamic Studies right next door to the Kowalski Sausage Factory.

[A joke, but not entirely. For as long as I can remember, and certainly much longer than that, the University of Chicago has been widely viewed as the destination for humanities students and scholars. Some other elite schools might have the coveted Ivy League branding, or a few more famous faculty members, or a couple more dollars to tack onto the salaries of its professors and graduate students. But perhaps nowhere is the study of literature, philosophy, the arts, and languages more valued, their spirit more authentically preserved, their frontiers more doggedly pursued, than at Chicago. The university has had several household names on its humanities faculty, including the firebrand critic Allan Bloom, the novelist Saul Bellow, and the ethicist Martha Nussbaum, as well as scholars who may be less well known to the general public but whose work has been deeply influential in their fields, including the brilliant literary critic Sianne Ngai and Fred Donner, the pathbreaking and Guggenheim-winning historian of early Islam. In short, Chicago is a place for scholars' scholars. At least, that's the reputation. And Chicago's reputation is no doubt why, when the university announced recently that it was reducing Ph.D. admissions for seven departments—among them art history and English language and literature—and outright freezing admissions to others, including classics, the decision was met, in some quarters, with fury and disbelief. "Chicago!" as one stunned academic friend put it in a text to me.]

#36

Off the Record / Re: The Closing of the America...

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 02:03:06 PM

On the University of Chicago decision:

If the University of Chicago Won't Defend the Humanities, Who Will?
Why it matters that the University of Chicago is pausing admissions to doctoral programs in literature, the arts, and languages
By Tyler Austin Harper
August 26, 2025
Updated at 9:30 a.m. ET on September 2, 2025

The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree was lit, COVID-19 was still a mysterious respiratory illness in Wuhan, and I was a Ph.D. candidate in a dying field: comparative literature. I was getting ready to Zoom interview for a tenure-track job near Boston that I almost certainly wouldn't get (and didn't). Sardined with me in a Greenwich Village coffee shop in December 2019, one of my faculty mentors talked me through, for the thousandth time, the questions I should expect the hiring committee to ask me and dispensed advice about how I should answer them. Then we walked back to his office, lined in handsome foreign-language editions of various novels and works of philosophy, where I would sit for the interview. There, he offered a final piece of wisdom: "Don't be nervous. It's just Harvard," he said, grinning. "It's not like it's Chicago."

A joke, but not entirely. For as long as I can remember, and certainly much longer than that, the University of Chicago has been widely viewed as the destination for humanities students and scholars. Some other elite schools might have the coveted Ivy League branding, or a few more famous faculty members, or a couple more dollars to tack onto the salaries of its professors and graduate students. But perhaps nowhere is the study of literature, philosophy, the arts, and languages more valued, their spirit more authentically preserved, their frontiers more doggedly pursued, than at Chicago. The university has had several household names on its humanities faculty, including the firebrand critic Allan Bloom, the novelist Saul Bellow, and the ethicist Martha Nussbaum, as well as scholars who may be less well known to the general public but whose work has been deeply influential in their fields, including the brilliant literary critic Sianne Ngai and Fred Donner, the pathbreaking and Guggenheim-winning historian of early Islam. In short, Chicago is a place for scholars' scholars. At least, that's the reputation. And Chicago's reputation is no doubt why, when the university announced recently that it was reducing Ph.D. admissions for seven departments—among them art history and English language and literature—and outright freezing admissions to others, including classics, the decision was met, in some quarters, with fury and disbelief. "Chicago!" as one stunned academic friend put it in a text to me.

In an August 12 email to faculty, Deborah Nelson, Chicago's arts and humanities dean, said that the changes were necessitated by "this moment of uncertainty" and "evolving fiscal realities." These bits of bureaucratese appear to be allusions to both the Trump administration's war on higher education and Chicago's homegrown financial troubles, which include an eye-popping $6.3 billion in debt and a bad bet on crypto. "To be anything but cautious at this moment," the dean's email continued, "would be irresponsible."

Chicago's social-sciences division has also announced doctoral-admissions pauses, primarily in humanistic-leaning programs such as anthropology and social thought, where towering figures including the philosopher Hannah Arendt once taught. What's happening at Chicago is a particular gut-punch to the humanities, not just at the university itself, but nationally and even globally. The school is, as the classics professor Catherine Kearns put it in a message to me, "a singular center for the pursuit of humanistic knowledge and intellectual growth." Of the nearly 30 Chicago humanities professors I spoke with for this article, many emphasized that the stakes are much higher than the fate of prospective graduate students or the professors who might teach them. Chicago has long helped to keep alive tiny fields and esoteric areas of humanistic study, particularly in the languages. Without the university's support, and the continued training of graduate students who can keep these bodies of knowledge going, entire spheres of human learning might eventually blink out.

Of course, some might view these comments as self-serving complaints. But the primary fears of the people I spoke with were not about their own careers or futures, but instead about their fields—about knowledge that, once lost, cannot be easily regained. "If you allow a field to die, there's a loss to something like humanity," Clifford Ando, a Chicago classicist who has been outspoken about the administration's maneuvers, told me. "There's also a real practical risk that a field simply cannot be re-created just because you have books." I heard this sentiment echoed over and over. "If we stop producing people who are trained or educated to help undergraduates understand the most important things thought or written or painted in human history," the renowned philosopher Robert Pippin said, "we might not be able to recover that." Elaine Hadley, an emerita professor of English, told me, "Part of what we do is we're conservators, keeping a body of knowledge going. We want to innovate and we want to think new things about it, and, you know, we want to make it relevant to the present day, but we're also trying to keep this knowledge alive."

These responses emphasize the cultural costs of shrinking the number of people trained in humanities fields, rather than focusing on the question of whether universities should be calibrating the production of Ph.D.s to the academic job market. No one I spoke to was insensitive to the pressures their grad students face when confronting the vanishing opportunities for tenure-track employment. But the professors also seemed reluctant to define the success of a program by how many professors it creates—after all, most humanities PhD students at Chicago do not pay tuition and receive stipends to cover their living costs, and getting paid to learn and read is not the worst fate.

These faculty perspectives also stood in stark contrast with the reigning image of elite higher educators in right-wing media outlets: that humanities professors are "woke" activists whose primary concern is the political indoctrination of "the youth." Most of the Chicago faculty I spoke with saw—and defended—their disciplines in terms that were, if anything, conservative. Implicit in their impassioned defenses was the belief that the role of a humanist is to preserve knowledge, safeguard learning from the market and the tides of popular interest, and ward off coarse appeals to economic utility.

Depending on whom I asked, the move to scale back humanities doctoral programs is either a prudent acknowledgment of the cratered job market for tenure-track professorships and a wise attempt to protect the university's humanities division from looming financial and political risks, or it is a cynical effort, under cover of the Trump administration's assaults, to transfer resources away from "impractical," unprofitable, and largely jobless fields (such as, say, comparative literature) and toward areas that the university's senior leadership seems to care about (such as, say, STEM and "innovation"). One faculty member I spoke with mentioned a consulting firm that was brought on to help Chicago as it considers changes to its humanities division, including possibly consolidating the departments from 15 down to eight. Many professors worried that the move to impose uneven changes—reducing admissions in some while halting them in others—may be an attempt to create circumstances that will ultimately make it easier to dissolve the paused programs. "Let no good crisis go unleveraged," Holly Shissler, an associate professor in the Middle Eastern Studies department, said with a dark laugh. "You engineer a situation in which there are no students, and then you turn around and say, 'Why are we supporting all these departments and faculty when they have no students?'"

When I emailed Nelson and asked whether the changes were part of a plan to kill off the paused departments, she said, "A one-year pause is exactly that—a discrete decision that applies merely to a single admissions cycle." She seemed to acknowledge, however, that a divisional reorganization could happen. "My goal is to sustain the full scope of our faculty's research and teaching," she said. "To do so, we must be open to new ideas and structures." She added, "There's no magic number of departments in the arts and humanities." In the meantime, Chicago's humanities professors appear largely determined to resist being evaluated in terms of expediency. In a meeting with Nelson a few days after the announcement, 14 out of 15 chairs in the humanities division told the dean that she should pause enrollment in all of their departments or none of them. Targeting some and not others was unacceptable, they argued, because it sent the message that some fields matter and others do not.

The department chairs' wager seems to be that acting as a unified bloc will make reorganizing the division and cutting programs more difficult, even if the division-wide pause causes short-term pain for the next academic year. As anyone who has served on a faculty anywhere can tell you, this degree of cross-department solidarity and willingness to sacrifice for less-favored colleagues is remarkable, and even moving. Last Wednesday afternoon, the dean announced that the chairs had gotten their wish: With the exception of philosophy and music composition (owing to previous pauses in those programs), doctoral admissions will be frozen across the humanities for the 2026–27 academic year.

It's a bittersweet victory, of course, one that will result in fewer doctoral students in the short term and is not guaranteed to strengthen the division in the long term. And it does not settle the most pressing question raised by all this turmoil. If even Chicago is not willing to support and protect American arts and letters, who will? One Chicago administrator, in an attempt to defend the university's admissions pauses, pointed out that other prestigious peer institutions were expected to make similar announcements about their Ph.D. admissions in the coming weeks, and noted that Harvard is cutting nearly $2 million from its own humanities division. I would like to think that my (and others') alarm about the future of the humanities is overblown. But the evidence doesn't give me much hope.

The subheading of this article originally incorrectly stated that philosophy was one of the University of Chicago doctoral programs whose graduate admissions were paused.

Tyler Austin Harper
Tyler Austin Harper is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Harper was previously an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College, where he taught courses on literature, film, and the history of science. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Jacobin, and other outlets. He received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from NYU and is a co-host of the podcast Time to Say Goodbye.

Good on the rest of the department chairs.

Again I'm just struck by wondering what the leaders of universities and higher education think they're for?

#37

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 01:51:20 PM

I guess this is a Euro thing. The right wing continually passes more and more laws granting power and economic advantages to religious institutions. Islam is basically untouchable because of them. Even if we leftists wanted to seriously challenge the worst reactionary actions by radical Islam, the Republicans have build giant legal protections around them that are insurmountable. We face the same problem with a whole host of insane culty religions. There is almost no legal angle to go after them thanks to the right wing in the US. Over here Muslims can basically just make a compound and keep their kids from ever leaving and it is all fine and legal. Because they are religious.

There's definitely been some similar issues in the US. I remember reading a story in the NYT about a town in Michigan which elected a majority Muslim council and Muslim mayor with the support of progressive activists, who then felt very betrayed when the council voted to ban flying the Pride flag on council buildings.

There are challenges in the UK because we have state funded faith schools, including Muslim schools (often very good) who still have to follow the national curriculum including on issues like LGBT rights etc. There have been tensions around that in the past - there were protests in Birmingham over the curriculum a couple of years ago. I mentioned it at the time but in 2024 the areas that saw the largest fall in Labour vote was directly correlated with the size of the Muslim community in that constituency and I think it is almost impossible to understate the impact of Gaza on that but also on the splits and energy on the left in general.

I'd add this is more than just Muslims. I've mentioned before but on all sorts of social issues - homosexuality, sex before marriage etc - the most socially conservative part of the country is London, by a country mile. That's because it's most diverse area with the largest immigrant population who are often coming from and living in communities that are not aligned with cutting edge of Western progressivism - whether that's Latin American evangelical or African churches or Bangladeshi Muslims. The White British population is one of the least religious in the world (I think in the latest census, the UK is second only to the Czechs in size of "no religious" and "atheist" population). London is a vastly more religious city than anywhere else in the country.

However anybody hoping to reduce the political influence of conservative Islam in your country, you have a powerful ally. Cultural Muslims and ex-Muslims have the sort of insider information to fight their influence and ideas while not being compromised by racism against Muslims as people.

To be really clear - this isn't conservative Islam or Islamism. These are left-wingers who happen to be Muslim and have socially conservative values that are very much in line with absolute mainstream Islam.

I've no issue with Muslims being more socially conservative and part of our social, cultural and political life any more than I do with African Christian communities or Hindus.

And for what it's worth I actually totally agree and really like Mothin Ali's refusal to sign any pledges:

Mothin Ali
@MothinAli
I've been sent pledges and hustings invitations from a number of Special Interest and Liberation Groups (such as the Vegan Greens, LGBTQIA+ Greens, Feminist Greens etc.), officially recognised and not.

I've chosen not to sign any – not because I don't support their causes, but because I wanted my messages to come directly from me, ideally sitting down in conversation, and not via third parties.

I believe the "pledge" system runs a risk of undermining our internal democratic processes. I did get this message to one of the groups in advance, but I recognise that my communication on this could have been better.

As a Party, we already have a constitution and policies voted on by members. That's where our collective decisions are made. Adding extra pledges creates a parallel system that can feel like purity tests, something I've never been in favour of. They shift focus away from the policies we've agreed together

Pledges can create pressure, turn allyship into performance politics, and even exclude those who are already doing the work. For me, solidarity is proven through trust, dialogue, and showing up – not ticking boxes.

With regards to hustings, due to availability, the only two I will be attending are the GO hustings and the GPEW hustings. The organisers reached out to me weeks in advance to agree dates and times.

I'll continue standing shoulder to shoulder with marginalised communities against oppression.

Let's put our energy where it counts: action, organising, and delivering the future we all believe in – together.

#38

Off the Record / Re: Norwegian Election

Last post by Neil - Today at 01:21:36 PM

There are two reasons to identify as a communist.  The first is that you're naive, the sort of person who tells people 'it's never been properly implemented'.  The second is that the vicious baggage is the point.  Either way, not a serious person.  There are ways to say that you stand up for social solidarity and rolling back the last hundred years of privatization without clothing yourself in a moniker that has tainted itself by failure and massacre.  It's like being part of the Ku Klux Klan. 

#39

Off the Record / Re: [Canada] Canadian Politics...

Last post by Neil - Today at 01:13:27 PM

Thanks for your explanation and insight Neil but I think that at the end of the day, most conservative supporters in Alberta really don't give a shit, and will make peace with whatever that government wants to do. The brand loyalty is just too strong.

I think that a lot of Conservative supporters did agree with the government's stated intent, especially since the government did a good job of making a few somewhat explicit homosexual graphic novels that were found in a K-9 school the media face of the issue.  But Edmonton Public School Division's deliberately faulty interpretation of the order was far more mixed in reception.  There were people who thought that the government was backing down and that they were selling kids out.  There were people who took a more nuanced view.  And then there are a few people who don't really think much of reading anyways. 

I don't think that identification with the government is as strong as you do.  Smith definitely doesn't feel all that secure, as she's worried about centrists moving towards Nenshi, but also has to be concerned about the loons forming another Wildrose party if they get disgruntled.  The noise about Alberta Republicans (the most cringe-worthy name imaginable for a Canadian political party) forced her to spend political capital on this embarrassing Alberta Next initiative. 

#40

Off the Record / Re: The Off Topic Topic

Last post by Tamas - Today at 12:40:45 PM

Hooray!  I just got an email back!  I got the job as a part-time Deli-guy at a local grocery store!  A local employee-owned store!