From The New York Times:

Some time in the 1920s, the Conservative statesman F. E. Smith — Lord Birkenhead — gave a copy of the “Nicomachean Ethics” to his close friend Winston Churchill. He did so saying there were those who thought this was the greatest book of all time. Churchill returned it some weeks later, saying it was all very interesting, but he had already thought most of it out for himself. But it is the very genius of Aristotle — as it is of every great teacher — to make you think he is uncovering your own thought in his. In Churchill’s case, it is also probable that the classical tradition informed more of his upbringing, at home and at school, than he realized. In 1946, in a letter to the philosopher Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss mentioned how difficult it had been for him to understand Aristotle’s account of magnanimity, greatness of soul, in Book 4 of the “Ethics.” The difficulty was resolved when he came to realize that Churchill was a perfect example of that virtue. So Churchill helped Leo Strauss understand Aristotle! That is perfectly consistent with Aristotle’s telling us it does not matter whether one describes a virtue or someone characterized by that virtue. Where the “Ethics” stands among the greatest of all great books perhaps no one can say. That Aristotle’s text, which explores the basis of the best way of human life, belongs on any list of such books is indisputable.

In his great essay “On Classical Political Philosophy,” Strauss emphasizes the continuity between pre-­philosophic political speech and its refinement by classical political philosophy. It is part of the order of nature (and of nature’s God) that pre-­philosophic speech supply the matter, and philosophic speech the form, of perfected political speech, much as the chisel of the sculptor uncovers the form of the statue within the block of marble. Before the “Ethics” men knew that courage was a virtue, and that it meant overcoming fear in the face of danger. Aristotle says nothing different from this, but he also distinguishes true virtue from its specious simulacra. The false appearance of courage may result, for instance, from overconfidence in one’s skill or strength, or from one’s failure to recognize the skill or strength of his opponents. The accurate assessment of one’s own superiority of strength or skill, which means one really has no reason to fear an approaching conflict, is another false appearance of courage. A false courage may also result from a passion that blinds someone to the reality of the danger he faces. In short, the appearance of courage may be mistaken for actual courage whenever the rational component of virtue is lacking.

More here.

Again

I’d left Paris for the beaches
in Spain. I’d sold
my dead father’s farm
and, in shame,
bought it back again
at a great loss . . . then
a plough found
a shelf of bismuth
and I sold just the north pasture
for big serial profits
and I am ashamed again:
the huge white bones of my father’s
favorite cow exposed
one late September morning!

It’s always been potatoes and bread
or millions of francs on speculation.
I am not stupid. I’m not dead.
But the bones of an old cow assemble
repeatedly now in a dream
where my naked lame father
sits in a tub of boiling milk
and screams at me
first my name and then his name
which is the same

name. The crimes of the verb to be
pushing a hard rain in general
across the city and its suburbs. . . .

by Norman Dubie
from Blackbird, Spring 2011

From PhysOrg:

Kangaroos adopt. It doesn't happen often, but to the astonishment of biologists at Wilsons Promontory National Park in Australia, sometimes a mother bends forward, opens her arms and invites someone else's youngster to hop into her pouch. Once made, the mix-up endures, lasting through the remaining weeks of “pouch life” and on during months of the “young-at-foot” stage, when the growing juvenile kangaroo continues to nurse. “It's a complete surprise to us,” said Graeme Coulson, a zoology professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Coulson described the baby swapping — in which two mothers end up with each other's young — this month at a joint meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists and the Australian Mammal Society in Portland, Ore. Although rare cases of marsupial fostering have previously been reported in captivity, and biologists have used fostering in breeding programs, this appears to be the first documented report of spontaneous adoptions in the wild, said Roberta Bencini, vice president of the Australian Mammal Society and professor of animal biology at the University of Western Australia. “That's really quite an unusual discovery,” said Bencini, who was not involved in Coulson's research. “I would like to find out why.” So would Coulson. The exchanges seem to have no apparent benefit for the mother, who squanders her own resources on another's offspring, Coulson said. His best guess is that the swaps are simply an error by one mother later compounded — or perhaps just accepted — by another.

More here.

Deep inside the stacks at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center lies a single box containing unpublished letters and handwritten essays by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Among the Ransom Center’s 36 million manuscripts and one million books are a Gutenberg Bible, rare first-editions, and holy relics of literature like James Joyce’s hand-corrected proofs of Ulysses. In the past decade alone, the Center has acquired the archives of Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Tim O’Brien, David Mamet, and David Foster Wallace. It’s a constant deluge; and every so often a stray file or two gets submerged—sometimes even for decades. The Borges papers were purchased in 1999; twelve years later, they remain uncatalogued. It’s appropriate that Borges has been neglected. For most of his life, the canonical writer of playfully ironic satires (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”), cosmic mind-benders (“The Aleph”), and sly thought-experiments (“On Rigor in Science”) found little recognition outside Argentine intellectual circles; much of his work had been published first in avant-garde magazines and almost none of it had been translated into English. Observing this state of affairs, the critic George Steiner noted that even basic details about Borges were “close-guarded, parsimoniously dispensed, often nearly impossible to come by, as were [his] poems, stories, essays—themselves scattered, out-of-print, pseudonymous.”

more from Eric Benson at Guernica here.

Down a dusty road in a remote far eastern suburb of Beijing a revolutionary-themed restaurant is busy preparing for the party of the year. This Friday, 1st July, marks the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 90th anniversary and The East is Red is expecting diners to run into the hundreds. They will come ravenous not just for the hearty cuisine but also for a heavy dose of communist nostalgia. A twice-daily show—ramped up for the anniversary —includes revolution-era songs, dance and drama, cherry picked from the chaotic days of the 1966-76 cultural revolution. I visit on a Tuesday evening, and despite the mid-week timing and isolated location the restaurant is around half full. The imposing doorway to the cavernous building is a colossal red star—inside are stirring statues of revolutionary heroes, murals of workers clutching Mao’s Little Red Book and an army of performers dressed in Red Guard uniforms. This is a family day out. Every customer, down to the smallest child, waves a red flag and many sway in the aisles to songs such as “Sing in Praise of the Motherland.” Across one wall gigantic red Chinese characters spell out the words: “May the Chinese Communist Party live ten thousand, 100 million years.”

more from Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore at Prospect Magazine here.

The so-called revisionist historians of the First World War can’t help appearing callous as they commend some of the strategic decisions of the British Army’s high command, while omitting to mention the massive suffering endured by its soldiers. Sometimes they remind one of Churchill’s comparison of Haig to a surgeon in the pre-anaesthetic era: if the patient expired under the knife, “he would not reproach himself”. By contrast, To End All Wars is a book that avowedly wears its heart on its sleeve. Nothing speaks more clearly or movingly of the spirit of futility that pervades Adam Hochschild’s perspective on the war than a recent discovery in the Saint-Symphorien military cemetery, east of Mons. There, by extraordinary coincidence, lie the first and last British soldiers to die in the war: sixteen-year-old John Parr of Finchley, North London, a golf caddy, who lied about his age in order to enlist, and George Ellison, a forty-year-old miner from Leeds, who survived all but the last ninety minutes of fighting. Parr and Ellison, killed within a few miles of each other, fighting to secure the same stretch of ground, are now buried under pine trees, seven yards apart.

more from Mark Bostridge at the TLS here.

In the wake of questions about Europe's future and the viability of the EU, in Eurozine:

I do not believe that nations should disappear nor do I believe in the prevailing wisdom that economic and monetary union can bring about political union, especially since the political forum continues to be the nation, and the best service one can render it from a democratic point of view is to respect the democratic structures within the framework of the nation-state. Therefore, I am in favour of a federation of nation-states. I am not asking the Germans and the French to give up being what they are, but I am saying to them: consider, in the real world, both your shared values and your shared interests. But, even if Europe does have these shared values, the nation is still an element of belonging that must be neither neglected nor given too much importance. We each have our own attachment to our national heritage. I am all the more inclined to say this because, as Freud said, we are nowadays fixated on small differences: Serbia and Montenegro, Flanders and Wallonia, Northern Ireland and the Republic; these are the things that we must fight against, not by preventing the existence of distinguishing features, but by saying to people: “Where does that get you?” Simultaneously, there are those values that lead us towards some form of convergence and, on the other side, moods of the times that urge us to create painful divisions. We have not heard the last of such divisions. And why is that? Because there is a malaise among people who are living through our times. They are frightened by globalization and, at the same time, attached to their territory, where they have attachments that are familial, geographical or otherwise. Between globalization on one side and local attachments on the other, the nation can no longer arrive at any kind of synthesis other than by exacerbating nationalism, and this can be seen in many European countries. Refusal of globalization, claiming that it is absolutely inimical, will not offer any solution either. Only by building a Europe that is a federation of nations can we find a response to this malaise, a response to the turmoil caused by globalization, a response that pays due respect to familial and geographical attachments; this is the way to create an equilibrium between globalization and the sovereign state that is prepared to delegate certain powers, by creating a strong and influential structure.

The reality is that, by building Europe, we have, it seems to me, a system that is ahead of the rest of the world. This is what we have to make our citizens realize. But our politicians see only the short term and the shifts in public opinion. As a result, there are two factors that are missing: awareness of our shared values and the challenge that Europe has to face. These two factors are a matter of survival or decline in the face of globalization and the kind of nationalism that is obsessed with minor differences. And this challenge is one that has to be faced by the strongest European power: Germany.

Germany is, in any case, in an extraordinary position. Never before has it been the lead nation in Europe to the extent that it is today. Previously, it accepted compromises and therefore concessions because of its past and also because of the political intelligence of Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, which I will never tire of praising. But today Germany holds the leadership. Does it realize this?

From more than a month ago in The Nation, Patricia Williams:

On the surface, Strauss-Kahn’s troubles are all about “women.” He has long had a reputation for salacious advances. On one hand, therefore, it’s tempting to assume the present accusations fit him as “in character.” On the other hand, given his prominence and the seismic stakes for the European Union, his well-advertised randiness, in the opinion of many, renders him the world’s easiest fall guy.

On the surface, furthermore, the case can be framed as one individual charging another with sexual crimes, period. Strauss-Kahn has been arrested, pleaded not guilty, released on bail, put under house detention. Ostensibly, he will be presumed innocent until a trial allows all the facts to be presented in an orderly fashion, witnesses to testify, motives to be assessed, credibility to be evaluated, irrelevant and extraneous information to be barred from consideration.

Unfortunately, what has unfolded is not that simple. The international media frenzy has all but obliterated any space for a presumption of innocence; and it has relentlessly impugned both Strauss-Kahn and his accuser in broad, vulgar stereotypes—not only about sex, but about wealth, Guinean colonials, socialism, fame, French masculinity, American Puritanism, Muslim women, Jewish identity and Africans as bearers of HIV. It will be very hard to see justice done against a backdrop of so much roiling passion, rumor-mongering and pure projection. The deliverance of due process requires restraint, not just in the media but among the citizens of America and of the world. So I would like to offer some modest caveats as this case proceeds through the digestive tract of a world obsessed with celebrity dirt.

First, we do not know what happened. We can choose to believe what we want, but it serves no civic purpose to allow one’s personal hunches to stand in the way of being open to the specific evidence-based possibilities that will be presented in a court of law. For example, French intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy’s publicly stated conviction that a proper first-class maid never cleans alone is spectacularly boneheaded. Even if it were true that housekeepers traveled only in “brigades,” it’s a generalization, a stereotype, irrelevant to whether DSK committed the crimes of which he is accused. At the same time, it is no less reflexively patronizing to conclude, as many women apparently have, that solely because the accuser is female or an immigrant or poor or Muslim or a widow that she could ever be anything other than truthful. And that is indeed all we know about her—that she is a poor Muslim widow from Guinea. Nor, of course, should we know much more about her identity, as a matter of due process. But, again, that process requires patience for victims’ stories to be played out in the appropriate place and time; it is not an invitation to plug the holes in our knowledge with bold imaginings.

Over at The Science Network:

Mark Oppenheimer in the NYT Magazine:

Last month, when the New York congressman Anthony Weiner finally admitted that he had lied, that his Twitter account had not been hacked, that he in fact had sent a picture of his thinly clad undercarriage to a stranger in Seattle, I asked my wife of six years, mother of our three children, what she thought. More specifically, I asked which would upset her more: to learn that I was sending racy self-portraits to random women, Weiner-style, or to discover I was having an actual affair. She paused, scrunched up her mouth as if she had just bitten a particularly sour lemon and said: “An affair is at least a normal human thing. But tweeting a picture of your crotch is just weird.”

How do we account for that revulsion, which many shared with my wife, a revulsion that makes it hard to imagine a second act for Weiner, like Eliot Spitzer’s television career or pretty much every day in the life of Bill Clinton? One explanation is that the Weiner scandal was especially sordid: drawn out, compounded daily with new revelations, covered up with embarrassing lies that made us want to look away. But another possibility is that there was something not weird, but too familiar about Weiner. His style might not be for everyone (to put it politely), but the impulse to be something other than what we are in our daily, monogamous lives, the thrill that comes from the illicit rather than the predictable, is something I imagine many couples can identify with. With his online flirtations and soft-porn photos, he did what a lot of us might do if we were lonely and determined to not really cheat.

That is one reason it was a relief when Weiner was drummed from office. In addition to giving us some good laughs, he forced us to ask particularly uncomfortable questions, like “what am I capable of doing?” and “what have my neighbors or friends done?” His visage was insisting, night after night, that we think about how hard monogamy is, how hard marriage is and about whether we make unrealistic demands on the institution and on ourselves.

That, anyway, is what Dan Savage, America’s leading sex-advice columnist, would say.

From The Washington Monthly:

The Washington, D.C., area is replete with landmarks— Ford’s Theater, the Watergate Hotel, the homes of Frederick Douglass and Red Cross founder Clara Barton—where, at a particular moment in time, history was made. There is no official placard marking Trinity College as such a site, but there probably should be. For roughly twenty years in the 1960s and ’70s, the small, austere, and relatively obscure women’s college graduated prominent female scientists, scholars, doctors, educators, judges, and public servants in numbers far out of proportion to its size. The true import of this achievement is only now being realized, as the school’s graduates hit the pinnacle of their careers. The historic advances of last year’s health care reform effort, for example, bear the fingerprints of an uncanny number of Trinity alumnae.

The tale of Trinity’s golden years is, in many ways, a “right college, right time” kind of story. In the days when most of American higher education was single sex and Catholics rarely mixed with mainstream institutions for reasons of mutual suspicion, Trinity—a Catholic women’s college distinct in its dedication to academic rigor—had the pick of the brightest graduates from girls’ parochial schools.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Anyone who has ever seen a streaky line of vapor, known as a contrail, behind a high-flying aircraft knows that airplanes can produce their own clouds. But in rarer cases aircraft can also punch round holes or carve long channels through existing, natural clouds.

Those hole-punch and canal clouds arise from the strong cooling effects of airflow past a plane's propeller or over a jetliner's wing, according to a new study. That cooling can spontaneously freeze water droplets in the cloud and stimulate precipitation, the study's authors say.
The phenomenon requires a very specific set of cloud conditions and so is unlikely to have significant large-scale effects, but it could have an impact on regional weather near airports. A team of researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and the University of Wyoming in Laramie report the new findings on the inadvertent aircraft cloud seeding in the July 1 issue of Science.

More here.

Peter Singer on Derek Parfit’s On What Matters:

Last month, however, saw a major philosophical event: the publication of Derek Parfit’s long-awaited book On What Matters. Until now, Parfit, who is Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had written only one book, Reasons and Persons, which appeared in 1984, to great acclaim. Parfit’s entirely secular arguments, and the comprehensive way in which he tackles alternative positions, have, for the first time in decades, put those who reject objectivism in ethics on the defensive.

On What Matters is a book of daunting length: two large volumes, totaling more than 1,400 pages, of densely argued text. But the core of the argument comes in the first 400 pages, which is not an insurmountable challenge for the intellectually curious – particularly given that Parfit, in the best tradition of English-language philosophy, always strives for lucidity, never using obscure words where simple ones will do. Each sentence is straightforward, the argument is clear, and Parfit often uses vivid examples to make his points. Thus, the book is an intellectual treat for anyone who wants to understand not so much “what matters” as whether anything really can matter, in an objective sense.

Many people assume that rationality is always instrumental: reason can tell us only how to get what we want, but our basic wants and desires are beyond the scope of reasoning. Not so, Parfit argues. Just as we can grasp the truth that 1 + 1 = 2, so we can see that I have a reason to avoid suffering agony at some future time, regardless of whether I now care about, or have desires about, whether I will suffer agony at that time. We can also have reasons (though not always conclusive reasons) to prevent others from suffering agony. Such self-evident normative truths provide the basis for Parfit’s defense of objectivity in ethics.

Antti Kauppinen over at the Experimental Philosophy blog:

I was catching up on this blog just now, and noticed that the old question about the identity of X-Phi came up in several posts and comments. Perhaps this is enough of an excuse for me to made a modest proposal. There is, of course, plenty written about the relationship between X-Phi and more traditional philosophy. I think the simplest way to approach it is to ask whether it is psychology, and if not, why not? (After all, the disciplinary identity of psychology is a lot clearer than that of philosophy.) To lay my cards on the table, I think it is: both the methods it uses and the questions it addresses are those of empirical psychology. This is not, of course, to say that X-Phi studies are necessarily philosophically uninteresting – I agree with Tamler (sort of) that such issues of relevance must be settled in piecemeal fashion. But since the two disciplines have distinct questions and methods, it is important to avoid the sort of confusion that easily arises (and has indeed arisen) from using the same or similar terms for different types of inquiry. So I will advocate that people begin to describe themselves as doing psychology of philosophy or of intuitive judgments when that’s what they do. The label ‘experimental philosophy’ and talk of ‘philosophical experiments’ has generated a lot of heat and no light. The admirable modesty of many smart X-Phiers is incompatible with the alleged continuity with the philosophical tradition.

First of all, I hope it’s not controversial to define psychology as the science that studies how the mind actually works. I don’t know what else psychology could be. (Perhaps it also has some limited otherworldly ambitions.) To answer questions about how the mind actually works scientifically, what is needed is systematic observation and controlled experiments of all sorts, including surveys, lab experiments, studies of the brain, and so on. Now, according to Josh Knobe, X-Phi studies how the mind actually works. It does so by way of systematic observation and controlled experiments of all sorts, including surveys, lab experiments, and studies of the brain, among others. Ergo, X-Phi is a branch of psychology that specializes in how the mind actually works when we make judgments about philosophically interesting topics.

At this point Josh would likely say, as he has recently often done, that philosophers, especially prior to the 20th century, did make claims about how the mind actually works, so this is actually just a return to the classical tradition. (There may also be an underlying narrative of progress: put in my terms, the suggestion is that philosophy has always been psychology, but only now it is done properly and scientifically.) Behind this response, there may be a causal hypothesis: certain misguided developments within philosophy (maybe Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Husserl) led to an aberration that has now finally run its course.

Steven Shapin reviews Ian Miller's A Modern History of the Stomach: Gastric Illness, Medicine and British Society, 1800-1950, in LRB:

Alexis St Martin was one of the 19th century’s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his half-digested breakfast was pouring out of the wound from his perforated stomach, along with bits of the stomach itself – but a US army surgeon called William Beaumont was nevertheless sent for. Beaumont was pessimistic, but he cleaned the wound as best he could and was amazed the next day to find his patient still alive. It was touch and go for almost a year: St Martin survived, though with a gastric fistula about two and a half inches in circumference. It was now possible for Beaumont to peer into St Martin’s stomach, to insert his forefinger into it, to introduce muslin bags containing bits of food and to retrieve them whenever he wanted. Human digestion had become visible.

Beaumont took over St Martin’s care when charity support ran out, and over the next ten years the patient lived intermittently with the doctor, as both his domestic servant and a contractually paid experimental object. St Martin’s fistula was soon to become one of the modern world’s most celebrated peepshows. The experiments were conducted at intervals over the eight years from 1825 and a remarkable contract survives which established a legal basis for scientific access to St Martin’s stomach:

Alexis will at all times … submit to assist and promote by all means in his power such philosophical or medical experiments as the said William shall direct or cause to be made on or in the stomach of him, the said Alexis, either through and by means of the aperture or opening thereto in the side of him, the said Alexis, or otherwise, and will obey, suffer and comply with all reasonable and proper orders of or experiments of the said William in relation thereto, and in relation to the exhibiting and showing of his said stomach and the powers and properties thereof and of the appurtenances, and powers, properties, situation and state of the contents thereof.

In return for letting Beaumont in and out of his stomach, St Martin was to get board, lodging and about $150 a year. But by 1833 he’d had enough: he went back to his old life as a voyageur, and, amazingly, lived well into his seventies.

The following menu for a 1902 Christmas dinner party stands—as far as I know—as one of the most unusual ever printed. And also one of the least appetizing. Apple Sauce. Borax. Soup. Borax. Turkey. Borax. Borax. Canned Stringed Beans. Sweet Potatoes. White Potatoes. Turnips. Borax. Chipped Beef. Cream Gravy. Cranberry Sauce. Celery. Pickles. Rice Pudding. Milk. Bread and Butter. Tea. Coffee. A Little Borax Unless, of course, one happens to enjoy meals spiced up by the taste of borax—a little metallic, sweet and unpleasant, or so they say—a preservative used to keep meat from rotting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This particular menu grew from a series of federal experiments that ran from 1902 to 1907 and were designed to test the toxicity of food additives. In these tests, groups of volunteers—popularly known as “Poison Squads”—agreed to dine dangerously in the interests of science, working their way through a laundry list of suspect compounds.

more from Deborah Blum at Lapham’s Quarterly here.

Yesterday, with great pleasure, I read the epigraph to Elizabeth Gumport’s short essay on book reviews in the already venerable n+1, the literary magazine out of Brooklyn. The epigraph is from an 1807 editorial in the long gone, but once venerable Monthly Anthology and Boston Review: The office of a reviewer is, in a republic of letters, as beneficial and necessary, though as odious and unpleasant, as that of an executioner in a civil state. This is fun, of course, as long as we don’t have to think too seriously about the death penalty or about book reviewing. There is, I’ll admit, something unpleasant enough about the business — all of us who have received bad notices know it, and we at the Los Angeles Review of Books are aware of it every day, now that we’re editing a bunch of reviews, worrying about our multiple responsibilities to writers, critics, readers, the record. But one thing I’ll wager: being reviewed does beat being executed.

more from Tom Lutz at the LA Review of Books here.

On the cut-and-kill floor of Quality Pork Processors Inc. in Austin, Minnesota, the wind always blows. From the open doors at the docks where drivers unload massive trailers of screeching pigs, through to the “warm room” where the hogs are butchered, to the plastic-draped breezeway where the parts are handed over to Hormel for packaging, the air gusts and swirls, whistling through the plant like the current in a canyon. In the first week of December 2006, Matthew Garcia felt feverish and chilled on the blustery production floor. He fought stabbing back pains and nausea, but he figured it was just the flu—and he was determined to tough it out. Garcia had gotten on at QPP only 12 weeks before and had been stuck with one of the worst spots on the line: running a device known simply as the “brain machine”—the last stop on a conveyor line snaking down the middle of a J-shaped bench [DC] called the “head table.” Every hour, more than 1,300 severed pork heads go sliding along the belt. Workers slice off the ears, clip the snouts, chisel the cheek meat. caption TK Matthew GarciaThey scoop out the eyes, carve out the tongue, and scrape the palate meat from the roofs of mouths. Because, famously, all parts of a pig are edible (“everything but the squeal,” wisdom goes), nothing is wasted. A woman next to Garcia would carve meat off the back of each head before letting the denuded skull slide down the conveyor and through an opening in a plexiglass shield.

more from Ted Genoways at Mother Jones here.

Bruce Fleming in the Berlin Review of Books:

Proposing anal sex to someone, for example, is not the same as using the words “anal sex” in a classroom discussion as one topic of publicly unacceptable jokes—such as I did in my classroom at the U.S. Naval Academy, where I’ve taught for more than two decades. I was “counseled” by our Division Director Marine Colonel for uttering these words and warned to avoid a “hostile working environment” Later I was told I could not explain the medical details of a sex-change operation in response to a student question as this had the same effect. (I had proposed that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who is clearly unhappy being a woman, might have fewer problems if she were a man: discuss.)

How do words relate to the world? What’s characterized the political left in recent decades is a general acceptance of the stance of linguistic idealism: at its extreme, this view— formed by analogy with the philosophical position of idealism that holds our minds make the world rather than existing in it—means that words are the world. This in turn has led to the insistence on what we call “political correctness,” associated with the political left, with its emphasis on what is said rather than what is thought or done. If words are the world, it’s of utmost importance to police them.

The right, by contrast, tends to see a distinction between what you say and what you do—words are just words. For the right, the world exists independently of our minds, and we, as individual actors, exist in the world. The greatest interest of Palin’s defense of her gun language is her denial of linguistic idealism—even if she doesn’t put it like that—in favor of an underlying view that professional philosophers would call “naïve realism.” This holds that people are agents that act with each other and an independent world using words. Why criticize words? They’re just words.

More here.