Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

Mask Up or Drop Dead

Posted on by under COVID-19

Some readers may remember the dispute I had here back in April with Jason Brennan and Phil Magness over the use of lethal force to enforce social distancing orders. The issue was: are there any circumstances such that lethal force would be justified in enforcing such orders?

I said yes: if someone refuses compliance, and then not only resists an order to comply, but escalates resistance to the point of serious physical danger to others, it can be justifiable to shoot them dead. I say “shoot them dead” because under the rules of engagement that apply in police work, every shot is intended to be a kill shot: if an officer draws a weapon, it’s understood she had no choice but to do so; if she fires, she aims at the subject’s torso, which is the largest and most easily-hit target; and given the nature of standard police firearms, and the likelihood that the officer will fire more than once, the subject’s death is highly likely, whether literally intended or not. Continue reading →

Portia, Portia, Portia

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Whenever I have to spend a lot of time dealing with lawyers, I find myself thinking about The Merchant of Venice, the best guide to the law (and to lawyers) ever written. Of course, for as long as I’ve been reading it, I’ve encountered interpreters who sing the praises of Portia, the pseudo-lawyer who decides the case at the climax of the play. I guess my attitude toward Portia is a lot like Jan Brady’s attitude toward her older sister Marcia, as depicted in this, the climactic scene in one of the major episodes of the Brady Bunch epic.

Continue reading →

Cancellation and Miscancellation

Posted on by under cancel culture

One of the worst features of “anti-cancel culture” is the strange moral indiscriminateness that lies behind it. Cancellation is merely a tactic or technique. Unless a tactic is somehow intrinsically immoral, or so transparently unjust that it couldn’t serve any legitimate end, you’d think that the value of a tactic was determined by the value of the end or ends which it served. Continue reading →

9/11 + 19: Lessons

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I post this every year around 9/11, so here it is again with some revisions. Though it isn’t up yet, Chris Sciabarra’s annual 9/11 series is always worth reading, and like this post, goes up at midnight on 9/11. 

Today is the nineteenth anniversary of 9/11. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from nearly two decades of perpetual warfare. I offer them somewhat dogmatically, as a mere laundry list (mostly) minus examples, 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 →

The Lives of Others

Posted on by under COVID-19

Some universities have honor codes that oblige students to inform on other students who have broken provisions of the code. Some of these codes govern off-campus behavior, and some govern non-academic behavior. Under some conditions, you can be expelled for violation, and once expelled, you don’t get a pro-rated tuition refund. Incredible, isn’t it? Sounds a lot like the Stasi under East German Communism, no?

Not really. It just sounds that way if you’re completely consumed in self-righteous hysteria, have zero real-time, feasible proposals for how to stop the spread of the coronavirus on campus, but prefer to watch its spread from the Olympian heights of your suburban home, relieved of the responsibility of having to do anything about it. At that level of tone deafness, of course, anything will sound like anything.

Why Not Cancel “Mulan”?

Posted on by under cancel culture

So here’s a campaign of cancellation that even the American Right could like: the calls to boycott “Mulan” over its complicity in China’s repression of the Uighur Muslims, and its authoritarian control over Hong Kong. Instead of giving justice cheap shout-outs from social media, why not refuse complicity in the injustice of Chinese Communism? The American Right is still anti-Communist, isn’t it? At this point, it’s hard to know what they stand for, if anything. Continue reading →

What’s Wrong with “Cancel Culture,” Again? “A Case Study”

Posted on by under cancel culture

“Case study” is a bit grand for what follows, but this post was originally a comment I wrote a few days ago on an article in The New York Times. It was buried in the comments of the discussion about Kevin Vallier’s views on cancel culture, but I thought I’d pluck it out and post it here for better visibility. I’ve re-written the comment a bit, partly for clarity and partly for explicitness.

I guess my questions for critics of cancellation/cancel culture are these:

  • Is Thompson’s action objectionable? If so, how?
  • Is Thompson’s action a cancellation? If not, why not?

As far as I’m concerned, Thompson’s action is unobjectionable. I don’t like the term “cancellation,” but if we stipulate that we must use it, I feel no compunction (given the imprecision of the concept) in using it here. Since things like Thompson’s quit happen all the time, I regard such “cancellations” as entirely justified. I don’t know if this story is representative of what anti-cancellation types regard as a real cancellation, but part of the problem is that they haven’t explained themselves very well on that score. And considering the ridiculous-idiosyncratic-obscure origins of the concept, I would say that they owe us some precision before warning us against the supposed activity to which it refers. Continue reading →

Lauren Hall on Adele, Local Norms, and…Cancel Culture

Posted on by under cancel culture

Cancel culture is all the rage now, so for once in my life, I’m going to be fashionable and follow suit (so to speak) by blogging the living crap out of it. Lauren Hall has a blog post at Radical Classical Liberals on the recent controversy about Adele and cultural appropriation. The post alludes to cancel culture, so what better opportunity to reiterate my objections to that concept and the discourse that surrounds it? Continue reading →