Veronese's Last Supper

In 1573, Veronese painted a Last Supper, and it "...led to an investigation by the Roman Catholic Inquisition. Veronese was called to answer for irreverence and indecorum, and the serious offence of heresy was mentioned. He was asked to explain why the painting contained "buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs and other such scurrilities" as well as extravagant costumes and settings, in what is indeed a fantasy version of a Venetian patrician feast."

Q. In this Supper which you painted for San Giovanni e Paolo, what signifies the figure of him whose nose is bleeding?

A. He is a servant who has a nose-bleed from some accident.

Q. What signify those armed men dressed in the fashion of Germany, with halberds in their hands?

A. It is necessary here that I should say a score of words.

Q. Say them.

A. We painters use the same license as poets and madmen, and I represented those halberdiers, the one drinking, the other eating at the foot of the stairs, but both ready to do their duty, because it seemed to me suitable and possible that the master of the house, who as I have been told was rich and magnificent, would have such servants.

Q. And the one who is dressed as a jester with a parrot on his wrist, why did you put him into the picture?

A. He is there as an ornament, as it is usual to insert such figures.

Obamacare wins again, repealers can't deliver garbage

This is Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) hugging Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the last Republican Senator whose opposition sealed the defeat of Graham-Cassidy. Obamacare repeal efforts now hit the Sept. 30 deadline for passing the bill with 50 votes.

It's worth saying a little about how we got here. Many Republicans claimed that Obamacare cost too much, while Trump promised more generous coverage that would cost more. Some attacks on Obamacare (death panels!) didn't point at anything it was actually doing.

After winning elections with incoherent policy proposals and straw-man arguments, Republicans were committed to passing incoherent legislation that eliminated nonexistent policies. They tried to introduce repeal-branded legislation that their base could be misled into thinking of as doing everything, but they could never get 50 of their 52 Senators behind a bill.

Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan now find themselves in a trap of their own making. Instead of compromising with Obama, they made really bad arguments against his policies. Now they have to follow through with really bad legislation that can't actually make it through Congress. And it only gets worse from here. Since the base has seen that they can't deliver, their people are losing primaries (Luther Strange) or retiring for fear of losing primaries (Bob Corker).

The runup to passing Obamacare was very different. Democrats had spent the 2008 primary achieving consensus about a basic structure for the plan (insurance regulations + individual mandate + subsidies). Yale's Jacob Hacker wrote it up for a labor-union think tank, Edwards introduced it in early 2007, Clinton copied it that August, and the party as a whole adopted it as a model after Obama won. As a moderately high-profile John Edwards volunteer, I spent a lot of 2007 arguing for the plan on the internet and face-to-face with other Democrats. An entire caucus of 60 eventually lined up to get a version of the plan through the Senate, breaking a Republican filibuster.

I know it often doesn't seem this way in politics, but there are advantages to not saying total garbage. Then you don't have to promise garbage and write garbage legislation that Susan Collins can't bring herself to support. Your base doesn't ask, "You promised me garbage, now I want it, where is my garbage?" and get furious because you didn't deliver the garbage.

Primaries

Primaries are very important. They also make people a little crazy.

People who prefer a candidate fall into like-minded communities where everyone says the best about their candidate and the worst about the other. These communities give them an exaggerated sense of the differences between the candidates, at least relative to the spectrum of national opinion and the spectrum of outcomes they'd create relative to the opponent.

(Personally, I wouldn't say that Hillary-Bernie in 2016 was especially fiery by historical standards. Seriously, contested presidential primaries are always that way. I'd rate 2004 with Howard Dean a bit higher. The Iraq War was going into its worst period. The Dean people were rightly furious at the other Democrats who had let that happen.)

This dynamic has continued post-primary. Except since there isn't a primary anymore and we aren't focused on the policy outcomes, it's more purely about lauding your hero and hating the enemy.

Social media sharing after Hillary's book came out has been an example. People who were in one social media environment or the other during the primary should probably reflect a little on how they might be seeing the best or the worst stuff related to a 512-page book. Content is more likely to go viral if it's more intense, so you might be seeing some especially slanted material.

Halloween costume: Russia

If you want to dress up as Russia this Halloween, all you need is a bear costume and a Donald Trump hand puppet.

Doing metaethics like Judit Polgar

Judit Polgar's swashbuckling chess style is sort of a philosophical inspiration to me. I watch more chess than I play, because I'd rather see great players make beautiful moves than make mediocre ones myself. Her game against Alexey Shirov, narrated here by friendly chess uncle Mato Jelic, is a perfect example.

On move 10, Polgar makes a pawn sacrifice that looks bad at first glance. But there's a whole world of possibility behind it that nobody else had previously explored. She plunges into that world, and makes a bunch of other weird-looking awesome moves. Eventually she emerges into a conventional endgame with a massive advantage, and Shirov resigns.

My feeling about the philosophical literature in metaethics today is that a bunch of smart people are carefully mapping out a narrow subset of options. There are moves out of this literature that are dismissed because they initially look bad. And it's true that lots of the initially bad-looking moves are just bad.

But there are a few bad-looking moves that open up awesome new opportunities. People stop exploring these moves too quickly because the path to victory really is hard to see. But if you do see the precise weird moves to follow up with, you could come out far ahead of the possibilities discovered in the existing literature.

Ingber on executive power creep

Friends wondering why executive power continued to expand under Obama might appreciate this excellent paper from Rebecca Ingber. One reason is that career civil servants who staff executive agencies and believe in their missions are interested in expanding their power over time.

The paper described another factor that I wouldn't have guessed. Lawyers tend to orally tell executive agency people "No, we can't do this." They write memos that might be useful in later in legal proceedings defending the decision to say "Yes, we can do this." So when the next administration shows up, it inherits a lot of "Yes, we can do this" memos and nothing to the contrary.

A bit of good news Rebecca mentioned when I emailed her is that some dangerous agenda items of the Trump Administration are about curtailing executive power rather than increasing it. Even if Trump tries to stop the State Department from doing its diplomatic thing or stop the EPA from doing its environmental thing, the career civil servants will keep plugging along. Things might be more diplomatic and environmental than the Trump Administration wants.

"Nazi" and "Nacho" are distant cognates

A few days ago Warren Tusk told me that the words "Nazi" and "Nacho" are very distant cognates. They come from German and Spanish contractions of the Latin name "Ignatius".

"Nazi" is primarily a contraction of Nationalsozialismus, or "National Socialism". Back in the 1920s it was also a derogatory nickname for peasants in Bavaria. "Ignatius" was a common name there, which was sometimes contracted to "Ignaz" and then to "Nazi". (This is similar to how "Paddy" has been a stereotypical nickname for Irishman and a contraction of "Patrick".) Since the Nazi party originally had its strongest base of support in Bavaria, its opponents liked the nickname as a way to tie the party to backwards Bavarian peasants.

Nachos were invented by Ignacio Anaya, a Piedras Negras restaurant maitre'd. He wanted to feed some wives of American military officers who were visiting Mexico during World War II, but the chef had left and he had to figure out how to make something they'd like. He threw together some canapes from tortilla chips, cheese, and jalapenos. Ignacio's nickname, "Nacho", soon was applied to his creation.

I bought color vision glasses and I'm going to see green!

I’m home with my family and the Enchroma color-vision-correction glasses have arrived! Tomorrow I’m going to put them on. I hope I get to see green like everyone else does.

I hope to usefully answer people’s questions about how I sense colors before and after using the glasses. Here I want to record some previous thoughts on the questions. It might be a useful check on cognitive penetration issues raised by former student Eugene Yao in a Facebook post a month ago.

On to some answers! People suggested many questions and I selected the ones I thought I could answer the best.

Claire Zabel:
“If there are some differences between green and brown, can you currently imagine what it would be like to go more in the green direction, you just can't see it in the real world, or can you not imagine it?”

This is the question I’m most interested in. I can try to imagine colors that are more in the green direction starting from a dull green, but I don’t think I succeed. I just end up adding yellow or sometimes blue or even white instead of green. Amy Kind is interested in this question too, and I’ll put up a blog post for her in June discussing it.

Bryce Huebner:
“I'd like to know 1) how long adaptation takes, and 2) whether it ever seems like you're seeing something new. I tried them out two summers ago, but didn't get any color shift. But that was before I realized that there's an adaptation period (which, uh, of course there is).”

Thanks for telling me about the adaptation period, Bryce! I’ll wear the glasses for some time over the week-plus that I’m home. Probably I’ll write down the answers at the end of that, though I could do it before if the effects are faster.

Geoff Pynn:
“I wonder whether you will experience any effects on tastes. Will avocado and broccoli taste ... greener?”

My mom has used her spectacular cross-cultural cooking powers to make dolmas from the grape leaves in the garden! I’m about to have some for lunch today and I’ll have some after I put on the glasses and see if they’re different.

Bryony Pierce:
“Does the colour you now see, when you look at it, seem to have the associations it has for those who can easily differentiate green from brownish colours (e.g. fresher/less murky than brown, brighter than grey, more soothing than red), or does it have a similar feel to brown, say, or perhaps some other colour?”

I have positive associations with the concept of green because I like trees and nature and elves. I’ve always liked the way sunlight glows through leaves. (Sunlight through grass is on the cover of my recent book, and I like that.) But I think for me it’s what you’d call a bright amber. I have positive associations with that amber color. Maybe after the glasses, I’ll feel like I’ve been invited to Lothlorien?

Stephanie Hoyle Dorton:
“After wearing the glasses, does it make someone more acutely aware of what they're missing? …Do people wish they'd never found out what they're missing?”

Will the green I see after always strike me as a dull imitation of the green I saw before? Some people say that the glasses can actually train your brain to pick up on green if you use them for a long time. That would be surprising and completely awesome. I hear that the visual system is pretty complicated and I’m not going to rule it out. If I end up really missing green I guess I can wear the glasses everywhere and look like a dork.

Jim Moskowitz:
“If you open up an image in Photoshop (or equivalent), and then use the "adjust colors" slider to increase the saturation just of the green part of the picture, how does it change the image's appearance?”

To simplify, I’ll just use this RGB slider instead of a full picture:
If blue is at zero, upping the green slider adds yellow. If I set red and blue to zero, the image goes from black towards yellow but doesn’t get all the way. It stops at something that I guess is bright green. If I set red to maximum and blue to zero, the image goes through amber to primary yellow, which is probably my second-favorite color behind primary blue.

If blue is at max, upping the green slider makes things whiter. If I set red to zero and blue to maximum, the image goes from primary blue to a bright but pale blue. If I set both red and blue to maximum, the image goes from bright magenta to white.

Lauren Chris Horne:
“what things that you thought of as being the same color, and did not expect were actually different, are there? what things that you thought of as being different colors are actually the same?”

I’ll see! I hope there are some cases like this. I have some internet hex-color cases in response to Toby Ord's question at the end.

Claire Zabel:
“Do you think these glasses will give you a subjective experience of greenness that's similar to that of a person with normal color vision, assuming inverted spectra aren't a thing?”

That's what I think! But I guess it's possible that Enchroma is running a scam where they make someone have a totally different experience and they're like "wowwww Greeen!" Still, if the glasses give people totally new experiences, they’re getting their money’s worth.

Alexa Forrester:
“The question I want you to answer is not one I think you'll be able to answer, which is, when you see green while the glasses are on, are you seeing the same color green as me?”

I probably won’t be able to answer this! But my guess is that I’ll get closer to how you see it. Too bad I can’t directly compare our experiences.

Mirja Annalena Holst:
“Will you learn a new fact when you see green for the first time?”
I think so. The fact could be stated as “green experience is like that”. Hard to talk about simple phenomenological components without demonstratives.

Ann Pearl Owen:
“Let us know if the glasses make you feel any differently about green politics and/or the Green Party.”

I don’t know what green politics is, but it sounds nice. But the only real effect of the Green Party is to help Republicans win elections and impose horrible policies on America. I'll let you know if my views change!

Jamin Asay:
“I want to know if you see "the dress" differently.”

White-and-gold before…

Chase Hamilton:
“Do you see what you think is green in afterimages now? Will that change after putting on the glasses for a long time?”

I don’t think I see green in afterimages now.

Laurie Paul:
“can you see green, but not well? Or can't you see it at all? If the former I'm not sure why you think you'll see green for the first time.”

Sweet to have a question from the mother of transformative experience research! I think I can see green, but not well. How would the glasses then help me see green for the first time?

Perhaps the levels of green-cone stimulation I can have don’t allow for vivid green experience. I can have a little green-cone stimulation, which is enough for a range of dull green experiences. Maybe the experiential simples that make up dull green aren't sufficient to construct vivid green. So I need the glasses to hyperstimulate my cones into generating a new experiential simple that makes for vivid green.

Toby Ord:
“I'd also love it if you made a computer image (like the one linked in your FB post) whose two halves look to you (while wearing the glasses) like the before and after.”

I’m just in the before stage now, but I can identify some pairs that look very similar. There’s only a slight flicker of variation when I toggle between tabs with these colors. If I focus on the text in the box with the color background and shift back and forth between the pages, it’s hard to notice the colors changing. (I can see differences more easily if I look at the screen from above, but the colors look basically similar seen straight-on, or at the slight below-tilt of a pushed-back monitor.) I’ve given the RGB values in decimal form too:

Blues:
76/79/255
12/92/255

Darker blues:
60/85/153
12/92/153

Greens?
44/239/127
111/233/127

The general idea seems to be that you can make up for a little loss of green by upping the red significantly from a low value. This isn't how I would've thought of it before, but I guess that's how it works.

Ben Blumson suggested a paper for me to read on the Frege-Schlick view. I’ll read it this evening and tomorrow I'll put on the glasses!

[Update:] Here's a blog post I put up for Amy Kind after trying on the glasses. The effect wasn't dramatic, but I think I saw a shade of green with more depth than I could've imagined before!

365 days, 114 talks

I left Singapore for Hong Kong on April 24, 2016 for a talk at Lingnan University. Today on April 24, 2017, I’m on the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond after a talk at St. Andrews. In these 365 days, I’ve given 114 talks. Thanks to everyone who organized events for me, and to everyone who came! It’s been a wonderful year of discussing exciting stuff with smart people around the world.

I return to the National University of Singapore in August. NUS made this possible with a post-tenure sabbatical, combined with other kinds of leave that I could piece together for 15 months of travel and something like $15K-20K USD in total travel grant money. I started with the crazy idea of giving over 100 talks in 365 days, and it's sort of amazing how well things went.

 Loch Lomond at sunset last night. I was listening to
the Loch Tay Boat Song and Wild Mountain Thyme a lot.

This post has some statistical information about the 114 talks I’ve given so far, to answer questions people asked me on the road.

Talks to departmental colloquia and topic-specific groups: 107

Talks at conferences and workshops: 4

Presentations for students and public: 3

Number of distinct articles: 14-18. The exact number depends on questions of article-individuation, and on how to count a conference response and two more popular presentations. I presented various parts of my recently published Humean Nature, as well as a forthcoming book tentatively titled Moral Value is Pleasure that makes metaethical arguments for hedonic utilitarianism.

Number of countries: 17 – Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, Ireland, UK, Switzerland, Norway, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia.

Number of universities: 111, with Yonsei/Underwood, Boise State, and Duke inviting me to multiple venues.

Biggest month: August 2016, when I gave 16 talks in 31 days.

Most intense period: August 16 to September 2, 2016. I gave 12 talks in 18 days, covering 8 paper ideas on 3 continents and a different paper in a different city for each of the last 5 days. Things looked bad when I came down with the flu on August 16th after the first of the 12 talks. Fortunately, my fever broke that night as I slept on friend and colleague Ben Blumson's couch. I was a little weak for the next 3 days as I gave talks at Sydney, Wollongong, and Brisbane before an overnight flight to Singapore where I would bounce to the US, but I recovered quickly.

Least intense period: December 10, 2016 to January 10, 2016, when I stayed with family, apart from a few nights visiting the Bay Area. Apart from that and my June visit home, my longest period with one home base was for two weeks in Melbourne, with overnight visits to Adelaide and Wagga Wagga.

Talks missed: 0, thanks largely to excellent luck with transportation and my resistance to disease and exhaustion.

Talks I was seriously late for: 2. In April 2016 at Hong Kong University, I had the cab drop me off next to the department just in time, and then realized that the department was at the top of a four story cliff. In April 2017 on the way to University of Zagreb, my bus was stopped an hour at the border, where extra border controls had been initiated in the preceding week. I thank my audience at both places for sticking around and being very friendly about the situation.

Total list of dates, venues, and titles:

North Sea Sunset

On a ship from Amsterdam to Newcastle, I saw the sun set over the North Sea.

Zagreb!

Thanks to Matej Susnik for bringing me to Croatia! The Zagreb city center feels like the Slavic Europe of music videos, with stylish young people in tight black jeans walking past stately old buildings. I friended Matej on Facebook a few years ago when Google Scholar told me that he had discussed my work in Croatian. I ran his paper through Google Translate and was happy to see that he was bringing Humean ideas into a new language.

Yesterday after I laid out my naturalistic moral epistemology for the philosophy department, Matej organized a second talk on moral metaphysics at another venue. So I get to play with more philosophers, and I don't even have to go to a new city! Tonight will be the only night for nine days in which I sleep in the same country I slept in the night before. It's been Norway-Finland-Slovakia-Hungary-Croatia, and from today Croatia-Netherlands-North Sea-UK.

Philosophers in Zagreb have enemies who want to shut their department down for bad reasons. (For example, the philosophers discovered plagiarism in a government minister's work, and now the minister's friends want revenge.) I hope the department can survive and keep being awesome. I don't know how international support can help at this point, but we should be ready to provide it if needed. 

Nuclear Option Silver Linings

Republicans have unanimously voted to end Supreme Court filibusters and will confirm Neil Gorsuch. This was always the most likely outcome. But Democrats did the right thing in forcing Republicans to end judicial filibusters.

The bad news is that Neil Gorsuch will be on the Supreme Court, making Scalia-like decisions for three decades. Some judges are further right and some judges are younger, but it's hard to get both at once. That's serious bad news, but it's basically the only bad news, and it was the likely outcome ever since Trump won the election.

People will say it's bad that we've lost the ability to filibuster further Trump Supreme Court nominees. They're wrong. This party-line vote shows us that our filibusters weren't ever going to succeed. McConnell was always going to be able to break the filibuster, as long as Republicans had a Senate majority. He probably would've had an easier time after 2018, as we have to defend 25 Senate seats including some in very conservative states (WV, ND, IN, MO, MT). We'll probably lose some Senators then, so this was the best shot we were going to get.

There are two long-term benefits here. First, it'll be easier for Democrats to confirm their own judges. I was chatting with a Democrat at the center of this fight in DC yesterday. He specifically brought up the prospect of being more ambitiously left-wing in our party's judicial appointments in the future, now that Republicans can't filibuster them.

The second benefit is that this makes it easier to end the legislative filibuster someday. And that would benefit progressives much more than conservatives. Why?

It'll take more than a Trump Administration to end my faith in human progress. The world has become wealthier and less prejudiced over the centuries, and I expect that long-term trend to continue, barring nuclear war or some other global catastophe. From a blog post I wrote back in 2009:

"So if you make it easy to change the laws, you make it easy for a society to have the laws that people want in a high-tech, unprejudiced society. But if you make it hard to change the laws, you stick us to laws from the past. The filibuster is basically a way of making it very hard to change big laws, so it keeps us a couple decades behind the present."

Neil Gorsuch will do his best to keep America trapped in the brutal and impoverished past. But if today's events make it easier to end the legislative filibuster, that moves us towards an enlightened and generous future.

Filibuster Gorsuch

Of all Trump's nominees, Neil Gorsuch is the most important to block, as he could easily spend 30 years on the Supreme Court. I would've loved to block Jeff Sessions, but the filibuster doesn't work on the Cabinet. It works on the Supreme Court, and Democrats should use it.

Gorsuch likens his own judicial views to those of Scalia. Ronald Reagan named his mother to run the EPA so that she could tear it apart. She slashed its budget by 22% and rolled back environmental regulations. Given this, his potential opposition to executive power strikes me as a minus rather than a plus, as he's basically a machine built from birth to overturn executive action against climate change.

I never saw the 1930s Germany path to doom as a big risk under Trump. An independent judiciary is a deep and central American institution, and it's served us well in blocking things like Trump's travel bans. We can probably muster 6 votes on the Supreme Court against really crazy Trumpy stuff -- there's 4 progressives, Kennedy's libertarian streak, and the old institutionalist Roberts. Whatever Gorsuch's virtues might be, they're small enough not to win us any decisions we wouldn't win already.

I fear the more traditionally American antidemocratic horror -- Republicans suppress the black vote and win elections even though a majority of the public opposes them. Gorsuch's emails show a favorable attitude to the work of Hans Van Spakovsky, who makes his living doing vote suppression for the Republican Party.

If Democrats filibuster, we'll see if McConnell can successfully end filibusters on Supreme Court nominations (the 'nuclear option'). He'll need 50 of his 52 senators to do that. 3 of them supported preserving the filibuster back in the 2005 Gang of 14 compromise. So it's not clear that he has the votes.

One possible endgame resembles the 2005 compromise: 3 Republicans and some moderate Democrats work out a compromise where the filibuster is preserved, Gorsuch is replaced with a more moderate judge, and Democrats agree to accept the moderate.

There's also the possibility of negotiating a much better nominee with Trump directly if Gorsuch fails. Gorsuch owes his nomination to a deal Trump made with evangelicals to win the election. Recognize here that Trump doesn't have deeply held views about jurisprudence. He just knew the nomination was a trinket he could barter for evangelical support in the election and gave them their man. But if the nomination fails and Trump's alliance situation becomes much more fluid after other failures (Obamacare repeal among them), other deals are possible. After demonstrating their power by blocking the nomination, Democrats might be able to negotiate for a nominee significantly more liberal than Gorsuch.

In any event, the tradition of generally accepting qualified nominees from the other party ended with Merrick Garland. Democrats shouldn't pretend otherwise. With a lifetime appointment at stake, they should play for the most moderate nominee they can get.

Humean Nature

My book defending the Humean Theory of Motivation is published! Thanks to everyone who helped, including the editorial staff at Oxford University Press, my three referees, and colleague / ex-roommate / friend Ben Blumson, who set up a reading group on the manuscript.

This passage from the end of Chapter 1 discusses and exhibits the style of the book:

"My writing is sometimes colorful. I hope this never reduces clarity, but instead helps you more quickly see what I mean. I have a lot to tell you, and sometimes an unusual style helps me say it in fewer words. After working on the Humean Theory for sixteen years, I have some of the feelings that it would have if theories had feelings. Expressing how I feel may help you understand how the Humean Theory explains phenomena and relates to other theories. Maybe robots or angels would understand everything faster in dry prose. But this book is written for and about humble descendants of apes, like me."

I'm talking about proton-electron romantic relationships on Australian public radio

Here I am discussing "Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in Love" with Joe Gelonesi of The Philosopher's Zone! It's downloadable as a podcast if you'd like to listen that way.

The paper is about how the metaphysical possibility of romantic relationships between otherworldly protons and electrons defeats the fine-tuning argument for God's existence. It's now out in APQ. That and "Possible Girls", also discussed in the interview, are my contributions to discussion of metaphysically interesting romantic relationships. I didn't expect that it'd be such a media-friendly topic when I started working on it, but it kind of makes sense.

DeVos confirmation consolations

Thanks to all of you who fought the good fight in calling Senators to oppose the DeVos nomination. Republicans like to complain about teachers' unions, and sometimes unions push for things that are suboptimal (police unions I am looking at you), but corporations can push harder for greater evil than teachers' unions ever will. Like: confirming an utterly unqualified Secretary of Education who lobbied for corporations running failing charter schools in Michigan, so they could keep their badly run charter schools open and even expand them. It's crony capitalism with children in its claws.

I expected this evil in November, but with it comes a sign of the Democratic Party becoming what it could be. Every single Democrat and two moderate Republicans voted no. The last Cabinet nominee who lost a vote was alcoholic sexual harrasser John Tower, blocked by Democrats and liberal Republicans in 1989. The sheer outpouring of activist energy brought us closer to another block than anything since. (Pence, historically, had to vote. Sessions had to be delayed so he could still be in the Senate to vote.) For reference, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were confirmed 94-2 and 94-3.

There are two reasons why I can feel okay right now. (1) DeVos is going to have some difficulty implementing her terrible policies. Education is mostly controlled in the states, and working the federal bureaucracy right to implement her objectives is a challenge that she has never undertaken and probably can't really handle. (2) I never expected us to block DeVos -- skillful majority leaders like McConnell and Pelosi (who did exactly this when she passed Obamacare) can usually get just enough votes within their caucus, by giving some people a break and other people favors for voting their way.

The giant foe that looms before us is Neil Gorsuch, nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. Unlike Cabinet appointments, Democrats can block him with the filibuster. I've spent a couple days thinking about some arguments from smart people who think it's okay to confirm him, and concluded that they're wrong on basically everything except counterfactuals for some unlikely scenarios. Blocking Gorsuch matters way more than DeVos.

More on this soon. But for now: rest well, and take care of yourself so you'll be ready for the battles ahead.

Why Jeff Merkley's Leadership PAC is my #1 pick for fighting Trump

This was the seventh year in which I gave $5000 to Senator Jeff Merkley's Leadership PAC. If you have the money and want to fight the Trump Administration, I invite you to join me.

Just three days after Trump won the election in November, Jeff announced that Republicans had stolen the Supreme Court nomination and that Democrats should block the nomination of anyone other than Merrick Garland. Now Chuck Schumer is announcing that Democrats are willing to filibuster for four years and keep the seat open unless Trump nominates a moderate. I didn't think we had any hope of avoiding another Scalia after election night, and now it looks like we have a shot. Jeff has been doing this sort of thing for the last eight years, and it's why I see him as the best progressive legislative tactician we have in the Senate.

Jeff donates his Leadership PAC money to the re-election campaigns of other Democratic Senators. We have a lot of tough races coming up in 2018, including West Virginia, North Dakota, Montana, Indiana, Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin. If you expect that you'll probably end up donating to some of those Democratic campaigns in the next couple years, I strongly recommend doing it now through the Leadership PAC. In addition to helping Democrats win, you'll make them owe favors to an excellent left-wing legislative tactician who can organize them to vote the right way when it matters. As an out-of-state contributor, I can't influence Democratic Senators to support a Supreme Court filibuster. Jeff can, and he does it very well.

We need those votes now as much as we ever have. Trump is planning to announce his Supreme Court nomination on Tuesday night. Whether another Scalia occupies that seat will depend on whether we can hold a Democratic filibuster together -- either to keep the seat open indefinitely, or to force him to withdraw an extreme nominee and nominate a moderate.

I started following Jeff when he was the Speaker of the Oregon state House. He had won Democrats control of the chamber by recruiting a serious challenger to run against the previous Republican Speaker, tying her down so that she couldn't just go out and fundraise for her Republican underlings. After beating enough of her underlings to win a slender majority, he passed all sorts of awesome stuff -- same-sex domestic partnership benefits, requirements that insurance companies cover birth control, and all sorts of minor nifty good-government things I would've never thought of, like a law allowing people in trailer parks to join together and form co-ops to prevent the land they live on from being sold out from under them. That seemed like what Democrats needed in the US Senate, and Jeff has been providing it for the last eight years.

If you donate over $2,500 to ORPAC (it has that name because Jeff is from Oregon), you'll be invited to come to Portland for a two-day fundraiser where we travel the Oregon wine country. It's a wonderful opportunity to directly engage with Jeff, his staff, and influential DC people. Often I'm the only non-lobbyist there. But I'm hoping that more people will join me this time, to make clear that there's lots of support for a Senator who can organize Democrats to fight hard against the Trump Administration. 

The Incredible Publication Records of NUS Philosophy Junior Faculty

We have four Assistant Professors at the National University of Singapore. Collectively, they've published 29 articles, 16 of which are single-authored publications in top 10 general-interest journals (according to recent polls). Behold the amazing publication records of my junior colleagues, Weng Hong Tang, Qu Hsueh Ming, Bob Beddor, and Abelard Podgorski!

Weng Hong Tang, PhD 2010, ANU:

1. Forthcoming: Transparency and Partial Beliefs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 
2. Forthcoming: Knowledge and Probability, in Hetherington and Valaris, Knowledge in Contemporary Philosophy, Bloomsbury.
3. 2016: Reliabilism and the Suspension of Belief, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94, 362-77. 
4. 2016: Reliability Theories of Justified Credence, Mind 125, 63-94. 
5. 2015: A Note on the Definition of Physicalism, Thought 4, 10-18. (With Ben Blumson)
6. 2015: Belief and Cognitive Limitations, Philosophical Studies 172, 249-60. 
7. 2014: Success Semantics and Partial Belief, Journal of Philosophical Research 29, 17-22. 
8. 2014: Intentionality and Partial Belief, Synthese 191, 1433-50. 
9. 2012: Regularity Reformulated, Episteme 9, 329-43. 

Qu Hsueh Ming, PhD 2014, NYU:

1. Forthcoming: Hume’s Doxastic Involuntarism, Mind.
2. Forthcoming: Hume’s (Ad Hoc?) Appeal to the Calm Passions, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie.
3. Forthcoming: Hume’s Internalism in EHU 12, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
4. Forthcoming: Hume’s Dispositional Account of the Self, Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
5. Forthcoming: Hume on Mental Transparency, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.
6. 2016: Prescription, Description, and Hume’s Experimental Method, The British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24:2, 279-301. 
7. 2016: The Title Principle (or lack thereof) in the Enquiry, History of Philosophy Quarterly 33:3, 257-274.
8. 2014: Hume’s Positive Argument on Induction, Nous 48(4): 595-625. 
9. 2014: Hume’s Practically Epistemic Conclusions? Philosophical Studies 170(3): 501-524. 
10. 2012: The Simple Duality: Humean Passions, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 42:supp1, 98-116. 

Bob Beddor, PhD 2016, Rutgers:

1. Forthcoming: Believing Epistemic Contradictions, (w. Simon Goldstein)  Review of Symbolic Logic.
2. Forthcoming: Justication as Faultlessness,  Philosophical Studies.
3. 2015: Process Reliabilism’s Troubles with Defeat, Philosophical Quarterly 65 (259): 145-159.
4. 2015: Evidentialism, Circularity, and Grounding, Philosophical Studies 172 (7): 1847-1868.
5. 2015: Reliabilist Epistemology (w. Alvin Goldman), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Abelard Podgorski, PhD 2016, USC:

1. Forthcoming: Rational Delay,  Philosopher's Imprint.
2. Forthcoming: Wouldn't it be Nice: Moral Rules and Distant Worlds, Nous. 
3. 2016: A Reply to the Synchronist, Mind 125(499): 859-871.
4. 2016: Dynamic Permissivism, Philosophical Studies 173(7): 1923-1939.
5. 2016: Dynamic Conservatism, Ergo 3.

There are many other good young (and older) philosophers in Singapore at Yale-NUS College, Nanyang Technological University, and Singapore Management University, in addition to NUS where I work.