The 11th Annual Felician Ethics Conference takes place this Saturday, October 14th, at Felician’s Rutherford campus: that is, roughly 9 am to 6 pm, at 227 Montross Ave, Rutherford, New Jersey 07070. Registration and plenary take place on the first floor of the Education Commons Building (the modern-looking white building on Montross); concurrents take place in Martin Hall (the old-fashioned brick building right next to it on Montross).

The plenary couldn’t be more topical:

Michele M. Moody-Adams
Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory
Columbia University

“Taking Expression Seriously: Liberty, Equality, and Expressive Harm”

The paper will discuss some implications and challenges of the claim (accepted by theorists as varied as Elizabeth Anderson, Richard Pildes, Jeremy Waldron,  Catharine Mackinnon and  Charles Lawrence) that (a) expression can sometimes be the cause of direct, ‘non-material’ harm to persons and their interests and (b) the seriousness of some kinds of expressive harm make it reasonable to consider content-based restrictions on free expression and academic freedom.

And here’s the program.

Though we won’t have quite the PoT-person quorum we had in 2016 (when David Potts and Derek Bowman gave papers, and Michael Young and I chaired sessions), Michael, Alison Bowles, and I will be there this year. Michael and I will once again be chairing sessions, and I’ll be giving a version of a paper that started life as a blog post here.

If it’s any consolation, plenty of other people will be there, too.

I’ve been too busy blogging elsewhere to blog here, or even keep up with what’s happening in threads in which I’m involved. “Elsewhere” refers primarily to the blogging I’ve been doing for three of the (eight!) sections I’ve been teaching this semester: Phil 250, a sort of applied ethics course (“Making Moral Decisions”); Phil 380, a course on philosophical issues in criminal justice intended primarily for criminal justice majors headed for the police academy, and pre-law students headed for law school; and Phil 420, a three-student independent study I’m doing on “Islam and the West,” where the primary text is Edward Said’s Orientalism.

I’ve been doing this “blogging for credit” thing for about three years now, but have in the past generally thought it advisable to create a “firewall” between my ordinary blogging and my classroom-blogging. The thought was to “protect” my students’ “privacy,” and ensure that I wasn’t distracted by the intrusions of trolls (or other overly zealous commentators) who might derail what I was doing on the job. I’ve come to re-think that. It’s not that there are no risks to taking down the firewall; it’s that I now regard the risks as relatively low and manageable, and think that there are offsetting gains to be gotten by blog-teaching “out in the open.”

Bluntly put, it seems to me that both the academy and its non-academic observers and critics could use a little exposure to one another. The academy often seems to spend a lot of time and effort demoting the non-academic world to non-existence, or else striving to “protect” our students from it. The non-academic world seems to spend a lot of time confabulating ideologically-driven mythologies about what the academic world is supposedly about.  Too much is lost in the interchange. In any case, since I don’t have the time to do my usual blogging, and have lost my scruples about the need for firewalls between the virtual classroom and what lies beyond it, I figured I’d just throw this idea out there, and see what happened.

So consider this an open invitation to join in any of the conversations, whether in response to me or my students; my students and I could probably benefit from the kick in the ass you give us–and in some cases, the reverse may be true as well. Obviously, I have to focus on my students rather than non-students, but I’ll play that by ear. I’m curious to see what (if anything) comes of the venture.

I’m perennially frustrated by the reticence of PoT’s bloggers, especially when motivated by modesty: they never call, they never write. And they rarely if ever toot their own horns. So when they make the news, you have to toot their horns for them. Which I now proceed to do.

As readers here know, Riesbeck the Bashful (as he’s known here) has a new position teaching Latin/Humane Letters and Greek at Tempe Preparatory Academy in Tempe, Arizona. Here’s an announcement to that effect from De Equitibus, the school’s online student publication. (Naturally, since the publication’s name is in Latin, Riesbeck is the only one of us here who knows for sure what it means.)

The announcement not only has a photo of Riesbeck, but all manner of scandalous revelation about his life and career. Among these is his former life as an academic wastrel, his present commitment to a form of pedagogical act-hedonism (“It’s enjoyable watching people learn, which makes me enjoy teaching even more”) and his confession to the eyebrow-raising claim that our spiritual lives should be based on a paganized form of consumerist axiological solipsism (“Dr. Riesbeck says that a Boston terrier is his spirit animal because ‘they are the best dogs and I have one.'”)

So the truth is out at last about our co-blogger. We all had our suspicions, I’m sure.

Seriously, man–congrats.

I post this every year around 9/11, so here it is again. Highly recommended supplementary reading: Steven Brill’s “Is America Any Safer?” The Atlantic (Sept 2016). Though it isn’t up yet, Chris Sciabarra’s annual 9/11 series is always worth reading and should be up soon.

Given Donald Trump’s recent “plan for Afghanistan,” I thought it might be appropriate at least to link to my 2008 review in Democratiya of Sarah Chayes’s The Punishment Virtue: Inside Afghanistan after the Taliban—a liberal imperialist’s advocacy of perpetual warfare as the self-evident response to 9/11. Here, in confirmation of what I said in the review, is the latest news from Afghanistan. As a bonus, I’ve cut and pasted  the “response” I got from Sarah Chayes when I sent her the review in 2008, inviting her to respond to it. Draw your own conclusions about the quality of her response, or for that matter, the quality of the recommendations she made in the first place. But hey–the experts know best, right?

We’re just a few days away from the sixteenth anniversary of 9/11. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from the last decade and a half of perpetual warfare. I offer them somewhat dogmatically, as a mere laundry list (mostly) minus examples to illustrate what I’m saying. But I have a feeling that the lessons will ring true enough for many people, and that most readers can supply appropriate examples of their own. Continue reading →

Seen on Facebook:

Wasn’t John Brown ‘antifa’? Who today would object to his actions?

Here’s the reasoning as I understand it. Obviously, John Brown was cool. But John Brown was like antifas, and antifas are like John Brown. Therefore antifas are cool. QED. It’s obvious. Obviously obvious. Who would even think of denying it? Except racists, I mean?

Here is Wikipedia on the Pottawatomie massacre, one of John Brown’s ‘actions’:

Some time after dark, the party left their place of hiding and proceeded on their “secret expedition”. Late in the evening, they called at the house of James P. Doyle and ordered him and his two adult sons, William and Drury to go with them as prisoners. (Doyle’s 16-year-old son, John, who was not a member of the pro-slavery Law and Order Party, was spared after his mother pleaded for his life.) The three men were escorted by their captors out into the darkness, where Owen Brown and one of his brothers killed them with broadswords. John Brown, Sr. did not participate in the stabbing but fired a shot into the head of the fallen James Doyle to ensure he was dead.

Brown and his band then went to the house of Allen Wilkinson and ordered him out. He was slashed and stabbed to death by Henry Thompson and Theodore Winer, possibly with help from Brown’s sons.[6] From there, they crossed the Pottawatomie, and some time after midnight, forced their way into the cabin of James Harris at swordpoint. Harris had three house guests: John S. Wightman, Jerome Glanville, and William Sherman, the brother of Henry Sherman (“Dutch Henry”), a militant pro-slavery activist. Glanville and Harris were taken outside for interrogation and asked whether they had threatened Free State settlers, aided Border Ruffians from Missouri, or participated in the sack of Lawrence. Satisfied with their answers, Brown’s men let Glanville and Harris return to the cabin. William Sherman was led to the edge of the creek and hacked to death with the swords by Winer, Thompson, and Brown’s sons.

Who today would object to those actions? Except a racist, I mean? C’mon, people, let’s go punch some nazis.

…

(Warning: Irony)