Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

Yes, by all means draft the man whose conservative credentials were so suspect that millions of conservatives stayed home rather than vote for him. Earth to Republican establishment: You have proved repeatedly (John McCain in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012) that you can lose with a wishy-washy conservative. Let's try a real conservative, such as Ben Carson or Ted Cruz, or at least someone like Donald Trump who is not beholden to the Republican establishment and who can be counted on to keep his promises.

Addendum: Nikki Haley nails it:

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, herself an outsider who rode the tea party wave into office five years ago, explained the phenomenon.

“You have a lot of people who were told that if we got a majority in the House and a majority in the Senate, then life was gonna be great,” she said in an interview Thursday. “What you’re seeing is that people are angry. Where’s the change? Why aren’t there bills on the president’s desk every day for him to veto? They’re saying, ‘Look, what you said would happen didn’t happen, so we’re going to go with anyone who hasn’t been elected.’”

It's a new day in Conservative Land.

To the Editor:

Re “Missouri Professor Who Confronted Photographer Quits Journalism Post” (news article, Nov. 11):

As a former veteran journalist at ABC News, I was shocked at the actions of some students and even a professor at the University of Missouri concerning the presence of news media covering the protests about racial justice on campus.

Melissa Click, an assistant professor in the department of communication no less, had the audacity to call for “some muscle” to remove a photojournalist who was just doing his job in a public space. The professor, who under enormous criticism later apologized for her incendiary remarks, must have momentarily forgotten the First Amendment.

While I am sure the event was chaotic—as most protests that I have covered are—the actions by some at the university toward the news media were outrageous and fly in the face of what the heart of democratic debate is about, including a free press.

The incident reminds me of my days reporting on the unrest in South Africa when the white-minority government often did its best to interfere with our coverage about anti-apartheid events not to its liking. While no First Amendment existed in South Africa to protect foreign correspondents like me, the actions by some at the University of Missouri reflected the ugliness of what mob rule is about and what it can turn into at a moment’s notice.

While the professor who called for the “muscle” has now apologized to the journalists involved, it seems to me that such actions at a storied institution like Missouri should still be challenged and turned into a teaching moment. It is not only about the importance of what sparked the protest—racial justice—but it should also encompass what it means to respect freedom of the press. The lessons are critically important far beyond the gates of the University of Missouri.

RICHARD SERGAY

Washington

Note from KBJ: The professor in question is a progressive first and a journalist second. No matter what else progressives are, they are progressives first.

This is rich. Paul Krugman has expertise in economics, but he has been putting himself forward for many years as an expert on everything from morality to politics to journalism to the military to law. His opinions outside of economics (which is a technical discipline, not a normative discipline) have no more weight than those of any randomly selected person.

Thoughts about student unrest on college campuses:

• Hell hath no fury like a journalist scorned. The student protesters are making a grave mistake by excluding journalists from their gatherings. Journalists are tight, and they are absolutists about their legal right to cover stories. I expect the mainstream media to turn on the student protesters if the latter continue to exclude the former. If the protesters were smart, they would co-opt journalists by welcoming them in.
• Football is money, and money is power. If black football players decide not to play, for whatever reason, it will bring university administrators to their knees. Black football players (and to some extent black basketball players) are starting to realize just how much power they have. It's going to get interesting. Imagine Alabama's or Ohio State's players deciding not to play in the BCS playoff until their demands are met. Imagine what they might demand. You should also expect white coaches such as Nick Saban of Alabama and Urban Meyer of Ohio State to support their black players come what may, for if they don't, they will never recruit another black player and will have to find another line of work. (See below for cravenness.)
• White males are on the way out. It's not enough anymore to be leftist. We live in an age of identity politics. You have to be black to understand the black experience. You have to be female to understand the female experience. You have to be homosexual to understand the homosexual experience. You have to be disabled to understand the disabled experience. You have to be Muslim to understand the Muslim experience. See how it works? Straight white able-bodied males, no matter how politically correct they may be, are out. We're seeing the beginnings of a purge. In 10 or 20 years, there will be few (if any) white males in the upper ranks of university administration.
• We are seeing just how craven leftists are. Instead of standing up to the student thugs, as anyone with any spine would do, they cower in fear and capitulate. As a conservative, I am enjoying every bit of this. What goes around, comes around.

What say you?

Leftists continue to eat their own.

Here.

I'm a professional philosopher, but not one who thinks that my training or credentials gives me any special status or authority. Philosophers, as such, have no factual or evaluative expertise. Our training is in conceptual analysis. I have long said that society doesn't need more philosophers. What it needs is more philosophically minded lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers, &c. My aim as a teacher of philosophy is to inculcate critical-thinking skills in my students. It is not to indoctrinate them and it is certainly not to get them to give up beliefs or values that they had before studying philosophy. Philosophy is as likely to provide a basis for traditional beliefs and values as it is to supplant those beliefs or values.

I therefore agree with Marco Rubio when he says that we need more welders than philosophers. Philosophers will not like hearing this, obviously, but that's because they're self-interested. (Philosophers have all the vices of people generally, plus some of their own.) Some philosophers think they should be philosopher-kings. This is risible. I would rather be ruled by a randomly selected person than by a professional philosopher.

Lou Reed Live (1975).

Although in popular moral thinking the appeal of desert remains very high, within political philosophy desert has been out of favour for much of this century. There has been something of a 'revolt against desert'. This hostile mood towards desert has a number sources [sic] of varying degrees of sophistication. The most significant objection is probably that based on the claim that desert presupposes a responsibility we simply do not have.

(Geoffrey Cupit, Justice as Fittingness [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], 55 [footnote omitted])