“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!
Bad Company
Category Archives: cancel culture
صُمٌّ بُكْمٌ عُمْيٌ فَهُمْ لَا يَرْجِعُونَ
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 readingNo One is to Advocate Anything Until I Blow This Whistle
The New York Times has a click-baitish headline about Hamas on the front page, except that unlike most click-bait headlines, this one happens both to be click-bait and true.
“Pro-Palestinian Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Hamas”
It’s true. They do. Of course, at this point, a headline like that is a bit like one ca. 1943 that said:
“Pro-Jewish Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Stalin’s Red Army”
Or, how about, ca. 1944: Continue reading
“Sick of the Bullshit”
It’s ordinarily a violation of the ethics of discourse to use the question-and-answer period of a talk to make a speech rather than ask a bona fide question. A question is a request for information. A request can, as a condition of its intelligibility, require a brief clarification or bit of context-setting, but there’s a difference between that and a speech.
However, most norms, no matter how stringent, have exceptions. What if, day after day–hundreds or thousands of times across a solid year–the spokesperson for a person in authority engages questioners in egregious, obvious bad faith? What if, day after day, he tells smirking lies about life and death matters, makes up random bullshit at will, and evades the meaning of obvious questions in order to serve up whole stinking, decaying schools of red herrings? What if his bosses are concealing complicity in mass murder, and are about to lead the country into an insane, ill-conceived war (the second one in the last few years), not just on behalf of their own country, but on behalf of a foreign country? Continue reading
Arrested Princeton Students’ Statement on Court Appearance
Princeton, New Jersey
5 months ago, 15 of us were arrested for protesting the University’s complicity in the ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza. 2 of us—both graduate students—were arrested on the 25th of April minutes after the launch of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. 13 of us—Princeton students, researchers, and affiliates—were arrested on the 29th of April for participating in a peaceful protest in a University administrative building. At the time of our arrests, the university barred us from campus and evicted us from university housing, all without formal disciplinary charges. Weeks later, the university conducted a “disciplinary investigation” and sanctioned us with four years of disciplinary probation. One of us, postdoctoral researcher Sam Nastaste, remains barred from campus. These measures are far harsher than Princeton’s response to previous campus protests.
Continue reading
Defiance and Compliance in Princeton (1)
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
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.
Policy of Truth 