This is what the vaunted “ceasefire” actually looks like in the West Bank: disarm the population, box them in, round them up, incarcerate them en masse. The occupation has quietly swept dozens into jail, and settlers have set fire to the village of Sinjil. Not a shot fired, though.
Continue readingIt’s been a while since I’ve beaten up on Jason Brennan’s “argument” against character-based voting, but I’m feeling the urge again, so here I am, hot to go.(1) The crux of Brennan’s argument is that it’s wrong to vote for political candidates on the basis of their traits of character, except when character is a predictive proxy for the policies they can be expected to enact once in office. In a formula (Brennan’s formula, made in discussion here on PoT): “policy > character.” Taken literally, the argument proscribes voting against any candidate, no matter how evil, if the evil he exemplifies is policy-irrelevant. My aim here is to add yet another counter-example to my ever-growing list of counter-examples to Brennan’s thesis, partly for the understanding it affords, and partly for the fun of it. Continue reading
Imagine that LA had been blockaded since 2007, and had repeatedly been bombed since then. Now imagine that the current fires took place, and that the response was to bomb, maim, and starve the survivors for the next fourteen months, on the premise that doing so was a favor to them, and proof of the superiority of our civilization. That’s what we’ve done to Gaza and Lebanon. The enormity of that crime—series of crimes—can barely be imagined. Neither can the scale of the retribution that its survivors will have in mind for us for the foreseeable future.
Continue readingA couple of days ago, I predicted here that a “terrorist” attack on the United States would take place. Now one has, in New Orleans. Did I have foreknowledge of this attack? I sure did. In fact, I told you what the foreknowledge was in the post itself: You can’t spend decades supporting apartheid, conquest, occupation, and genocide, then take pride in shutting down the anti-war movement, and not expect to be attacked in retaliation. That’s what Americans and Israelis did, and that’s what happened to them. What did you think was going to happen? The victims of your psychopathic depredations were going to roll over and play dead forever? Continue reading
I had a conversation the other day with a woman associated with a very liberal Protestant church who’d been organizing a charitable event for Gaza. The event was a dinner intended to raise money for a well-known medical relief organization. The event was a success, but she told me with chagrin that she had to be careful to advertise it in such a way as to avoid mentioning it to those members of the congregation who might have objected.
Continue readingJust a reminder to anyone attending the APA Eastern in New York this January: the Molinari Society is hosting a session on “False Alternatives in the Politics of Knowledge,” Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025, 4-5:50 pm, room TBA. Cory Massimino and I will be giving papers, with Roderick Long moderating and commenting. Cory’s paper is “Between Convergency and Conspiracy.” Mine is “Between Indoctrination and False Neutrality,” a defense of an advocacy-based conception of pedagogy, using the teaching I did under the Israeli occupation as a case study. For more details, click here.
I was at a Christmas Eve service last night where the Confession and Lament Sequence said: “Forgive us for following the logics of Empire and the violence of Herod. Lord have mercy.”
It’s an admirable sentiment, but I had to wonder: if mercy is to be sought, is this the proper addressee? Is mercy in fact the thing to be sought at all?
In the Gospel of St Matthew, we read of King Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents. Herod put to death every male child under the age of two in the vicinity of Bethlehem. The Christian response was to render unto state power what belonged to it, without being able to identify what did and what didn’t. The results were predictable. First the Christians accommodated empire. Then Christianity became one.
Continue readingYou’ve got to love a country where the President commutes the death sentences of 37 death row inmates, is widely praised for it, makes a pious speech about why the other three have to get the shaft for “terrorism,” and then, without a pause, continues committing genocide abroad while winning adulation for that. The part of the country fixated on the first part of that sentence is incomprehensible to the part fixated on the second, and vice versa. The day when the second group becomes large enough to be a real worry to the first is the day that we’ll witness the beginning of the end of the United States of America in the name of something better. It’s only when you grasp that the second group unapologetically wants to hasten that day that you’ll understand what the dispute was about in the first place. But believe me, we do.
Zeynep Tufekci has a piece in The New York Times trying to explain the “drone panic” that has (supposedly) overtaken New Jersey. I live and work in central New Jersey, and have neither seen any drones nor encountered any panic, but am only too happy to borrow the premise.
Tufekci attempts a couple of explanations for the drone panic (and the drones), but conspicuously fails to mention one of the most prominent ones out there. About a week ago, South Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew vehemently suggested that the drones had been launched by an Iranian mothership, the implication being that they were imminently about to attack us, and constituted a major national security threat. He cited no real evidence for his claims, accused the Pentagon of covering up the threat, doubled down for awhile, and then retracted the whole thing. Van Drew is a standard-issue right-wing imbecile, but the explanation for making such claims is obvious. It’s called a guilty conscience. A belatedly guilty conscience.
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Policy of Truth 