Category Archives: moralism

“First They Came for the Professors…”

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

“….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.

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“Free Meals in the Prytaneum”

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

“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”

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

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 →

I Don’t Wanna Hold Your Hand

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Ukraine

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 →

All Normal on the American Front

Posted on by under moralism, Palestine

Sometimes American foreign policy speaks for itself. From “Blinken to Talk to Saudis about Normalizing Ties with Israel,” The New York Times, June 6:

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Monday that he planned to talk to Saudi leaders and other Gulf state officials this week during a visit to Saudi Arabia about the possibility of the kingdom normalizing ties with Israel. The Biden administration supports such a move, but it should not come at the expense of “progress between Israelis and Palestinians” and a two-state solution, he said.

“The United States has a real national security interest in promoting normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia,” Mr. Blinken said at a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “We believe we can and indeed we must play an integral role in advancing it. Now, we have no illusions that this can be done quickly or easily.”

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Greg Lukianoff on “Cancel Culture”

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism

In a much quoted tweet, Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has defined (“defined”) “cancel culture” as follows:

We define cancel culture as “the measurable uptick, since roughly 2014, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or *would be* — protected by the First Amendment.”

That’s from a tweet posted in 2022, but Lukianoff has repeated that “definition” many times since then. I’ve seen it in FIRE’s Facebook posts as recently as yesterday. Continue reading →

The Most Dangerous Game

Posted on by under moralism, Ukraine

For a moment the general did not reply; he was smiling his curious red-lipped smile. Then he said slowly, “No. You are wrong, sir. The Cape buffalo is not the most dangerous big game.” He sipped his wine. “Here in my preserve on this island,” he said in the same slow tone, “I hunt more dangerous game.”

–Richard Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game“

Anyone who favors intervention in the war in Ukraine owes it to themselves to read about the emerging consensus on nuclear war over Ukraine. A year ago, anyone who brought the subject up was dismissed as a pacifist, a scare-monger, a defeatist, or a crank. Now, a little over a year later, the idea of nuclear war is being normalized in military circles in both the United States and in Russia. Sober, respectable, mainstream strategists are now beginning to speak and write as though nuclear war was just another one of those things that’s headed our way, and will just take a bit of getting used to. Continue reading →

The Man Who Laughs

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Studies in Objectivist Propaganda

Humor is a funny thing. What we find funny–what we spontaneously laugh at–tells others more about us than might be revealed by an extended interview. Consider this passage from a blog post dedicated to the defense of what its author regards as “Enlightenment values.” The author quotes a passage from Zeev Sternhell’s The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, and comments as follows:

Sternhell takes Rousseau and Kant to be Enlightenment figures, though he is very aware of their being “complex and ambiguous figures in the history of Western political thought.”

(By contrast, I take Rousseau and Kant to be Counter-Enlightenment figures, though I agree very much with Sternhell that those are difficult judgment calls. And I laughed out loud at his quoting from Judith Shklar’s Men and Citizens on Rousseau as “the Homer of the losers.” Perfect.)

So “the Homer of the losers” is supposed to be funny. Maybe because losers are?

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Pedagogy of the Oppressors

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism

From a statement by the National Association of Scholars, a right-wing lobbying group: 

Just last week, Ohio State Senator Jerry Cirino introduced Senate Bill 83—also known as the Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act. This is one of many bills introduced across the U.S., both for K–12 and higher education, that are inspired by model legislation drafted by the National Association of Scholars and the Civics Alliance. In response to SB 83’s introduction, NAS promptly published an enthusiastic endorsement. SB 83 and our Model Higher Education Code provide a solid foundation upon which to rebuild Ohio’s colleges and universities, and to fight back against overreach by diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activists. …

SB 83 would prohibit state-funded colleges and universities from requiring diversity statements for promotion, hire, and admissions, and would ban DEI concepts in classrooms and on campus. The bill would also mandate syllabus transparency and further commit to intellectual diversity and institutional neutrality. …

In a day and age where free speech is a nonstarter in higher education, legislation like SB 83 offers hope for the preservation of American ideals, as well as the restoration of institutional integrity and academic freedom.

Freedom isn’t free. There’s a hefty fucking fee.

Defining “Wokeness”: Socratic Dialogues with Bethany Mandel

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism

The Bethany Mandel “define wokeness” controversy manages to be illuminating and absurd at the same time. Mandel, for the uninitiated, is an American anti-woke polemicist who’s apparently written a book on the subject of wokeness, and generally made a sophistical career of attacking it. She was recently invited to a YouTube talk show on wokeness, and asked to define the term. Turns out she didn’t have a definition. When asked for one, she managed instead to draw an embarrassing blank on her would-be area of specialization, babble a bit, and look like an all-round idiot. Continue reading →