Been dazed and confused for so long, it’s not true…
Wanted a president, never bargained for you
–Led Zeppelin, “Dazed and Confused” (more or less)
Oh, the poor Democrats. Here’s The New York Times lamenting their fate.
Come on Dems, you can do this. Just pretend that Donald Trump is a Palestinian ER physician, and that the White House is a pediatric trauma center in Gaza. How hard could it be?
No tears.
“Could Better Security Have Stopped the New Orleans Terror Attack?” asks The New York Times with furrowed brow. Yes, if you turn the country into a gigantic fortress, you can probably stave off another a “terror attack.” But then, you can achieve even greater assurance of safety against “terror attacks” if you take a cyanide tablet right now and sleep off the fear. How’s that for a remedy?
Continue readingAn irony no one could have made up: just a few days after the death of Jimmy Carter, the grandfather of our Afghan wars, a veteran of one of those wars launches a terrorist attack on the United States.
Asked about the possibility of blowback from the proxy war he had devised in Afghanistan, Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi had dismissively asked his (French) interviewer what was more important in the grand scheme of things—a bunch of “agitated Moslems” or the “liberation of Central Europe”?
The lesson here, I take it, is that as long as we keep the proxy war in Ukraine going, New Orleans is a trifle. What’s one agitated Moslem in the French Quarter to the liberation of Central Europe?
It’s amusing how many obituaries of Jimmy Carter mention ruefully that it was Carter’s idea, inspired by Zbigniew Brzezinski, to support the Afghan mujahidin against the Soviets. It seemed like such a great idea at the time, but look at Afghanistan today. Brzezinski was widely hailed as a strategic genius and moral prophet for devising that jihad, like Robert McNamara before him, and Paul Wolfowitz after. Three wizards. Three catastrophes.
Continue readingMy barber is a twenty-something Jersey girl from “down the shore.” A conversation:
Her: So you doin’ anything fun this weekend?
Me: Well, I’m finishing up a presentation I’m giving this week.
Her (pause): Oh. (pause). That should be fun. (pause). What’s it about?
Me: Machiavelli.
Her: What’s that?
I was at first going to call this post “And So It Begins,” except that nothing’s begun. What’s happening right now in America is just a continuation of what’s been happening all along. President Biden’s true-believing Democratic boosters keep reminding us that a Trump presidency betokens fascism, but someone needs to tell these people that fascism is already here, care of their favorite cantankerous, incoherent, amnesiac president. Biden has recently taken to bragging about the draconian, quasi-Trumpian quality of his “border enforcement” policies. I don’t doubt that Trump’s policies will be worse, or even much worse. What I doubt is that the difference matters enough to be worth a vote for Biden. What I don’t doubt is that he’s not getting one, at least from me. Continue reading
Announcing a virtual reading group on Greek philosophy that Cory Massimino and I will be starting up later this month:
For more details, and an application form, see:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1RcOJ5pkvsOaKQKQ1e36F75T8_XinSGLr-zM824pK4OM/viewform?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3Vp6gGE9ikCUK9D4cpfq3fl6CvPaUdnyJZW6R_7YbuaPCRzKuhLa8tK7U_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw&edit_requested=true
How much of republicanism can we get without making any essential reference to domination? Maybe quite a lot.
First, whatever job the government has, if carrying out this job requires substantial power that is liable to abuse, then part of your political ideal should be republican democracy (and you should be very leery of even putatively ideally benevolent dictators). In particular, you might want a high level of assurance, born in part through moral recognition, that the government or government officials will not behave like the criminals that they are supposed to protect us against (supposing that this, at least, is part of the job that governments have). Just say no to a charter city run by Elon Musk or whatever.
Here’s a way to think of domination that might accord with our intuitions about the paradigm or unambiguous cases (and help us explain the borderline, extended or special cases). The core idea is that, when X’s governing consideration in deliberating about what to do is what Y wants X to do, X is in a certain objectionable submissive relationship with Y. But perhaps in order for Y to dominate X, something like this must be true: Y intentionally (and successfully) cultivates the submissive relationship with X – or at least cultivates it with some knowledge of what she is doing or of what is happening. Arguably, this is something objectionable (and hence something that one is required not to do, that one has usually-dispositive, requirement-style reason not to do, something like that).
Is this characterization any good at covering the paradigm cases and shedding light on the borderline cases?
(This is not a pure capacity view like Pettit’s. If one is to dominate, one has to do things – though not necessarily actions that are instances of interfering with the patient’s actions. But: interest-threatening power, including the power to interfere, could, it seems, do quite a bit of work in generating the submissive mindset – and this might be one of the more common mechanisms for generating submission/domination. And: it would seem that the levers of social expectations, norms and institutions could be more or less intentionally used to cultivate submission/domination relationships between groups of people, yielding the institutional-injustice-y sorts of domination. It seems that this kind of characterization of domination is well-positioned to do a lot of the work that an adequate account should do.)
Policy of Truth 