Breaking: new FOIAs out of the NIH. In Nov 2020 a pair of NIH officials drafted a crazy memo to the FDA chief on implementing a national N95 mask mandate. The memo likens the mandate to emergency wartime powers, such as the suspension of habeas corpus.
More coming soon.
Here's the downright crazy part where they try to legally justify this stuff under emergency executive powers to overcome any "resistance" to the mandate.
Update: one of the memo's authors is a NIH investigator (retired) who appeared to know several top officials on a first name basis. The same individual has co-authored scientific papers with FDA commissioner Hahn.
Note this line in particular. This pair was apparently brought in to some covid advisory committee by the head of the FDA to present its memo.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
If Marxists want better critics, they also need to do a better job at making their own arguments.
To paraphrase Keynes, most Marxists approach Marx's texts as received documents from on high. They also treat their critics as heretics from that text.
Rather than engage with serious - indeed damning - criticisms of Marx's system, Marxists far more often try to handwave them away by designating them "bourgeois" arguments (i.e. heresies) and claiming that they're just ploys to maintain and preserve power disparities in society.
Alternatively, they will immediately start parroting lines about how "You simply don't understand Marx!" No amount of textual evidence showing that they are wrong will ever overcome this, because "understanding Marx," to them, means accepting Marxism as true and valid.
The chain of modern use of "neoliberalism" derives from Foucault's posthumously published 1979 lectures about his archival digging in the transcripts of the 1938 conference where Mises rejected the term.
This is not difficult, unless, like Kuehn, you reject linear time.
*1939 transcripts.
And yes, Foucault is quite clear that he found it while doing archival research.
Probably not, because the 1939 colloquium participants were well-aware of the term's baggage due to Spann and Adler's uses over the previous two decades. At min, the absence of Spann and Adler would have yielded a very different transcript...which is where Foucault picked it up.
1. The publication of Foucault's lectures are what sparked the 90s boom
2. Gide's article had all of 2 citations between 1898 and the 90s when people first noticed it used the term
3. It's Othmar Spann & his chapter on neoliberalism was in a widely used econ textbook
As usual, Kuehn has strong opinions about a subject in which he lacks basic competence. Yet somehow he thinks I'm at fault for that...
FWIW, the claim that "neoliberalism" originated at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium is a myth as well. The transcripts barely mention the term at all. It's briefly proposed, then shot down by Jacques Rueff and never revisited - likely because they knew it was a Nazi pejorative.
In this new working paper, we investigate our critics' claim that the SPD popularized Marxism in Germany with its 1891 Erfurt Program, long before Lenin came along.
Our main finding may be seen here. The Erfurt Program appears to give Marx's citations a very modest boost in 1891.
Except (1) it isn't statistically significant, and (2) it's dwarfed by 1917, which does past muster for significance.
Some of our critics also claimed that Ngram isn't suitable for this test (although they never offered any compelling reason why). So we ran the same test using an independent database of scanned German newspapers. The result? Not even a visible boost from the SPD or Erfurt.
Synthetic Karl Marx is returning for another round.
Preview: John Ganz and all the other twitter warriors who claimed that the SPD popularized Marx before 1917 are simply wrong and don't know what they're talking about.
For reference, here's Ganz's claim from back in November about the SPD.
We tested it by using the 1891 Erfurt Program as a treatment, and he's simply wrong.
Our findings using German Ngram reveal only a tiny visual increase in Marx's citations from Erfurt, and we're unable to establish statistical significance. Meanwhile the 1917 boost from the Bolsheviks is huge and statistically significant.
One of the stranger myths of the Brown v. Board aftermath is that Arlington County, VA bucked the "Massive Resistance" movement of the state and permitted integration. Not true! In 1956, the Arlington school board voted 3-0 to fight court-ordered desegregation in appellate court
The Arlington school board consistently affirmed this position in the desegregation era, adopting resolutions that pursued every available avenue. The language of these resolutions clearly sided with preserving segregation.
In 1958 the NAACP sued the Arlington school board after it systematically rejected 30 out of 30 African-American applicants for transfer into all-white schools.
This strategy was intentional and relied on zoning, enrollment caps, and even IQ tests to block the transferees.