Oh yeah? Back in August, I wrote a post responding to the Republican presidential candidates’ debate, suggesting that the Republicans’ views were insane but not much worse than the Democrats’, so that the best bet was to vote third party. That was before October 7 and before Gaza, when my main objection was the Democrats’ involvement in Ukraine. Since then, I’ve only gotten more adamant about it: I had no intention of voting for either Biden or Trump then, and have even less of one now. Continue reading
Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja
“Pedagogy Under Occupation”
Just a quick announcement–for anyone in the vicinity of Omaha, Nebraska this July–that I’ll be giving a paper at the 41st annual conference of the North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP), Thursday morning (11:15 am), July 11th, at Creighton University. The paper, “Pedagogy Under Occupation: Between Indoctrination and Neutrality,” is a much revised version of a blog post by the same title that I posted here back in 2015. The paper is scheduled for a session called “Hostile Environments,” with Monika Rydzewski (Queens College) and Joseph Tanke (University of Hawaii). As the blog post suggests, the paper is something of an exercise in standpoint epistemology, or more precisely, I suppose, standpoint pedagogy. Continue reading
Force and Fraud on Campus
So much falsehood has been offered up in the last seven months that it seems futile to single out a discrete claim as a particularly egregious example that absolutely demands rebuttal. But one claim happens to combine egregiousness, absurdity, and in my case, proximity in space and time, in a way that really does demand a response.
I’m sure most readers are aware of the recent demonstrations on college campuses in defense of Palestinian rights. I happen to live in Princeton, New Jersey, not far from Princeton University, and have visited Princeton’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment a dozen times in the last six days. Two students were arrested on campus on Thursday, April 25th, and thirteen were arrested on Monday, April 29th, for a total of fifteen arrests. Continue reading
“First They Came for the Professors…”
“….but I was a university administrator, so I called the cops, egged them on, and assumed the role of aggrieved victim.”
Ironically, Emory University’s Caroline Fohlin specializes in the political economy of early twentieth century Germany. You can’t make shit like that up, but her arrest does starkly raise the question posed by Jason Brennan’s valuable book, When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice (Princeton, 2018): when, exactly, does it become legitimate to fight back? And how? Those aren’t rhetorical questions, and the answers don’t involve an infinite regress. Individual human beings have a right of self-defense, after all. Believe it or not, that right isn’t just the monopoly of Jewish States.
Continue reading“Free Meals in the Prytaneum”
“So if I’m to make a just assessment of the penalty I deserve, this is it: free meals in the Prytaneum.”
–Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, 37a
Cough it up, Georgia. You assholes owe us all.
War with Iran
I’m gratified to tell you that I have no interest whatsoever in blogging right now about Israel’s recent attack on Iran’s diplomatic complex in Damascus, or yesterday’s Iranian attack on Israel, or the Biden Administration’s pledge of “ironclad” support for Israel, or the years-long “shadow war” that preceded the current altercation. For now, I’ll just remind you that back in 2020, I wrote a series of twenty-four posts about Donald Trump’s contribution to US-Iranian hostilities. Biden’s recent contribution is just a continuation of Trump’s, itself a continuation of several decades’ worth of Western policies aimed at Iran.
Continue readingAnarchy, Democracy, and Privacy
A trio of announcements on, yes, anarchy, democracy, and privacy:
(1) PoT’s Roderick Long has a review in Reason of Jesse Spafford’s new book, Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny (Cambridge, 2023). Despite his reservations with some of Spafford’s arguments, Roderick says,
…this is an intelligently argued book that deserves careful reading and discussion—particularly among market libertarians, since it offers ingenious and powerful arguments, from premises many libertarians will find appealing, to conclusions that most libertarians will be eager to avoid. That’s the sort of challenge that libertarians need to take seriously.
Judging from the review, I’m inclined to think that Spafford’s discussion of the Lockean Proviso is worth further discussion. I’m hoping we can have some of that here, possibly with Spafford’s input. Continue reading
Silence, Complicity, Genocide
Ever since the October 7 attacks on Israel, I’ve repeatedly threatened to go silent for a year, only to backslide a week or so later and sound off on something that somehow “demanded” comment. Having done this some eight times in a row, I decided to give myself until the end of 2023 to get any public comments out of my system, and then really stop. The reflex to keep talking was hard to kill, but I finally think I’ve succeeded.
I happen to be writing this on the last day of 2023, so it’s my last day to avow the resolution in public and explain it. It seems absurd to explain a so-far failed resolution to go silent, but the situation itself is so surreal that the addition of yet one more absurdity on top of all the others seems like a drop in the bucket. In short: Why go silent now? Isn’t silence complicity in atrocity and injustice?
Continue readingThe Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund
I hope readers will consider contributing to the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund for Gaza (ht: Norman Finkelstein). My further hope is that opportunities will open up after the war, if we can allow ourselves that phrase, for health care-related work in Gaza.
Planning for THE DAY AFTER
This Fund is dedicated to the children of Gaza: providing medical attention to the children who need it the most, helping to rebuild & relieve the medical sector in Gaza, and, eventually, establishing a sponsorship program for the over 20,000 children orphaned in Palestine. Continue reading
Go Fund Me for Hisham Awartani
Below the fold is an Instagram post from Morgan Cooper, an American living in Ramallah these past two decades with her Palestinian husband and two children, and something of a rising star on Instagram. (Mashjar_juthour and handmadepalestine are the names of two of her business enterprises, the first an arboretum outside of Ramallah, the second a handicraft business.) I’m not sure the Instagram post will come out in its entirety, but it’s a plea from three weeks back for a GoFundMe for one of the college students shot in Vermont in late November, Hisham Awartani. The man pictured on the right of the photo is Hisham’s father, Ali. In Western nomenclature, he would be “Ali Awartani,” but in Palestinian nomenclature, he’s known as “Abu Hisham,” the father of Hisham.
The son has been rendered a paraplegic from the shooting, is paralyzed from the chest down, faces a long recovery, and naturally, can look forward to large medical bills. His current status is likely what we in medical billing parlance call “DNFB”: Discharged but Not Final Billed. The billers and coders are no doubt trying to calculate the bill, and the insurance companies are likely trying to figure out how to avoid paying it to whatever extent they can. The charges are probably astronomical, beyond anyone’s ability to pay. But every little bit will help.
The Go Fund Me link is: https://gofund.me/026fa8da
Continue reading
Policy of Truth 