From the “shit that sounds made up but isn’t” file:
Full article for those desiring context:
Another life cut tragically short while striving to bring a genocide to full fruition.
ht: Kim Jensen, Community College of Baltimore County
“A man is known by the company he keeps.” Which makes you wonder what Bill Ayers was thinking here.
Me and Bill Ayers, Niagara Falls, New York.
He said he “loved” my paper–on Machiavelli, on conquest. Mission accomplished!
Though I’ve never voted for Trump and never will, the Trump campaign can be “credited,” if that’s the right word, with a pair of useful things, both related to the same underlying thing. The underlying thing is ethnic identity politics, and the two things are the taboos regarding what you can say about it.
Taboo #1 is that you’re not allowed to attribute dual loyalties to members of an ethnic identity. Every ethnicity is axiomatically assumed to be loyal to Uncle Sam and the Stars and Stripes.
Taboo #2 is that you’re not allowed to wonder whether there there are any non-accidental connections between certain ethnic identities and, say, reactionary politics. The axiom here is that whatever the other differences between them, every ethnicity–or, every ethnicity in America–fundamentally pledges allegiance to freedom, equality, and the happy, smiling ideal of being a good neighbor. We may eat different foods, or attend different houses of worship, or wear different clothes, or make sure to marry within different demographics, but at the end of the day, we’re all the same.
The upside of watching Muslims line up to endorse and vote for Trump is that we can say good-bye and good riddance to both of these delusions. Continue reading
It’s sad that it takes a murtad to detect a kaffir, but here we are. Consider this post a fatwa for takfir–my second one aimed at this ludicrous individual. Any faith community that would own such a person deserves him. But a faith community that fails to repudiate him comes close to owning him by default.
Bad enough to be a homophobe, but this is a person who prioritizes gay bashing over Gaza. There’s a separate post to be written on the problem of homophobia in the Islamic world, but I’ll save that for another day. Not much needs to be said here. Either you get it, or you don’t.
Continue readingBack in August, I posted a message here from a friend in the southern West Bank about an Israeli ultimatum to the inhabitants of his village to flee their village or be killed. Though the noose is slowly but surely tightening around their village, and around the West Bank itself, the threatened expulsion has yet to take place, at least within that particular village. Hundreds of people have been expelled from their homes in the West Bank in various discrete expulsions over the last few months, but so far, there’s been no mass expulsion. Continue reading
Just a quick announcement for anyone inclined to attend the APA Eastern Division meeting this year. The Molinari Society is organizing a session, care of Roderick Long (Auburn University), on “False Alternatives in the Politics of Knowledge.” The session is G3A, on Wednesday, January 8, 2025, 4-5:50 pm (room TBA) with presentations by Cory Massimino (Center for a Stateless Society) and myself. The meeting is being held at the Sheraton New York Times Square, 811 7th Ave at 53rd St. Attendance, as usual, requires registration and payment of the registration fee. Cory’s presentation is called “Between Convergence and Conspiracy.” Mine is “Between Indoctrination and False Neutrality: Pedagogy Under Occupation,” a now unrecognizable version of this post from nine years ago. Roderick will be commenting. Continue reading
My barber is a twenty-something Jersey girl from “down the shore.” A conversation:
Her: So you doin’ anything fun this weekend?
Me: Well, I’m finishing up a presentation I’m giving this week.
Her (pause): Oh. (pause). That should be fun. (pause). What’s it about?
Me: Machiavelli.
Her: What’s that?
Two weeks ago, I posted here on Fajr Scientific’s Gaza Medical Evacuation Initiative. I’ve just learned that the initiative has been canceled, as the Israeli government has now banned Fajr from operating in Gaza. This decision comes a few weeks after the release, by 99 physicians associated with Fajr and similar medical organizations, of an Open Letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, providing medical testimony and forensic evidence that the Israeli military had, among other things, been executing Gazan children by shooting them directly in the head and chest.
From the letter (bold type in original):
Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter saw children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.
Here is the appendix to the letter. This article contains images of X-rays showing bullets lodged in children’s heads and throat (the trajectory in the latter case being through the forehead). Here’s a link to The New York Times essay discussing the evidence (may be paywalled). Continue reading
I attended a webinar the other night with the journalists Pankaj Mishra and Ben Rhodes on “Gaza, Israel, and the American Left,” organized by The New York Review of Books. Since the anti-war movement came up during the talk, I asked Mishra and Rhodes if they had any advice to offer the movement. To my surprise, both claimed not to, on the grounds that it would be “presumptuous” of them to do so. It struck me as a pretty odd thing to say. Here were two world-class journalists who’d just spent the previous hour offering up advice to the world’s most powerful governments. Rhodes, in fact, isn’t just a journalist, but was Deputy National Security Adviser during the Obama Administration. And here they were, for all that worldly wisdom, expressing timidity about the prospect of giving advice to a bunch of college students and faculty. Continue reading
In a post I wrote here back on July 18, 2023, I argued that the Titan submersible accident was “diagnostic of the delusions of our society.” Here’s the first paragraph of the post, emphasis added:
The response to the Titan submersible event has, in my view, been both remarkable and bizarre. Some people have found it an occasion for gallows humor; others have tried to suggest that the crew/passengers felt no suffering as they died. Still others tell us that we should celebrate the heroism of people who take risks to explore the unknown, and point out that civilization itself depends on its bold risk takers. I find all three of these reactions delusional, and diagnostic of the delusions of our society.
It turns out that I was wrong (or likely wrong) about the italicized clause, and that David Potts, who commented on the post, was right. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 