Now that the wonderful Democrats have won the midterms, there are no excuses left for failing to act to end the Iran War. Nothing should stop the Democrats from getting started today. How about we skip the Blue Wave self-celebration and get to it?
Triumph of the Undeserving
Leave it to West Orange to have elected two of the least deserving candidates for office, Justin Goldsman for Council and Joyce Rudin for Mayor, in one of the filthiest, most debased, and most incompetently reported election campaigns in recent memory. Congratulations, I guess. Well deserved.
Happy Ending
I just checked a book out of the library. The young lady who checked it out was wearing a button: “Ask me about the book I’m reading.” So I did.
“Well,” she said, apologetically. “It’s not a happy book. It’s called Killers of the King, about the execution of Charles I.”
“That is a happy book,” I said.
I Told You, West Orange, You Fucking Fools
About a month ago, I invited the candidates up for election in West Orange to denounce the bigotry of one of their colleagues, Justin Goldsman (see here and here). Not one of them did. A few months before that, I had a conversation with West Orange Councilman Joe Krakoviak about the Mt Laurel inclusionary housing doctrine. The conversation touched on the prevalence of racism in the housing market. Krakoviak told me with great confidence that racism was a thing of the past.
Now, West Orange is in the midst of a sordid but utterly predictable scandal: both of the African American candidates in the election have been on the receiving end of racist comments designed to drive them, by intimidation, from the electoral field. Now, everybody is convinced that racism is a problem. And of course now everybody is doing their best to out-do their rivals in voicing their supposed abhorrence for racism, and their abhorrence of the failure to take a stand against it. But where were they a month ago?
Continue readingIs Being Right Enough?
The following guest post, a contribution to Buddhist philosophy, is by Huideng Chanyu.
Truth, Benefit and the Timing of Speech in Majjhima Nikaya 58
By Huideng Chanyu (慧灯禅语)
A correction can be accurate and still be an act of humiliation. A reassurance can be welcome and still leave someone dangerously mistaken. Neither observation tells us exactly when to speak. Together, however, they suggest that truth and a listener’s reaction are different considerations. The Abhaya discourse, Majjhima Nikaya 58, makes their relationship a subject of explicit examination. Its answer raises a further difficulty: who is entitled to decide that unwelcome words are beneficial?
Continue readingHallucinations of Empire
This is one of the New York Times’s headlines this morning:
The story turns out to be that the United States and Israel are in the advanced stages of planning attacks against Iran. The headline reflects the possibility that Iran might respond.
Open Borders and the Problem of Evil
It’s now become a kind of axiom in American politics that “open borders” are an absurd idea. Even Analilia Mejia, the left-most candidate among New Jersey’s Democrats, is quick to disavow the idea. “How do you have a country without borders?” she asks. Since you can’t, we can’t have open borders. Open borders means no country; no country means chaos. We can’t have chaos, so we must disavow open borders.
Continue readingWhose Streets?
Permits, Nazis, and the Reclamation of Public Space
A pointed question came up during Public Comments at Princeton Municipal Council a few weeks ago, namely: “Why was a neo-Nazi group ‘allowed’ to march in Princeton despite lacking a permit?” As I’ve suggested here before, this is the wrong question to ask. It also diverts attention away from a series of questions that badly need asking.
Continue readingNotes on Lolita (3)
Laughter, Tragedy, and Comedy Revisited
I can’t resist offering a postscript of sorts to an earlier post I wrote about film depictions of Lolita. As I suggested there, Kubrick’s Lolita has widely been praised on the grounds that it captures the undeniable humor of the novel; by contrast, Lyne’s Lolita has been criticized because it mostly fails (or declines) to do so.
On my view, however, this gets things backwards: Kubrick’s version fails precisely because it plays Lolita as comedy; Lyne’s succeeds precisely because it plays Lolita as tragedy. There is undeniable humor in Lolita, as Kubrick and others have correctly recognized, but this humor fades to the background when contrasted with the tragedy depicted in it. In other words, to get Lolita right, its humor has to be subordinated to the tragedy it depicts, not foregrounded at the expense of the novel’s plot or theme. On my view, while Kubrick inverts the relevant priorities, Lyne gets them right.
Continue reading“Gaza as World Event”
The Executive Board of the North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP), recently asked its membership (of which I’m one) for nominations of keynote speakers for its Forty-Fourth Annual Conference in mid-July 2027. The keynote at an academic conference is usually given by a well-known, distinguished professional in the field, and is usually focused on the theme selected that year for the conference. The theme at next year’s NASSP conference will be “Situated Stories: Belonging, Erasure, Replacement.”
Continue reading
