The problem of maintaining humanistic societies

Humanism is an idea that, like so many philosophical concepts, is hard to pin down. If asked whether I am a humanist, I would say yes, but would struggle to come up with a clean definition. If pressed, I would probably say something along the lines that I believe that humanism privileges feeling solidarity with fellow humans and values a sense of shared humanity that takes precedence over allegiances based on things like race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and the like.

In her book Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope (2023) Sarah Bakewell acknowledges that humanism resists sharp definition and indeed humanists tend to avoid creeds of any kind since a creed itself tends to separate people, from those who adhere to the creed to those who don’t. Her book instead gives a series of brief biographies of people down the ages who seemed to consider themselves to be humanists of various stripes and discusses what drove them.
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Academic freedom under threat

The student protests on college campuses against the horrors taking place in Gaza have been largely peaceful and taken the form of setting up encampments in college open spaces and holding demonstrations and making speeches. In response, some universities have responded with inexcusably harsh repressive measures, sending in armed riot police and even snipers to break up the protests and the encampments and arrest students and faculty. It is as if they have not learned the lessons of the anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid protests of past decades where this kind of authoritarian response resulted in strengthening student resolve with even more universities joining in solidarity.

Sarah D. Phillips, a professor at Indiana University, was shocked by the harshness of the police response to peaceful protests and she herself was arrested simply for being there. But she says that the faculty are outraged and calling for the resignation of the president and provost, and that the students are undeterred.

I am a professor at Indiana University at Bloomington, where I was arrested this past weekend. After receiving social-media messages reporting a heavy police presence at a student rally, I rushed to the public gathering space on campus known as Dunn Meadow. There I saw my students among unarmed peaceful protesters. I saw state police in riot gear approaching them with batons. I saw still more police toting assault rifles. I could not believe my eyes. A few moments later, I had a riot shield pressed against my face. I was forced to the ground and told to roll onto my stomach. My wrists were cuffed tightly behind my back. I looked to my left — there was my student, likewise prone, battered, and cuffed. I looked to my right — another student, prone, battered, and cuffed.
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A problem I am glad not to have

F. Scott Fitzgerald is often quoted as saying “The rich are not like you and me”. He never actually said that. That is actually a misquote, a paraphrase from part of a longer passage in one of his short stories.

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

I was reminded of one way in which the rich differ from me when I read this article about the enormous difficulty involved in getting reservations to chic restaurants in New York City, and the extraordinary lengths that some people will go to to get one. It is no longer the case that a simple phone call is all that is needed. It also used to be that if you are wealthy, you might be able to get a table by quietly slipping the maitre d’ some money. But now the reservation process has become a world of websites that specialize in reservations, bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers and you could be out several hundred dollars or more before you even step foot into the restaurant and even that requires booking days, weeks, or even months in advance. It helps, of course, if you are a celebrity.
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Is shooting a puppy good for a MAGA politician?

The governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem reveals in her new book that she shot dead her 14-month old puppy.

The Guardian revealed Noem’s story, which is contained in a book out next month. In No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, Noem describes her frustrations with Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehair pointer who Noem says ruined a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbouring family’s chickens.

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, saying Cricket was “untrainable … dangerous” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.

“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”

Noem describes taking Cricket to a gravel pit on her farm and shooting her. Remarkably, Noem then describes how she also chose to kill an unruly, unnamed, un-castrated goat, first botching the job then finishing the animal off with a third shotgun shell.
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Dan Lussen, a hunting dog trainer, told Rolling Stone a 14-month-old dog was a “baby that doesn’t know any better”, adding that unruly dogs were the result of a lack of guidance, training or discipline by the owner.

The pressure group Peta – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – said: “Most Americans love their dogs, and we suspect that they will consider Governor Noem a psychotic loony for letting this rambunctious puppy loose on chickens and then punishing her by deciding to personally blow her brains out rather than attempting to train her or find a more responsible guardian who would provide her with a proper home.

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Campus protests over Gaza escalate

The horrific situation in Gaza where the Israeli government has unleashed a reign of terror on the people there killing over 34,000 people (two-thirds of whom are women and children), destroying hospitals, infrastructure, and homes, leaving almost two million people destitute and in a state of famine, has galvanized protests around the world. In the US, students at over 40 universities have organized protests demanding justice for Gaza and also protesting the attacks on Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank by settlers, who have taken this opportunity to further encroach upon the lands owned by Palestinians and to attack them, shielded by the Israeli Defense Forces.

Sometimes, a story about one person captures the horror of what is going on better than a recitation of facts and statistics. I was deeply moved by this story on NPR about a 12-year old Gazan boy who was shot by Israeli troops when he went to get food from one of the air drops. He was later kicked in the head by one of the soldiers as he lay on the ground and is now in agony because of the lack of pain medication.


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Approaches to the end of life

Dhruv Khullar writes about the differing opinions about how to approach the so-called “‘marginal decade’ at the end of our lives, when medicine keeps us alive but our independence and capacities bleed away.” He points out that in 1900, the life expectancy at birth was 47 years. But at that time, one in five children died before the age of 10. Now life expectancy at birth is close to 77. Much of this improvement came about rapidly due to improved sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines that have reduced infant and child mortality considerably.

But in the last six decades, increases in longevity have slowed, to only about seven years, and are more due to extending the lives of of old people, many of whom are in ill health. In other words, Khullar says, “we are prolonging the time it takes to die.” The goal of compressing mortality, i.e., shortening the gap between the end of a healthy life and death, may be slipping away.

If anything, longer lives now appear to include more difficult years. The “compression of morbidity may be as illusory as immortality,” two demographers, Eileen Crimmins and Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez, wrote in 2010. According to the World Health Organization, the average American can expect just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five. (Health spans are greater in countries such as Switzerland, Japan, Panama, Turkey, and Sri Lanka.)

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There is no indignity that some people will not accept

This is especially true for people who worked with serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) in his administration who, after they left office, tried to reclaim some shred of credibility by distancing themselves form some of his actions. But even after SSAT severely ridiculed them, they still go back to him with their tails between their legs.

Bill Barr, the U.S. Attorney General under former President Donald Trump — who once called his former boss “erratic” and “petty” and dismissed his false claims of a stolen 2020 election — told Fox News that he would still vote for the former president in November.

“The real danger to the country — the real danger to democracy, as I say — is the progressive agenda,” Barr said, calling the prosecution of Trump for illegally covering up hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels a “perversion of justice.”

Trump rewarded Barr’s renewed allegiance with a mocking Truth Social post that doubled down on past name-calling. “Former A.G. Bill Barr, who let a lot of great people down by not investigating Voter Fraud in our Country, has just Endorsed me for President despite the fact that I called him ‘Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy’ (New York Post!),” he wrote. “Based on the fact that I greatly appreciate his wholehearted Endorsement, I am removing the word ‘Lethargic’ from my statement.”

Before distancing himself from Trump, Barr was one of the administration’s most prominent figures, using his position to protect Trump from legal probes, enforce his orders targeting anti-fascist protesters, and echo his inflammatory rhetoric on everything from pandemic restrictions to the security of mail-in ballots. But the fallout of the 2020 election persuaded Barr to jump ship, at least for a time, as he rejected Trump’s false claims of mass fraud. When Barr published a book to defend his own reputation, Trump called him “a disappointment in every sense of the word.”

There are many things that one can criticize Joe Biden for, but representing a threat to democracy is not one of them. He is like every mainstream Democrat, a devoted defender of the status quo, only willing to tweak policy at the margins.

I expect many of the other people who criticized SSAT to also slink back to him as the election gets closer.

Ban on noncompete clauses gets challenged in court

I wrote yesterday about how the FTC had banned noncompete clauses for all but high-level employees. It is absurd to think that low-level employees in places like fast food and the hospitality industry have valuable proprietary information that they could give to their new employers. These clauses are nothing but a way to prevent such employees from finding better jobs, and thus has the effect of suppressing wages.

It should come as no surprise that the US Chamber of Commerce immediately filed a lawsuit challenging the power of the FTC to ban those clauses.
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Good riddance to non-compete clauses

When people are hired, their contracts can sometimes include what are called non-compete clauses. These were originally designed to prevent someone from learning trade secrets at one company and then switch to another company or start their own business using that knowledge to the detriment of the original employer. As you can imagine, the only people who are likely to know valuable insider information are high-level employees. But companies realized that they could use those clauses to keep many more of their workers captive and started extending the clauses to cover lower and lower level employers, thus preventing them from finding better jobs.

Now the Federal Trade Commission under the admirable leadership of Lina Khan has forbidden the use of such clauses for all but top-level employees. As Kevin Drum says:

The vote was 3-2 in favor of banning noncompete agreements for new workers and voiding them for all existing workers (except C-suite executives). This will eliminate the ridiculous practice of fast food chains hiring sandwich makers and then prohibiting them from quitting and going to work for a different fast food chain—and giving their valuable, proprietary sandwich making expertise to the competition.

Corporate America has only itself to blame for this. Noncompetes used to be limited to high-end jobs like coders or lawyers. But then, as usual, some bright boys got the idea of expanding the idea to poor shlubs working minimum wage jobs. That was outrageous enough that it finally produced support for killing noncompetes completely.
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A Labor Department study published in June 2022 estimated that 18 percent of Americans are bound by noncompete agreements, while other research suggests it could be closer to 50 percent. They are used in a wide range of industries, including technology, hairstyling, medicine and even dance instruction, while imposing restrictions on both high- and low-wage earners.

The FTC estimates that banning noncompete agreements could create jobs for 30 million Americans and raise wages by nearly $300 billion per year.

All good free-market capitalists—as opposed to those who are merely shills for big corporations—should be happy about this. The United States will do nothing but benefit from it.¹

Apparently California banned these clauses over a century ago and and despite that has had a booming economy.