Here’s the text of a letter I sent yesterday to Town Topics, the local paper here in Princeton. The Daily Princetonian is the campus newspaper of Princeton University. Town Topics comes out every Wednesday, so I don’t know whether the letter will be printed or not. Continue reading
Category Archives: cancel culture
Why Don’t They All Just Fade Away?
I missed this earlier, but the indefatigable John Davenport had an Op-Ed published in the August 15 issue of the Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey): “Americans do not want a gerontocracy.” Following the argument of his Democracy Amendments, John makes the case for a constitutional amendment for age limits for office:
It is thus a safe bet that at least three-quarters of American adults would support a constitutional amendment to set a 75 as a maximum age, even if some would prefer a lower number. That could be enough to get such an amendment ratified if it ever reached state capitols or state ratifying conventions. It would mean that no president could be inaugurated later than a day shy of their 72nd birthday.
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.
“The Future Is Being Bulldozed”
An email to me from a reader of the blog who asked to remain anonymous. As it happens, about a month ago, I wrote to two of the Times’s correspondents, Jeffrey Gettleman and Edward Wong, asking similar questions about their coverage of the West Bank. I have yet to hear back from either of them.
This report from a guest reporter to the NY Times is so different in so many ways from the dozens of other pieces, both news and opinion, that they publish. It reports from places where their own reporters never set foot, describes places and events in a specific and granular manner, directly quotes both Palestinians and settlers’ real words rather than quoting only official propaganda statements, and includes the relevant historical context of the places in the report. Continue reading
“It’s OK to Be Gay”: Hamtramck and the Jihad for Gay Pride
This Washington Post article tells the story of a betrayal–a double betrayal, really. The first betrayal is the one mentioned in the article itself. The Muslims of Hamtramck, Michigan accepted the generosity and hospitality of pro-immigrant activists, including Pride activists, then stabbed them in the back.
In June, after divisive debate, the six-member council blocked the display of Pride flags on city property — action that has angered allies and members of the LGBTQ+ community, who feel that the support they provided the immigrant groups has been reciprocated with betrayal.
“We welcomed you,” former council member Catrina Stackpoole, a retired social worker who identifies as gay, recalls telling the council this summer. “We created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?”
That betrayal is obvious. The other one is harder to see, but just as real. The Muslims of Hamtramck have not only betrayed their neighbors but their co-religionists: Muslims abroad fighting for gay rights and pride. Continue reading
I Don’t Wanna Hold Your Hand
There’s been an outpouring of sympathy for the Ukrainian fencer Olha Kharlan for not shaking the hand of her Russian opponent, Anna Smirnova. Kharlan’s refusal was, of course, an impassioned protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The underlying assumption here is that an athlete in an international competition is in some sense a representative of her government, including its very worst policies. On this assumption, every Russian athlete is a representative of Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Until January 2021, I suppose, every American athlete was a representative, whether chosen or not, of Donald Trump. Every American athlete right now represents our current immigration policies, up to and including that of pushing mothers and their children into the Rio Grande in defense of America’s southern border. Every Saudi athlete represents MBS’s evisceration of Jamal Khashoggi. Every Chinese athlete represents the repression of the Uyghurs. And so on. I guess athletes from Niger are, for lack of a government, exempt. Maybe Sudanese ones, too. Continue reading
Neutrality Loathsome
Either be hot, or cold: God doth despise,
Abhorre, and spew out all Neutralities.
–Robert Herrick, “Neutrality Loathsome“
When I taught college-level philosophy, one of the biggest obstacles to teaching, and particularly to successful class discussion, was students’ fear of dealing with controversial issues in class. Despite the bragging that Americans like to do about “free speech,” American students were far more reluctant to speak candidly about anything (or handle constructive criticism) than the college students I briefly encountered in Pakistan or taught in Palestine. By comparison with students in these impoverished and highly repressive places, American students were discursively speaking afraid of their own shadows. They seemed to need “permission” to say anything beyond the safely anodyne and cliched. Continue reading
Defining “Wokeness”: Strike 1 for Robert George et al
See update at the end of the post, July 12. Second update, July 25.
One of the many problems with the “culture wars” in the United States is that almost all of the contested terms used in the debate have gone undefined. It’s common for people to speak loosely about “wokeness,” “cancellation,” “cancel culture,” “the Left,” and “Cultural Marxism,” as though these terms had some obvious meaning known by all. They don’t. In fact, in the absence of explicit definitions, all of these terms are mysterious to the point of meaninglessness. So despite contrary appearances, no one really knows what they mean. The absence of definitions of contentious terms tends to benefit people who don’t know what they’re talking about, but would like to conceal that fact from others. That might explain why so much talk on this subject has such a nonsensical quality about it, at once insular, enigmatic, and histrionic. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 