What Would Samuel Johnson Make of the UAE-Trump Bribery Scandal?

First somebody would have to tell the good doctor about it, but news coverage of Microsoft's new venture in the United Arab Emirates didn't do that.

Sculpture of Dr. Johnson by William Fawke (1948-2018) in the Garden of Heroes and Villains in Dorsington, U.K.

I’m indebted to Adam Stevenson of the website Grub Street Lodger for informing me that philosophers memorialized Samuel Johnson’s famous stone-kicking answer to immaterialism (“I refute it thus”) by naming a logical fallacy after it: argumentum ad lapidem.

If you don’t know the story, here it is from Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it THUS.’

If, like me, you love that story, you are no philosopher. I took a couple of philosophy classes in college, got terrible grades, and eventually became a journalist. We journalists are professional stone-kickers, fallacy or no fallacy, so it exasperated me to read coverage of Microsoft’s new venture in the United Arab Emirates without any reference being made to the $2 billion purchase in May by the UAE of World Liberty Financial stablecoin. Biden-era restrictions on the export of AI chips to UAE were removed two weeks later.

Flirting momentarily with Berkeleyan immaterialism, I wondered whether the New York Times Page One story that informed me of this transaction had been a figment of my imagination. To disprove that, I didn’t kick a rock, but rather did the 21st-century digital alternative, which is to click on a hyperlink. Bishop Berkeley might quarrel with me, and even Dr. Johnson would struggle to believe such a thing as the World Wide Web could be real. But what the Times described in its September story was the biggest political bribery scandal since Teapot Dome. The only reason it wasn’t necessarily an illegal bribe is that the Supreme Court has for all practical purposes decriminalized political bribery, especially when the recipient is a president of the United States. Which makes me want to bypass technology and just go out and kick a rock.

Anyway, that’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. I’d consider it a great favor if you were to embrace argumentum ad lapidem long enough to presume that I exist, that my article exists, and that that the internet exists, and proceeded to read my piece here.