Since my first post here on institutional neutrality in 2025, Heterodox Academy has, predictably, re-affirmed its commitment to the doctrine by way of the same tired “arguments” for it, and done its fair share of bragging about the latest institutions to have signed on to it. For all their talk about “viewpoint diversity” and the burdens of rational discourse, the defenders of institutional neutrality seem pretty oblivious to the arguments that have been made against it. I haven’t, for instance, seen any serious attempts to deal with the complicity-based objections I’ve raised to it over the last year. I’ll take that as my cue to deploy yet another of the (literally) dozens of counter-examples I have to institutional neutrality, if only for the fun of piling them up. Continue reading
Category Archives: Notes on the Anti-War Movement
Unfortunate Sons
What’s remarkable here is the total lack of self-awareness with which these people will hold a graduation ceremony for soldiers (officers) in a public park, then rationalize the bombing of schools, hospitals, bridges, power plants, and crowds of starving civilians by claiming that the presumptive presence of n “terrorists” or “militants” at those locations makes it all OK. Wouldn’t the same logic rationalize blowing up everyone in the park pictured here, including all of the complacent but supportive civilians? What complaint could they offer if someone did here what was done at Old Dominion University?
Continue readingA(nother) Reductio for Institutional Neutrality
And a challenge to its defenders
Imagine a university whose administration passes what it takes to be a procedurally neutral rule–a “time, manner, place” restriction–prohibiting all protests on campus that take place either on grass or on thoroughfares. Protests inside university buildings are prohibited as well. Protests on grass, admin says, damage the grass, and protests on thoroughfares are a traffic hazard. Obviously, protests inside university buildings are too disruptive of university business to be permitted. All neutral considerations.
Now suppose that 99% of campus consists either of grass, thoroughfares, or buildings. It follows that large scale protests will be made impossible on such a campus.
Continue readingThe Wokeness Threat is a Right-Wing Scam
I did my annual DEI certification at work the other day. It’s the same one I’ve done here since 2022. The training video is produced by a company called KnowBe4, which specializes in workplace risk reduction: “15+ years of behavior data, 70,000 global customers, 12-in-production security awareness agents…1 of 3 full time US workers has been trained by us.” Not a fly-by-night operation, and not unrepresentative of corporate DEI training. Just the reverse. The norm.
The training took all of 15 minutes. What did I learn? Six woke lessons.
Continue readingPort Newark Activists on Trial
On May 26th and 28th, I mentioned a group of activists who’ve put their bodies on the line at Port Newark/Elizabeth, not far from Delaney Hall, to stop military shipments through those ports to Israel. These activists are part of a little-discussed worldwide effort–spanning Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, Denmark, the UK, Canada, and the U.S. (Newark, Norfolk, Houston, Seattle, Tacoma, Oakland, Los Angeles) to block the flow of military hardware to Israel.
Continue readingFrom Big Tech to Mass Grave
Here’s an item from Business Insider of the sort you see just about every day in that publication, at least if you read it every day, as I do. It’s so common that its implications seem to go in one ear and out the other. “More big tech execs are joining the Army Reserve as senior officers,” we’re told.
- The Army has added three more tech executives to its special Detachment 201 reserve unit.
- Det 201 members join as lieutenant colonels, advising the service on AI, cyber, and modernization.
- The new troops come from places like Cloudflare, a major private equity firm, and Facebook AI Research.
- A second crop of tech executives entered the Army Reserve last week, expanding the service’s ties with Big Tech as it continues a dramatic effort to modernize its equipment and systems and better prepare for modern warfare.
Those who recently joined include Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer of Cloudflare; Sam Pullara, managing director and CTO of Sutter Hill Ventures, a Palo Alto investment firm; and Serkan Piantino, a former Reddit executive and co-founder of Facebook AI Research.
The executives have joined a unit known as Detachment 201, a special unit “designed to bridge the gap between private-sector innovation and military modernization,” the Army said in a press release, reflecting the Pentagon’s push to leverage private-sector technical expertise to address complex national security and defense challenges.
Members are reservists, can work remotely, and must complete a minimum of 112 hours of service annually.
“Their primary role is to serve as senior advisors to help drive the Army Transformation Initiative, concentrated on high-level technological strategies in areas such as cyber, AI and machine learning applications, and other data-driven capabilities,” Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Orlando Howard said in an email to Business Insider.
They join four other tech leaders who entered the Army Reserve one year ago: Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, former chief product officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer at OpenAI.
All entered the Army as lieutenant colonels, a rank that takes most officers over a decade to reach. The senior entry, known as a “direct commission,” is not unheard of, though. Most military medical providers, chaplains, and veterinarians join at slightly more senior ranks, though they undergo their own version of boot camp, while Det 201 does not.
“The program selects applicants who are highly skilled civilian technology professionals at the executive or C-suite level to serve as part-time strategic advisers,” Howard said. “These officers use their advanced expertise in commercial tech and private industry to offer a different perspective and advise senior Army leaders on solving military problems.”
Continue reading
Graham Platner and the Merchants of Mass Death
The Graham Platner controversy is an instructively stupid one. It’s a little bit like the Katie Hill controversy of yesteryear, but even dumber.
Platner is accused of saying and doing some problematic things, mostly many years ago. The accusations fall into two categories. Either the facts are contested, or not. In the most serious cases, the facts are not only contested but essentially unknowable, which raises the suspicion that many of the allegations are either exaggerations, false memories, or lies. In the uncontested cases, what is alleged is simply not serious enough to be disqualfying. Much of the “scandal” turns on the widespread inability to grasp or acknowledge the fact that people often say things in anger or through thoughtlessness that they don’t really mean. These claims often don’t tell us very much in the first instance except that the person lacks a certain kind of self-control. Once the problematic claim comes out, it’s out, but if sincerely apologized for, much of the problem is, often enough, resolved.
Continue readingEngaging the Enemy
Another Night of Military Exercises Using Civilians as Human Shields
Not a joke headline. It happened the other day in Pasadena, California. It almost sounds like a comedy skit intended to unmask the hypocrisy of “Western” claims that Hamas uses “civilians as human shields.” We can’t, of course, be entirely sure of the military’s intentions here. The residents might not have been human shields; they might be simulated targets, after all. But that doesn’t really improve things.
Continue readingPASADENA, Calif. (KABC) — A late-night military training exercise in Pasadena startled residents as helicopters flew overhead and landed at a long-closed medical facility.
The exercise began around 8:30 p.m.Wednesday, with helicopters landing on the former St. Luke’s Medical Center building, which has been closed for more than 20 years. Residents said the noise continued into the early morning hours.
Why We Upheld the U.S. War Crimes Act At Port Elizabeth and Were Arrested
On May 26, I posted a press release on the May 22, 2026 activist blockade of Port Newark/Elizabeth Marine Terminal. This post below is a reprint, with permission, of an item describing an earlier action of theirs that took place on October 3, 2025. For the original post,and more material, visit their Substack, Zoomed Out. I’ve supplied the hyperlinks.
I would just underscore the fact that if “[h]undreds of tons of tax-payer funded weapons are being shipped weekly from its docks to the Israeli ports of Ashdod and Haifa via commercial shipping companies, Maersk (Danish) and ZIM (Israeli),” then ostensibly civilian infrastructure and workers are being used as human shields, not just at Port Newark/Elizabeth itself, but at every point in this supply chain from beginning to end.
Continue reading
Policy of Truth 