Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana March 18, 2025
My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law. Continue reading
March 2025: Kalven’s Complicit Executioners: A Critique of “Institutional Neutrality”
Last month, I started a series here called “Stirring the POT,” designed to announce forthcoming events and summarize notable recent happenings. In my last installment, I mentioned that I was giving a paper on–a critique of–“institutional neutrality” at the 34th Annual Conference of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) in Norfolk, Virginia. That was fun, so I figured I’d report on what happened. Continue reading
They say, you know when you know
So let’s face it, you had me at hello
Hesitation never helps
How could this be anything, anything else?
–Elvis, in a slightly different context
Are we living under fascism? Are we on our way to it? It’s natural to ask these questions, but hard to answer them, mostly because it’s hard to know what they’re asking. To know whether we’re living under or en route to fascism, we need a workable definition of “fascism,” but strangely enough, decades after the defeat of the worst of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century, that’s what we seem to lack. We know that fascism was defeated, but still don’t know what it was. In what follows, I simply want to canvass some of the problems involved in answering my opening question, not so much to provide a conclusive answer to it, as to figure out why it’s so hard to come up with one. Continue reading
It’s been a while since I’ve beaten up on Jason Brennan’s “argument” against character-based voting, but I’m feeling the urge again, so here I am, hot to go.(1) The crux of Brennan’s argument is that it’s wrong to vote for political candidates on the basis of their traits of character, except when character is a predictive proxy for the policies they can be expected to enact once in office. In a formula (Brennan’s formula, made in discussion here on PoT): “policy > character.” Taken literally, the argument proscribes voting against any candidate, no matter how evil, if the evil he exemplifies is policy-irrelevant. My aim here is to add yet another counter-example to my ever-growing list of counter-examples to Brennan’s thesis, partly for the understanding it affords, and partly for the fun of it. Continue reading
Everywhere one looks, commentators are aghast at Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense. But as usual when it comes to defense matters, everyone is wasting their energies on the wrong questions. Hegseth has become notorious for his view that women should not play combat roles in the US military. This pointless red herring has now become the centerpiece of opposition to him. How could he believe such a thing? How could he say it? What kind of cretin rejects the universal belief that women should serve in combat roles in the US military? Continue reading
ht: Susan Gordon for the first image
Election Night, 2024
Princeton, New Jersey
9 pm
As we watch the US election results shamble their way onto our screens, it’s amusing to think that we’ve spent a year or more fixated on the spectacle of two pieces of moral trash engaged in a long, unsavory job interview. Ironically, the result will be a hire and possibly a termination that blurs the distinction between at-will and for-cause. Whoever wins or loses this thing, can anyone really say why? Continue reading
To the best of my recollection, I haven’t voted since 2004. I’d been a reliable LP voter since 1988, but the LP’s nomination of Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root in 2008 soured me on the LP; and though the LP has had better candidates since (particularly in 2020 with Jo Jorgensen), by the time those campaigns came around I was no longer enamoured of electoral politics and was committed to non-electoral strategies for political and social change. (I even have a video on my YouTube channel from 2020 that blathers on for a mind-numbing 45 minutes about my non-voting policy; I’m not sure why I needed more than ten.) I expect I’ll most likely continue to be a non-voter in future elections. But I’m planning to vote in this one – though perhaps not for the reasons you may imagine.
For the last year, Kamala Harris’s more aggressive defenders have wielded a particular rhetorical weapon against Jill Stein voters like me: A vote for Stein is a vote for Trump. I’m a little late to the party in saying this, but there’s an obvious retort to them worth repeating ad nauseam: A vote for Harris is a vote for genocide. Call it Stein’s Maxim.
Stein’s Maxim retort has two advantages over theirs. For one, it hits a lot harder. For another, unlike theirs, it’s true.
Taken at face value, “A vote for Stein is a vote for Trump” is flat-out nonsense. A vote for X is a vote for X, not for someone else on the ballot. If I vote for X, and you accuse me of voting for Y, the obvious objection arises: if I had wanted Y to win, I could have voted directly for Y, yet I didn’t. So how could my voting for X be a vote for Y? It obviously can’t be an intended vote for Y. The only intended vote for Y is an actual vote for Y. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 