Category Archives: Notes on the Anti-War Movement

Aggression and Evasion

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

It’s sad and telling that with respect to both the US attack on Iran in June 2025 and the current attack on Venezuela, few if any commentators, whether supportive of the United States or opposed, have described what happened in essential terms. In both cases, the United States committed an unprovoked act of aggression against a country that had not initiated aggression against it. Put another way, the United States deliberately breached what had previously been a condition of peace between the two countries on the unargued premise that it had the moral right to attack its perceived enemies at will, regardless of anything they may or may not have done to warrant an attack. There are other things worth saying about both cases, but nothing more fundamental than that.

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Stirring the POT (5)

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, book review, cancel culture, liberty and the left, migrant defense, moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, political philosophy, slices of life

Politics and the Problematics of Fun

I started my “Stirring the POT” series earlier this year as a vehicle for announcements, but it gradually morphed into a series of ruminations on conferences I attended. The latter turned out to be the more interesting enterprise, so I’ll close out the year with a belated conference rumination. This past April, I went to San Francisco, at the invitation of Roderick Long and the Molinari Society, to be on an Author-Meets-Critics panel on Gary Chartier’s Christianity and the Nation State. It promised to be a good time, and it was. Continue reading →

The Contradictions of Institutional Neutrality

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

Coming Attractions in My Jihad Against Institutional Neutrality

Over the last year or so, I’ve written about two dozen posts here critiquing institutional neutrality, and given maybe a half dozen conference presentations on the subject. But in some ways, the criticisms I’ve made so far are peripheral to the fundamental problem with the doctrine. The fundamental problem is that it’s self-contradictory and self-subversive. This latter problem is so obvious, and so obviously fatal to the doctrine, that stating it threatens to trivialize the whole discussion about institutional neutrality: if the doctrine is self-contradictory, why discuss it? Good question. In any case, I might as well articulate the objection, if only to put it out there. Continue reading →

Those “Drowned Out” Zionists

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

Joshua Leifer’s “Conflictedly Connected” Liberal Zionist Center

The well-regarded left Zionist writer Joshua Leifer has a much fawned-over piece in Ha’aretz that’s been adopted in some quarters as the expression of profound wisdom. In it he argues that there’s a “conflictedly connected” Zionist quasi-left “majority” that’s been “drowned out” by the extremist voices of the “ultra-hawkish right” and the “anti-Zionist left.” If only this “conflictedly connected” majority could be liberated from the shackles placed on it by these twin extremists, the Golden Mean would prevail, and virtue would flourish on the topic of Israel and Palestine. Continue reading →

If You Want Blood

Posted on by under Fatwas, Memorials and Obituaries, migrant defense, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Do yourself a favor. Go back and re-read the Declaration of Independence, but do it this way: skip the beginning and the end, and read the bill of particulars in the middle. It’s too long to quote here. You really just have to read it for yourself. Once you do, you’ll see that details aside, we’re living in the very world that the Declaration describes, excoriates, and uses as the basis of its declaration of war. Virtually everything in it is something that our present government is doing to us. Like the people of British North America ca. 1776, we are a people under military occupation. Continue reading →

“When the World Breaks”

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

Veterans Day at Peddie

Peddie is a well-known elite prep school in New Jersey, located in Hightstown, a small town just east of Princeton. According to Niche, it’s ranked #2 out of 126 in a listing of the Best Private High Schools in New Jersey, and #2 of 112 of the Best College Prep Private Schools in New Jersey. It also ranks first out of 139 of the Most Diverse Private High Schools in New Jersey. I’m at least vaguely familiar with the place, having been there a few times, having interviewed Peddie students applying for admissions to Princeton, and having grown up myself (for better or worse) in the elite Jersey prep school milieu. In short, within its rarefied circles, Peddie is a trend-setter. Continue reading →

The Immigrant Trust Tour: October Update

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

To the best of my knowledge, the municipal-level campaign to persuade the New Jersey state legislature to pass the Immigrant Trust Act started last December in Madison, New Jersey, an affluent college town in a relatively conservative part of the state. By March, about a dozen municipalities had followed suit. 

Things quieted down in the months after that, but with the impetus of a constant drumbeat of ICE raids, things started up again in June with the campaign for a resolution in Princeton, which eventually passed in August. Whether it’s correlation or causality or both, the movement has heated up since then and gone statewide. About twenty municipalities and two counties have at this point passed pro-ITA resolutions, and plenty of county commissions and town councils across the state are facing demands to pass more. Continue reading →