Category Archives: Uncategorized

Happy 2016

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So 2015 is basically over. I probably couldn’t summarize the year better than Roger Cohen does in this column for The New York Times–it’s got Palestinians, it’s got Jews, it’s got Native Americans, it’s got Syrian refugees, it’s got flyover country, it’s got anti-Trump derision, and it’s ultimately about a tired old guy lumbering around America, ranting lugubriously about why so much of the world has come to suck so bad. (Sound familiar? )

This was PoT’s first full year in operation; the blog started as a solo act mid-year in 2014. This year, we managed to land 37,000 unique visitors, and took on five new bloggers–Matt Faherty, Michael Young, Hendrik Van den Berg, David Potts, and Stephen Boydstun. Most of our visitors came, unsurprisingly, from the U.S., followed in turn by the U.K., and the Palestinian Territories.

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The “No Boots on the Ground” Fraud

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I spent a fair bit of time during the fall of 2014 boring the readers of this blog with my insistence that despite Obama’s “promise(s)” not to put “boots on the ground” in Syria, he would eventually find some disingenuous, incremental way of putting them there. Since “boots on the ground” doesn’t really mean anything, military speaking, the phrase is practically designed to guarantee plausible deniability: you can promise not to put “boots on the ground,” then send military personnel to the relevant place, and then deny that that’s what you meant by “boots on the ground.” No, no: “boots on the ground” referred, all along, to those military personnel that we haven’t (yet) sent, not the boot-wearing ones that now happen to be there.

I may be a newly-minted Democrat, but I’m not dumb, amnesiac, or loyal enough to our President to forget that this is just a tired variant on the semantic game that the Bush II Administration played with the phrase “weapons of mass destruction.” As we all by now know (or ought to know), very strictly speaking, weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq as a result of the 2003 invasion; it’s just that the WMD we found found bore no relation to the WMD that furnished the rationale for the invasion. So if the invasion of Iraq was predicated on “finding weapons of mass destruction,” very narrowly conceived, well, it was a great success: weapons were found. But this is just a pathetic way of saving a pathetic thesis. The war was predicated on finding usable stockpiles of WMD, and precisely none of those were found.

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I Swear, I Saw a Video of Dozens of Them Celebrating the Tragedy

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A celebration “rumor” that turns out to be undeniable for a change. Here’s The New York Times, if you prefer getting the story from the mainstream media.

For the record, I regard what’s depicted in the video as free speech, and reject the idea that it involves (or should be regarded as involving) “incitement” in any legally actionable sense. Let them dance. 

I guess this gives new meaning to that old line from Billy Idol: “Hey little sister–what have you done?” It’s a nice day to start again.

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CFP: Tenth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs

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CALL FOR PAPERS

The Tenth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs will be held in the Educations Commons Building of Felician University’s Rutherford campus, 227 Montross Ave., Rutherford, NJ 07070, on Saturday, April 23, 2016, from 9 am – 6 pm.

Plenary Speaker:
Jorge Garcia (Boston College)
Topic TBA

Submissions on any topic in moral or political philosophy (broadly construed) are welcome, not exceeding 25 minutes’ presentation time (approximately 3,000 words). Please send submissions via email in format suitable for blind review by March 1, 2016 to felicianethicsconference@gmail.com.

Completed papers are preferred to abstracts, but abstracts will be considered. Authors should ensure that they are available to appear at the conference on the conference date before submitting.

Presentations are invited for a special panel discussion on the ethics, politics, and economics of adjuncting. The invitation is open to all, adjuncts and non-adjuncts alike, from within philosophy and outside of the field.

Please direct questions to Irfan Khawaja at felicianethicsconference@gmail.com.

Are You There, ISIS? It’s Me, Irfan

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It is unlawful for a believer to kill a believer except by accident…He that kills a believer by design shall burn in Hell forever. He shall incur the wrath of Allah, who will lay His curse on him, and prepare him for a woeful scourge.

Qur’an, Surah An-Nisa’a, 4:92-93, tr. N.J. Dawood

Not that I’m saying that they should go around killing non-believers. I’m just saying that basic acquaintance with al-Primary Text’ul Qur’an shouldn’t be too much to ask of aspirants to al-Khilafat’ul Muslimin (the Caliphate of the Muslim Community).

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Here’s the “explanation” for the title of my post, for the sadly deprived minority of you who didn’t spend fourth grade memorizing the Qur’an while reading Judy Blume.

Eid Mubarak to PoT’s Muslim readers, by the way–whenever it was.

Postscript: And yes, the “Eid Mubarak” link goes to a story about a fifteen foot birthday cake baked for the Prophet Muhammad in Faisalabad, Pakistan. You don’t need to know any Urdu or Punjabi to get the gist of the story: they’ve been making this Prophet-Cake for the last 25 years; people come from far and wide to eat it, regardless of their religiosity; it’s really big, and requires this much sugar, and this much milk; etc. etc.