Well, my fan-boy crusade for Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign has come to grief on the shoals of her abstention on impeachment last night. Her decision to abstain strikes me as a serious mistake: it had no clear legal or constitutional justification, and simply managed to alienate the base that’s supported her so far. I get the rationale, but it seems a bridge too far to a political right that’s essentially lost its way and lost its mind. I still have great respect and admiration for Gabbard, and still intend to post the fourth installment of my series on “Tulsi Gabbard vs. Liberal McCarthyism” (haven’t changed my mind on that, and don’t agree with the accusations of “cowardice” that have been leveled against her for this decision),* but the fan-boy crush, alas, has ended. Continue reading
Category Archives: Uncategorized
He Could Do No Other
In case you hadn’t figured this out, I’m grading final papers–tonight’s harvest being applied ethics. After spending the day making fun of my applied ethics students on Facebook, I turn at last to the final paper of the evening, a dense, single-spaced essay written by a transfer student. The author starts by telling me that while he found my course very interesting, applied ethics just isn’t his thing–and then proceeds to write a sophisticated, cogent, but totally off-topic paper on the problem of evil, written from “a Protestant Christian worldview.”
Now what?
That Zola Commercial
Here it is:
As you’ve probably gathered, the Hallmark Channel pulled this ad because the couple’s kissing–at their own wedding–supposedly violated Hallmark’s “policies on PDA.” Apart from the obvious hypocrisy and disingenuousness involved in invoking this excuse–what channel runs an ad that violates its own policies?–surely the question has to arise: why would any company adopt so idiotic a policy in the first place? Are articulable reasons involved, or just inarticulate fears? Continue reading
Notes on the Jersey City Shooting
I’ve held off on commenting on the recent anti-Semitic shooting in Jersey City, partly because I’m too overloaded with grading to comment intelligently, and partly because the facts are too sparse for comment. But confusions have already crept into mainstream reporting on the subject. Here is The New York Times. Continue reading
We Lit
Student arrives twenty minutes late to final exam. Khawaja looks up expectantly.
Khawaja (apologetically, as though the default procedure was to wait twenty minutes to start an exam): We already got started. You ready for this?
Student: I’m ready to bommmb this [laughs]. I didn’t study at all. At. All.
Khawaja: Did you at least get a good night’s sleep? It’s more important than studying.
Student: No.
Khawaja: Hmm.
Student: Yo, I met a rapper last night at a concert. It was lit.
Khawaja: You went to a concert last night?
Student: It was lit.
Khawaja (with forced cheer and strained smile): Hmmm.
Student: A’ight. You know, I don’t think I really want to go to law school any more [laughs uproariously].
Khawaja: Right, so here’s the test.
Another pedagogical win–aka, Socratic voyage of self-discovery–fall semester 2019, Felician University.
Distance from Khe Sanh to Kandahar: 0
Proof that people would rather die than ask simple questions of their so-called “superiors.” Theirs was not to reason why–and evidently still isn’t.
My view on Afghanistan, circa 2008, from a review of Sarah Chayes’s much-praised book, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (2006).
A government policy cannot rest on an illogical, inarticulate sense of commitment, and cannot be premised on the quixotic thought that good intentions trump feasibility. But that is effectively what our Afghan policy rests on today. 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 when 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.
Fade to Pak
When you know that a semester’s worth of pedagogical efforts have been in vain: an email query I got from a student re the take-home final exam for Phil 100, Critical Thinking. The assignment was to read a controversial piece of writing and offer a critical assessment of the author’s reasoning.
Verbatim:
What do You mean by offer a critical assessment of his reasoning ?
Cashing the Check of Justice (2)
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
–Martin Luther King, Jr. (1956), after the Montgomery Bus Boycott
For the first part of “Cashing the Check of Justice”–including some backstory and advice–go here.
The second part can essentially be summarized as follows:
Terrorism without Mens Rea?
We’ve had our share of disagreements about the semantics of “terrorism” on this blog, but I think we can all admit that this claim, (supposedly) made by Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) about the recent shooting at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, makes no sense at all. From a story in The New York Times:
Senator Rick Scott of Florida, also a Republican, said the attack should be considered terrorism, regardless of the gunman’s motivation.
If we eliminate the gunman’s motivation altogether, then all we’re left with is the fact that a Saudi trainee shot some people at a naval air base. That fact by itself is consistent with an accident. But however we define it, an act of terrorism can’t be an accident. Continue reading
Have You Been Saved?
Imagine there’s a reset button
that would restore those you love
to an earlier, saved state
before they left you
suddenly in anger
or slowly drifting away in boredom
before they betrayed you
or you betrayed them
or they thought you had
before they went mad
and forgot your name
or before they died
turned to rotting flesh underground
or incomprehensible ashes in a cardboard box
Imagine there’s a reset button
but someone else has it
and is about to delete
everything you’ve thought, felt, and done
since your last save point
someone who loves your past self so much
they’re willing to kill your present self to get it
Perhaps it has already happened
Policy of Truth 