On Wednesday nights, as part of an articulated program with my home institution, I teach a class at Middlesex County College, a community college in Edison, New Jersey about an hour away. A couple of weeks ago, a student walked into class a few minutes late, visibly upset and flustered. I asked her what was wrong. She told me that on her way to class, she’d crossed an on-campus street at the crosswalk. By state law, cars approaching a crosswalk are supposed to yield to pedestrians, but one didn’t, and in failing to yield, almost hit her. In anger, my student flung her coffee at the offending car, splashing it. At that point, the occupants of the car got out, physically attacked the student, then got back in their car, and drove off. Continue reading
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Imagine All the People
When Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, there were people out there who were absolutely certain that the explanation was sexism: the American people couldn’t (they insisted) handle the idea of a female president, and voted accordingly. You couldn’t get such people to consider the possibility that maybe Hillary Clinton lost the election because she was a complacent, uninspiring candidate. Continue reading
An Acid Comment
Student, to me:
Dude, my generation’s acid is like your generation’s acid…on acid!
And you thought “OK, boomer” was a cutting generational comment. The comment came up (in case you were wondering) during a discussion of Martin Seligman’s critique of psychopharmacology in his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (pp. 47-48). I don’t remember the exact route by which we went from anti-depressants to acid, but whatever it was, it had a well-conceived pedagogical purpose. “Two drugs diverged in a wood,” etc. Continue reading
The Meaning of Super Tuesday
What is the Meaning of Super Tuesday, you ask. I’ll tell you.
Start with the facts. Biden made a comeback. Sanders won California. The other candidates either got pushed down, or dropped out, mostly to support Biden. The one candidate who was clearly defeated was not Sanders but Bloomberg, whose candidacy lacks any clear rationale or support, and looks increasingly petulant and pointless. My only hope is that Bloomberg doesn’t drop out before I finish my series on stop and frisk, because I don’t want to have started it for nothing.* Anyway, what does all this mean? Continue reading
Bernie, Cuba, Literacy, and Ill-Gotten Gains
I’m finding the dialogue of the deaf over Bernie and Cuba exasperating. I’m not going to comment on the details–on the “first-order issues,” we might say. What I want to say is that it helps to clarify the underlying issue and make some relevant distinctions.
The basic issue is that Cuba is supposed to be a dictatorship, which is evil, but Bernie is praising it for increasing literacy, which is good. Assume (for the sake of argument) that Cuba is a dictatorship, and dictatorships are evil. The puzzle is whether you should ever praise an evil thing for doing a good thing; it’s a puzzle whether (or how) good things can ever arise from evil things. Put slightly differently, it’s a puzzle whether evil agents should ever get credit for any of the good they do (or seem to do), given the discredit they deserve for the very great evil they do.
“Abortion and Rape”: A Response to Catiline
Roderick Long recently posted a short essay on Facebook called “Abortion and Rape,” by a pseudonymous author named “Catiline.” Rumor has it that Roderick is Catiline and vice versa, but we don’t traffic in rumors at PoT, so “Catiline” it is.*
The essay is structured as a response to this anti-abortion argument (hereafter, “the Argument”):
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Abortion involves killing an innocent person.
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It’s always wrong to kill an innocent person.
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Therefore abortion is wrong.
According to Catiline, the Argument is valid but unsound: both premises are false. “Abortion and Rape” proceeds by making a case against each premise, followed in the discussion of premise (2) by answers to objections. If the Argument is the most plausible or typical sort of anti-abortion argument out there, and it fails, we can infer that the pro-choice position has in some way been vindicated by its failure. At a bare minimum, it’s won round 1 in a long battle. QED. Continue reading
Giving the Devil His Due: Donald Trump and the Afghan War
I’m not a Satanist, but I do believe in fairness, so I don’t mind giving the Devil his due. The Devil in this case is Donald Trump, and his achievement is getting us out of Afghanistan. Or, well: signing a deal that if adhered-to, and if all goes well, will someday get us out of Afghanistan. I ended my 2008 review of Sarah Chayes’s The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban like this:
To ‘keep trying’ to occupy and rebuild Afghanistan is to sacrifice lives and money on an ill-defined, increasingly pointless, and probably Sisyphean venture. A thousand lives and billions of dollars into that quest, we’re no closer to its completion than we were when we first started. That is as much a ‘punishment of virtue’ as anything Chayes describes. We’re entitled to ask when it will end.
We now have a better sense than we did a few days ago of “when it will end.” The answer is: some day. To paraphrase Metallica, the good news is that the light at the end of the tunnel may not be a freight train coming our way. Continue reading
Political Animals
Here’s how the people of India are treating each other nowadays:
And here’s how its big cats are: Continue reading
Vigor Mortis
I didn’t watch last night’s Democratic debate–I somehow managed to fall ill without doing so–but I was struck by this passage from what was supposed to be a news story about it. They’re talking about Biden’s performance at the debate:
The former vice president demonstrated more vigor than at many of the previous debates, when he often seemed somnolent. He sprinkled local references into his comments, sought to interject even when he was not called on and complained when he felt he was not given enough time.
Putting Tulsi on the Ballot in New Jersey
Readers of this blog are well aware of my (some would say quixotic) support for Tulsi Gabbard in the 2020 presidential election. Below the video is an announcement for New Jersey residents from Paul Surovell, a volunteer for the Tulsi 2020 campaign in New Jersey. And yes, I’m going to keep posting Paul’s announcement here every week until we get Tulsi Gabbard on the ballot. Fight me. Or better yet, just sign the petition and you won’t have to.
Policy of Truth 