"A growing chorus of economists is seeking to dislodge the editor of a top academic publication, the University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig, after he criticized the Black Lives Matter organization on Twitter..."

"... and equated its members with 'flat earthers' over their embrace of calls to defund police departments.... Mr. Uhlig’s Twitter posts criticized demonstrators.... 'Look: I understand, that some out there still wish to go and protest and say #defundpolice and all kinds of stuff, while you are still young and responsibility does not matter,' Mr. Uhlig wrote. 'Enjoy! Express yourself! Just don’t break anything, ok? And be back by 8 pm.'... Mr. Uhlig, a 59-year-old German citizen, also faced scrutiny over past writings on his blog.... Those included a 2017 post in which he asked supporters of National Football League players kneeling to protest police brutality, 'Would you defend football players waving the confederate flag and dressing in Ku Klux Klan garb during the playing of the national anthem?' Mr. Uhlig also wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 2016, complaining about calls for greater diversity in the motion picture industry at the Academy Awards. 'This whole "diversity = more American blacks in Hollywood movies" thing?' he wrote. 'So so strange. Really.' Janet L. Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair, said in an email on Wednesday that 'the tweets and blog posts by Harald Uhlig are extremely troubling' and that 'it would be appropriate for the University of Chicago, which is the publisher of the Journal of Political Economy, to review Uhlig’s performance and suitability to continue as editor.'"

From "Economics, Dominated by White Men, Is Roiled by Black Lives Matter/The editor of a top academic journal faces calls to resign after criticizing protesters as 'flat earthers' for wanting to defund the police" (NYT).

ADDED: "Would you defend football players waving the confederate flag and dressing in Ku Klux Klan garb during the playing of the national anthem?" That's a perfectly phrased Socratic question, so let's raise a glass for Professor Uhlig.

"So we have created a scenario which has mercifully slowed the virus’s spread, but, as we are now discovering, at the cost..."

"... of a potentially greater depression than in the 1930s, with no assurance of any progress yet visible. If we keep this up for six months, we could well keep the deaths relatively low and stable, but the economy would all but disintegrate. Just because Trump has argued that the cure could be worse than the disease doesn’t mean it isn’t potentially true. The previously unimaginable levels of unemployment and the massive debt-fueled outlays to lessen the blow simply cannot continue indefinitely. We have already, in just two months, wiped out all the job gains since the Great Recession. In six months? The wreckage boggles the mind. All of this is why, [on] some days, I can barely get out of bed. It is why protests against our total shutdown, while puny now, will doubtless grow. The psychological damage — not counting the physical toll — caused by this deeply unnatural way of life is going to intensify.... Damon Linker put it beautifully this week: 'A life without forward momentum is to a considerable extent a life without purpose — or at least the kind of purpose that lifts our spirits and enlivens our steps as we traverse time. Without the momentum and purpose, we flounder. A present without a future is a life that feels less worth living, because it’s a life haunted by a shadow of futility.'... We keep postponing herd immunity, if such a thing is even possible with this virus. A massive testing, tracing, and quarantining regime seems beyond the capacity of our federal government in the foreseeable future... [S]ometimes the only way past something is through it."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "We Can’t Go on Like This Much Longer" (New York Magazine).

ADDED: Damon Linker may "put it beautifully," but to write  "Without the momentum and purpose, we flounder" is to be on the wrong side of the flounder/founder distinction.

"Flounder" is a fish, and the verb means to struggle, and that takes some "momentum and purpose." To "founder" is to collapse, to fall helplessly to the ground... without momentum.

"I don't think I've ever heard Althouse use the word 'destroys' in reference to a debate."

Said The Vault Dweller in last night's debate conversation, after I said "Biden is doing well. I thought he destroyed Bernie on the issue of saving the banks."

Here's the part of the transcript I was talking about. The moderator, Ilia Calderon asked Sanders about his vote against bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis. Sanders stood by his vote based on the "illegal behavior" the banks engaged in and because of his concern about "massive income and wealth inequality." The "working person" should not "suffer" for something they did not control.

Then:

BIDEN: Had those banks all gone under, all those people Bernie says he cares about would be in deep trouble. Deep, deep trouble. All those little folks, we would have gone out of business. They would find themselves in position where they would lose everything they had in that bank, whether it was $10 or $300 or a savings account. This was about saving an economy. And it did save the economy. And the banks paid back. And they paid back with interest....

I'm skipping some squabbling, and then:

BIDEN: Look, the fact of the matter is that if, in fact, the banks had all been -- gone under, we would be in a great depression. We would have not -- how do you get out of that? Now Bernie is saying that I guess he's going to do a wealth tax or something, that the top 1 percent could pay for everything. And they should pay for everything that occurred. We were talking about tens and hundreds of billions of dollars. That's what this was about. And the fact was that it saved the economy from going into a depression. After we passed the Recovery Act, which I was the one that went out and got the three votes to get it changed, that had $900 billion in it and was the thing that kept us from going into a great depression. 

"I’ve been arguing that philosophers don’t need to believe in their arguments in order to make them. But what they do need to believe in is..."

"... the project of philosophical inquiry itself. A philosopher might offer up her argument in the absence of conviction but in the hopes of furthering the philosophical discussion around it. This is very different from someone who offers up a controversial claim in order to stir the pot of internet discourse, or enrage his opponents. While belief in one’s position can be laudable, it’s not the only laudable motive for doing philosophy. One can aim at truth even while reserving judgment on whether one has hit it this time."

Writes philosophy professor Alexandra Plakias in "Let People Change Their Minds" (OUPblog).

This got me thinking about an essay in The Atlantic that I was just reading: "Cool It, Krugman/The self-sabotaging rage of the New York Times columnist" by Sebastian Mallaby:

In [a 1993 essay], Krugman reflects on his approach to academic research and emphasizes his facility with simple mathematical models that necessarily incorporated “obviously unrealistic assumptions.” For example, his work on trade theory, which helped win him the Nobel Prize, assumed countries of precisely equal economic size. “Why, people will ask, should they be interested in a model with such silly assumptions?” Krugman writes. The answer, as he tells us, is that minimalism yielded insight. His contribution to economics, in his own estimation, was “ridiculous simplicity.”

That same contribution distinguishes his journalism.... But Krugman should surely be the first to admit that his journalism, like his research, is founded on radical simplification. Like those economic models that assume people are perfectly rational, he presumes that his adversaries are perfectly corruptible. ...

In the end, one’s judgment about Krugman the columnist depends on the test that he applies to economic models: Their assumptions are allowed to be reductive, but they must yield a persuasive story. If you accept that almost all conservatives are impervious to reason, you will celebrate Krugman’s writings for laying bare reality. But... [m]ost people [have motives that] are mixed, confused, and mutable..... Krugman’s “ridiculous simplicity” produces writing that is fluent, compelling, and yet profoundly wrong in its understanding of human nature. And the mistake is consequential. For the sake of our democracy, a supremely gifted commentator should at least try to unite citizens around common understandings....

Are Mallaby and Plakias taking different positions? Would Plakias support what Mallaby says Krugman is doing?