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There's an article in the NYT today that exemplifies my exasperated sense that white Americans, whether they are conservative or liberal or "left", seem unconscious of their vulnerable moral positions as they pronounce on the rest of the world. The article http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/does-immigration-mean-france-is-over/?ref=opinion is written by a man who is apparently a specialist in the philosophy of history. This is bad news for his students, as he seems blithely unaware of social science methods since Compte's day. Instead, he takes his pronunciamentos as evidence, along with what he has heard from taxi cab drivers and read in Le Monde's Weekend ideas section. I won't go into the shot at Derrida, except to say that it follows the NYT line, which is that Derrida is outre, a barely known figure in France. Now, this is the kind of thing we have easy measurements for. Look up the number of articles concerning Derrida in, say, the Perse