I just happened to read Norman Finkelstein’s recent interview with MintPress News, discussing the British Labour Party’s fundamentally ridiculous “anti-Semitism” scandal involving MP Naz Shah and others. I highly recommend it. I don’t agree with every last thing Finkelstein says (read it for yourself and decide for yourself), but I certainly agree with general point he’s making: the accusations of anti-Semitism being made against Shah are almost complete nonsense, and reflect an amazing double standard when it comes to the standards that govern acceptable political speech in the Anglophone world. No one seems to feel the need to make an argument for why Shah’s actions were anti-Semitic; the accusation is supposed to be too obvious to require argument. But there isn’t a particle of evidence to support the accusations in question: they seem literally to have been generated out of whole cloth, and accepted at face value despite that. Continue reading
Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja
Allah Save the Queen
So London just got its first Pakistani Muslim mayor.
I’m a Londoner, I’m European, I’m British, I’m English, I’m of Islamic faith, of Asian origin, of Pakistani heritage, a dad, a husband.
Why do I feel such a powerful impulse to throw cold water on this? Is it because, as an apostate Muslim, I find something problematic about a supposed Muslim who lists his religious commitment fifth on a list of politically expedient identities that helped him win an election? Or is it because, as a person of South Asian descent, I just find loud public expressions of South Asian–sorry Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Nepali, Kashmiri, or Bengali identity really embarrassing? Continue reading
Ignorance Is Strength
Representative Peter T. King of New York, whose Long Island district Mr. Trump won overwhelmingly in the April 19 primary, echoed other Republicans in pledging to vote for Mr. Trump even though he had reservations, calling Mr. Trump “a guy with no knowledge of what’s going on.”
–Patrick Healy, Jonathan Martin, and Maggie Haberman, “With Donald Trump in Charge, Republicans Have a Day of Reckoning,” The New York Times, May 4, 2016. Continue reading
Our Friend, the State
I’ve just received three letters in the mail that prove that in the end, truth and justice do triumph, and dreams do come true. These letters restore to me, through the beneficence of The State, two of the dearest objects of my heart’s desire–justice and a wife! They’re from the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office. The three letters are all identical to one another; their having been sent to me in triplicate is, I suppose, symbolic of the bounty and riches of my new estate. I’m blessed thricefold. Continue reading
Hursthouse on the Repentant Racist: Error, Evil, and Moral Luck
Some of you may have seen this material before, but I don’t think I’ve ever posted it at PoT, so I’m exhuming it in the interest of getting some comments on it, as I’d like to work on the paper a bit this summer, and am hoping to trundle it about at conferences this fall. (Apologies if I’m breaking blind with that claim, but this is the age of the Internet.) I’m particularly interested in getting comments and/or bibliographical suggestions on some of the empirical issues implicitly raised by the paper.
David Potts recently cited Martin Seligman’s claims in Authentic Happiness to the effect that childhood experiences count for little as regards adult experience. I haven’t fully digested Seligman’s claims (and references), but I don’t think that he had childhood upbringing in mind when he wrote Authentic Happiness. At any rate, I’m interested in empirical answers to questions like the following:
- What are the longitudinal effects of a racist upbringing? How powerful are they? How amenable to control or reversal? And in what form? Naturally, the longitudinal effects of racist upbringing are a function of the effects of upbringing, so I’m interested in the more general phenomenon, as well.
- What is the role of trauma in the production of racial identity in racists? Does trauma explain the production of racial identity? If so, what is the mechanism?
- What does racism (or “racism”) look like in small children? I’ve put “racism” in scare quotes because arguably children with racist upbringings may lack the cognitive sophistication to do anything but act as though they believed in the truth of racism. But behavioral racism without cognitive understanding does not strike me as genuine racism. A child who imitates racists is not herself a racist (at least not necessarily).
The Untarget Was Collateralized (Updated)
From George Orwell’s 1984, “Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak”:
The B vocabulary. The vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. In some cases, they could be translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language. …
Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. (pp. 249, 250).
Feuer Frei! Thoughts on Guns and Policing (Updated)
Beneath the fold you’ll find a picture of me at Essex County College’s Public Safety Academy in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, using the Firearms Training Simulator (FATS) there. (Is that click bait or what?)
Tasks accomplished tonight at the Academy:
- I watched my friend and colleague Officer Bob Kish of the Bloomfield Police Department do his firearms certification, which he blew away, with a 93% rating (i.e., 56 out of 60 rounds he was required to fire under tightly timed conditions hit a randomly-appearing target at a distance of 1-25 yards; 80% is a passing score).
- I shot a bunch of bad guys in the FATS. They died.
- I learned that I am not a bad shot for a middle aged philosophy professor with a squint. I also learned that I am not a good shot for a police officer who has to operate in non-simulated circumstances.
- I thought about the philosophical implications of it all (see below).
- I mailed some letters.
Felician Conference Postscripts (2): James DiGiovanna on Situationism and Identity
My erstwhile John Jay colleague James DiGiovanna gave a paper at the Felician Conference called “Situationism and No Identity Whatsoever.” I didn’t attend that particular presentation, so I won’t be blogging it beyond this note, but James has opened it up to comments on his Academia site, so if you’re interested, click the preceding link, take a look, and comment away.
Moral Standing to Blame: South Asian Edition
I can’t wait for someone to address this example in the literature on “moral standing to blame“:
Felician Conference Postscripts (1): Blake Wilson on Private Property
This is the first in a series of posts on the Tenth Annual Felician Institute Conference on Ethics and Public Affairs. For the introduction to the series, read this.
The first of the sessions I attended (and chaired) was one on (private) property rights, featuring two papers–one an essentially Hegelian justification of private property rights by Blake Wilson (SUNY Binghamton), the other a Lacanian account of a dilemma about private property by Chris Ketcham (University of Houston, Downtown). I’m going to discuss Blake’s paper rather than Chris’s, in part because Chris’s paper was aporetic rather than thesis-driven, and also because the aporia in Chris’s paper arises from the idiosyncrasies of Lacan’s conception of our obligations to others, a topic I’m not qualified to discuss, having read very little Lacan.
Policy of Truth 