Category Archives: Notes on the Anti-War Movement

Karma Comes for Mikie Sherrill

Posted on by under Big Data, character based voting, EVS Journal, Health Care Series, moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

A controversy has recently broken out in the New Jersey gubernatorial campaign. Mikie Sherrill, who has long touted her experience as a helicopter pilot for the Navy, is now facing the somewhat exaggerated charge that she “cheated her way” through the Naval Academy (to quote hearsay from the Internet).

The backstory is this: Nicholas DeGregorio, a supporter of Sherrill’s opponent in the race, made a records request re Sherrill, including her Naval Academy record, to the National Personnel Center of the National Archives. Continue reading →

Imperium et Dolus

Posted on by under Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

After helping Israel destroy Palestine and commit genocide there, Australia, Britain, and Canada are “recognizing” a “State of Palestine”—a “state” under military occupation, in the process of annexation, without borders, without a government, and without a military—while continuing to arm and support the regime destroying it.

If this is recognition, what would repudiation be?

Thoughts on Complicity

Posted on by under activism, moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

I’ve recently given a handful of talks critical of the Kalven Committee Report’s (KCR) conception of institutional neutrality–three or four, depending on how you count, with one or two more to come, depending on what the referees say. My argument is pretty straightforward: it’s an adequacy-condition on any account of academic norms that the account deal with the problem of institutional complicity in wrongdoing. The KCR defense of institutional neutrality doesn’t just fail to deal with this issue; it offers complicit institutions a blueprint for evading accusations of complicity even when those accusations are recognized as true, well-documented, and incriminating. Continue reading →

His Deeds On His Head

Posted on by under Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Fifty or sixty years from now, this is how they’ll be rehabilitating the reputations of the assholes running our current genocide in Gaza. Oh, the private doubts they had! The anguish they suffered! Poor, poor things! Judge not, lest it be discovered that you figured out on Day 1 what these “experts” were too cowardly to admit or act on for the duration.

The “war hawk who wasn’t,” except that he was.

The Lessons of War

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries, Notes on the Anti-War Movement

Most years, on 9/11, I’ve brought this post back up to the top and re-posted it. I want to do something different this time. I want to give a brief (or semi-brief) answer to one of the most pressing questions that arises on 9/11: why do Americans not learn from history? Or to narrow it a bit: why do Americans learn nothing from the military history of their own country? Continue reading →

Mistah Kirk, He Dead

Posted on by under Fatwas, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement

I’m sitting here eating a nice vegan meal, reading Livy. I just heard that somebody killed Charlie Kirk, another fascist nobody in this rapidly disintegrating country. We can’t keep track of how many fucking wars or proxy wars we’re in, or how many innocent people we’ve killed or sent to concentration camps in a week, but here come the hand-wringers and cry-babies on command, from Trump to Newsom to Obama, gnashing their teeth and virtue signaling over the least consequential death in America today.

Continue reading →

Is It Time to Bomb Columbia University?

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, cancel culture, moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

I had a conversation the other day with a friend who just started law school at Columbia. This person told me that on the first day of orientation, the first-year law students were visited by officials from Columbia’s so-called Office of Institutional Equity (OIE). According to OIE, the chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” is presumptively to be understood as advocacy of genocide, as discrimination against Jews, and therefore as a violation of Title VI. Anyone who chants it thereby becomes a candidate for reprimand, suspension, and/or expulsion. So they were instructed not to chant it. A couple of things can be said about this, I think. Continue reading →

The Mikie Sherrill Sweatbox

Posted on by under activism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

I saw this on Facebook just now. The “her” is Mikie Sherrill, Democratic candidate for Governor of New Jersey. To my regret, I volunteered for her 2017-2018 campaign for Congress (along with Chelsea Handler and a bunch of other idiots), and avidly promoted her here at PoT.

It reminds me of a scene in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s 1990 film, “Lionheart.” Legionnaire Lyon Gauthier is a lowly private in the French Legion, stationed in North Africa, whose brother has just been put in the hospital by a gang attack in LA. (Naturally, the family doesn’t have health insurance.) On receiving this news, Gauthier tells his Nazi commanding officer that he “needs” to see his brother in LA. The officer responds:

You need what I tell you you need. And right now, I think you need two weeks’ hard labor.

That’s what voting for Mikie Sherrill is like, except that she’d be governor for four years, not two weeks. Continue reading →

Does Heterodox Academy Practice Institutional Neutrality?

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, pedagogy

The doctrine of institutional neutrality asserts that an institution ought not to make public pronouncements on matters of public controversy. It’s promoted most vigorously nowadays by organizations like Heterodox Academy, and by the 150 or so universities that have signed on to Heterodox Academy’s campaign. This gives rise to an oddly neglected question: does institutional neutrality apply to Heterodox Academy itself? Is Heterodox Academy itself bound by the doctrine of institutional neutrality? It’s not clear how to answer this question, or whether it can coherently be answered at all. Continue reading →