Category Archives: moralism

The Soft Domination of Everyday Life

Posted on by under cancel culture, ethics, moralism, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism, slices of life

Consider this post an unplanned addendum to my earlier series on domination and at-will employment.

A friend of mine just got “fired”–you’ll see in a minute why the word is in scare quotes–and we’re disagreeing about what it all means. Naturally, I thought I’d share tidbits of our discussion here. My friend blames himself; I blame his employer. Which of us is right? I’ll give you an impeccably impartial account below; you decide. Then feel free to chime in either way.

Let’s call my friend “Claude.” Claude was caught vaping on the job. There’s no explicit rule in his company’s handbook against vaping on the job. It’s simply understood that “one does not vape on the job.” It’s not clear why this is so. “It is what it is.” Argument is not invited, and evidence is not required. We all know evil when we see it. Continue reading →

صُمٌّ بُكْمٌ عُمْيٌ فَهُمْ لَا يَرْجِعُونَ

Posted on by under cancel culture, Election 2024, Fatwas, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

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 reading →

No One is to Advocate Anything Until I Blow This Whistle

Posted on by under cancel culture, Fatwas, moralism, Palestine

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”

Posted on by under cancel culture, ethics, Fatwas, moralism, Palestine

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 →

Markets with and without Limits

Posted on by under book review, ethics, General announcements, libertarianism, liberty and the left, moralism

Some more bragging to compensate for the free-riding modesty of PoT’s bloggers: Roderick Long has an article out on the dispute over markets with and without limits: “The Limits of Anti-Anti-Commodification Arguments: James Stacey Taylor in Markets with Limits versus Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski in Markets without Limits,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 37:2 (Fall 2023), pp. 1-10. The publication date is given as 2023, but the issue just came out. Continue reading →

Force and Fraud on Campus

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

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…”

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.

Continue reading →

“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 →